Microsoft sees the OS as a weapon against the competitors, and when you're building weapons, of course you make them as powerful as possible and of course safety gets a lower priority.
And like any good weapons vender, you self-limit your product (so wayward purchasers lose the ability to maintain it without your help), backdoor it (so you can cripple it if purchasers have the audacity to try to improve it themselves so they can cut your support/upgrade strings) and only release it when you yourself have something better (i.e. I doubt that the software Microsoft runs on its own servers is exactly the same as what they sell to us sheeple).
Ok, everyone has pretty much ripped sane?'s points to shreds but I think there is at least one more rip to be made.
Web pages rarely get saved. And when they do, probably 90% of the time they get saved as HTML only pages. The images are discarded in the vast majority of cases.
Email, on the other hand, is almost always retained (and for most novice users retained in its entirety). So a bloated email means a bloated archive. Outlook (not that I use it) stores all email from all email folders in a single truly nasty ugly monstrous file that is next to impossible to archive or even open after a restore.
Using Eudora I've been retaining email for a decade or so but my total archive size is under 100MB. Why? Because I avoid/delete/strip HTML messages. Eudora saves messages in text files and this allows me to go in and strip out what I don't want -- i.e. most headers and most HTML messages. A simple (and automatic) email folder rebuild and I am good to go.
It really comes down to this: (1) give us a true opt-out from HTML message purgatory. Never seeing HTML is the most civilized route but it seems almost everyone wants to ram HTML down our throats so, (2) give us a "Click here if you can't read the crap we just sent you". Otherwise we will (3) delete your HTML crap unseen (with the exception of invoice copies that get HTML-stripped before they get archived).
As a P.S. to this whole crappy subject, Yahoo has recently started to forced HTMLification of all posts to YahooGroups. The lovely side effect of this is that ALL messages are now 5 to 10 times larger than they were. B-E-A-U-tiful. [The setting can be turned off at least, and for the 50 WebTV users of my biggest group that was the only option that allowed them to actually read my PLAIN frickin TEXT emails.]
Would you be against a ban of mercury in food as a seasoning?
Mercury is extremely toxic when breathed -- perhaps mercury added to an incense stick would be a better analogy.
As for being against the forced-feeding of a poison, I am definitely against fluoridation and would be against the addition of fluorine to foods. Pass that law soon please.
...nothing more. The whole point of coining the phrase "Wintel monopoly" was to out the practice of upping hardware demands for the next OS so people have to upgrade. Vista is simply more of the same MO.
A quick perusal of the excellent Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection shows how Vista CPU demands will skyrocket in all ways, at all times, across all devices. Never mind anything else, this is more than enough to force upgrades.
The last time something this blatant happened was WinME turning on drive indexing by default, making Windows 2000 seem like a performance king in head-to-head comparisons.
CPU usage is Microsoft's friend. They don't really need to have people playing HD-DVDs but they see an advantage to themselves and are pursuing it intently.
As for actually playing HD-DVDs on PCs, I think this will not happen. Period. People will very quickly realize it is not workable, or takes too much effort/cost, and they will play their HD-DVDs on their standalone players only. Making the **AA and Microsoft very happy indeed. Microsoft will have found a way to use up 80% of a modern computer's CPU cycles and the **AA will have stamped out the rampant DVD piracy.
I predict the need for premium content removal tools so that hackers can get back the cpu cycles they paid for.
We've watched Big Brother on CBS, Identity on NBC -- both with no commercials. We've also watched / caught up on Lost & Grey's Anatomy on ABC -- with commercials. Sounds like these stations are doing an end around on iTunes.
I have owned (still do) and loved a Thinkpad, but I have also found my HP 1440x900 3gHz laptop to be exceptional as well. And if I may step into a time machine for a second, the gray-black AC-only Toshiba 80386 laptops were perfect. I saw them everywhere and they never died -- I even crammed Windows 95 on a 5MB model, whose color screen alone was a $1,000 option.
There have been some great laptops -- even the Compaq luggables were good -- but I agree that few will get fired for buying a Thinkpad.
Correlations can be infinite. All are just theories, not facts, no matter how many percentage symbols are used in the article.
How about this theory: (1) sickly people get sick more often and (2) sickly people who get sick more often are not happy about. The problem with this theory, of course, is that it isn't sexy and won't see as many page views.
So which comes first, the data manipulation, the guy who smells a buck in it or the suckers born every minute who lap it all up.
I had v9.0 and now have the latest 9.2 update and can confirm that the large imdb page now loads without 100%ing the processor -- nice.
On ESPN I still don't get the new story ticker thing and over to the right it says In order to watch videos, please download Macromedia Flash Player 8
I get the following in YouTube: Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Macromedia's Flash Player. Get the latest flash player. yet I haven't turned off JS (to my knowledge) and I thought the latest Flash was built-in to Opera (it used to be).
Thanks for suggesting I update my.0 program, I should have tried this sooner.
At least when I open up the Task Manager on XP, every Task uses at least 5MB of RAM, while on 2k most of the Tasks use less than 1MB.
Windows 2K & XP are superb at swapping, so these figures are meaningless unless you are comparing two machines with identical RAM and VM settings. Please say this is so.
I love the command line. Really. But not the Unix command line. Only a computer could ever love C, or a C shell. Humans are forever tortured by both.
Exhibit A, the tar command. Never was so inscrutable and impractical a monstrosity presented to so many grovelling supplicants. No, it does not even compress the archive. Why? Well you see unix must be modular, even when it means that every bullet gets hand-packed before being inserted in the musket. If a finger or two is lost due to a blocked chamber, so be it.
Here is a still living example of fanboys helping fanboys -- a FAQ for the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball game. One of the greatest pins I have ever played, and complicated to say the least, this machine was in arcades a dozen years ago. I benefited from and ended up contributing to this detailed "How To" page many many moons ago, yet it is still accessible to Tibetan farmers young and old. Amazing.
I went for the Comodo firewall today, did the install and as part of it the installer suggested I disable the XP firewall which I agreed to. Then it wanted to reboot but I was (am) in the middle of something that will take another hour or so. The problem is that the installer has already turned off the XP firewall and the average time to penetrate an XP machine without firewall is under an hour. So I turned the XP firewall back on until I reboot, but how many would know to do this?
Why can't the installer turn off the XP firewall _after_ a successful reboot/config/test to make sure it is installed and running.
This is why I give "Funny" modded posts a -3 modifier in my preferences and then browse for comments modded +2 or higher. Not that I don't have a sense of humor.
First of all, I don't think that integrating everything and a kitchen sink in OS is good. Windows should be modular so third-party developers could create all necessary additions.
Someone needs to create a Vista Lite script thingy modelled after the 98 Lite one so that it strips out unneeded crap -- call it Vista Load Leveller.
It snoops your PII hardware and recommends "Press (C)ripple Vista to 98SE level?". Half gig of RAM machines get the "Too (L)azy to install RAM?" prompt. Those with more than a gig of RAM, 3+mHz CPU and 512MB graphics card get a "Click OK to donate an arbitrary amount of your net worth to a third world country"...with only an OK button that is counting down from 5.
I upgraded my mother-in-law's 64MB RAM computer to XP and everything ran (dog slow of course) ok. This included Office 2000 applications. She soon upgraded to 256MB and is happily using that machine right now. [IIRC the cpu speed was about 700mHz]
The oldest machine at our house (of half a dozen) has 320MB of RAM, ancient sub-20GB drives and runs XP Pro acceptably for over 3 years now.
I think you mean MSIE v4. IE3 was crap and a pain to get things to display properly on it. I forget whether the issues were incompatible javascript or the limited number of graphic images you could show on a page before some were just thumbnailed (or both of those things) but IE4 changed all that. Yes IE4 brought with it the illegal strong arm tactics but it was still a revolution at the time -- Netscape never recovered from it.
IT should get the best computers yet I worked for a large engineering company (NLK Consultants) where the head of IT insisted that we have the weakest computers so that we _wouldn't_ design bloatware. It was idiotic since it slowed us down by a factor of two or three but there was nothing we could do about it. This guy, by the way, was an Electrical Engineer!
Back in the DOS (and then early Windows 3.x) days I looked after computers for a university department that spanned 12 buildings. At the time most companies had either a static Menu.bat file or EXE (e.g. AutoMenu) that displayed a list of applications users could type in at the DOS prompt and then after an application ended, came back
to the Menu.
I had issues like virus scanning (almost no one ran scanners at the time), data backup, disk and network integrity checks to take care of and got tired of travelling from building to building all the time so I wrote a Menu.bat that used errorlevels and
a tiny countdown timer.COM file -- you had to hex edit it to change how long it counted down for, from 1 to 250 seconds.
If the user pressed the letter of a program, it returned the EL, I trapped for that and the program launched. If the timer counted down to zero, it returned the character
you had designated -- trapping for that allowed me to branch into "other things".
Eventually the system could do remote updates, automated distributed backup, disk & file scanning, email checking (used NuPop and a custom also DOS-based mail ap. I wrote)
and even reconnect itself to the network. Combined with command line R&R reports, this meant the power could go out yet the next morning the daily reports needed would
be sitting in the printer's output tray.
I also added events that displayed upcoming holidays, company functions and eventually would show birthdays (day & month only) for 3 days ahead (to cover long weekends), and this proved to be one of the most "high touch" (i.e. personally coolest) things
I did as it gave recognition to everyone from the lowest position on up. People would stop and wish you happy birthday that you normally never talked to. I personally got and gave more birthday recognition there than all other jobs combined.
The system had become a true information leveller and I think about it whenever the next carefully crippled version of Windows is about to be released. No wonder DOS was kept so limited -- who knows what you could accomplish if it wasn't.
depends on who gives it to them. Extended family give them 10,000 piece LEGO objects that are almost unassembleable, and then are completely useless once assembled, or mechanized marvels that disintegrate instantly or sucks batteries like an industrial vacuum.
My wife and I give them things that (1) don't need batteries, (2) are old school -- soccer ball, football, pogo stick, rebounder, training matts and this year a 20' x 25' redwood play structure [we can barely afford it but they need to be migrated away from computer games], or (3) are generic, like LEGO bricks, and so can be used to create a near infinite number of objects (thus defeating the planned obsolescence of most toys and all modern video games).
Slashdot Mirror
This just may be the finest way there is to start the day.
Microsoft sees the OS as a weapon against the competitors, and when you're building weapons, of course you make them as powerful as possible and of course safety gets a lower priority.
And like any good weapons vender, you self-limit your product (so wayward purchasers lose the ability to maintain it without your help), backdoor it (so you can cripple it if purchasers have the audacity to try to improve it themselves so they can cut your support/upgrade strings) and only release it when you yourself have something better (i.e. I doubt that the software Microsoft runs on its own servers is exactly the same as what they sell to us sheeple).
Ok, everyone has pretty much ripped sane?'s points to shreds but I think there is at least one more rip to be made.
Web pages rarely get saved. And when they do, probably 90% of the time they get saved as HTML only pages. The images are discarded in the vast majority of cases.
Email, on the other hand, is almost always retained (and for most novice users retained in its entirety). So a bloated email means a bloated archive. Outlook (not that I use it) stores all email from all email folders in a single truly nasty ugly monstrous file that is next to impossible to archive or even open after a restore.
Using Eudora I've been retaining email for a decade or so but my total archive size is under 100MB. Why? Because I avoid/delete/strip HTML messages. Eudora saves messages in text files and this allows me to go in and strip out what I don't want -- i.e. most headers and most HTML messages. A simple (and automatic) email folder rebuild and I am good to go.
It really comes down to this: (1) give us a true opt-out from HTML message purgatory. Never seeing HTML is the most civilized route but it seems almost everyone wants to ram HTML down our throats so, (2) give us a "Click here if you can't read the crap we just sent you". Otherwise we will (3) delete your HTML crap unseen (with the exception of invoice copies that get HTML-stripped before they get archived).
As a P.S. to this whole crappy subject, Yahoo has recently started to forced HTMLification of all posts to YahooGroups. The lovely side effect of this is that ALL messages are now 5 to 10 times larger than they were. B-E-A-U-tiful. [The setting can be turned off at least, and for the 50 WebTV users of my biggest group that was the only option that allowed them to actually read my PLAIN frickin TEXT emails.]
Would you be against a ban of mercury in food as a seasoning?
Mercury is extremely toxic when breathed -- perhaps mercury added to an incense stick would be a better analogy.
As for being against the forced-feeding of a poison, I am definitely against fluoridation and would be against the addition of fluorine to foods. Pass that law soon please.
...nothing more. The whole point of coining the phrase "Wintel monopoly" was to out the practice of upping hardware demands for the next OS so people have to upgrade. Vista is simply more of the same MO.
A quick perusal of the excellent Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection shows how Vista CPU demands will skyrocket in all ways, at all times, across all devices. Never mind anything else, this is more than enough to force upgrades.
The last time something this blatant happened was WinME turning on drive indexing by default, making Windows 2000 seem like a performance king in head-to-head comparisons.
CPU usage is Microsoft's friend. They don't really need to have people playing HD-DVDs but they see an advantage to themselves and are pursuing it intently.
As for actually playing HD-DVDs on PCs, I think this will not happen. Period. People will very quickly realize it is not workable, or takes too much effort/cost, and they will play their HD-DVDs on their standalone players only. Making the **AA and Microsoft very happy indeed. Microsoft will have found a way to use up 80% of a modern computer's CPU cycles and the **AA will have stamped out the rampant DVD piracy.
I predict the need for premium content removal tools so that hackers can get back the cpu cycles they paid for.
Pirates came on DVD and HD-DVD from our local pr0n shop, and this was about a year ago.
What I'm personally waiting for is an industrious hacker to expose the key of a popular hardware player
What I'm personally waiting for is revoked players appearing on eBay in "Like new!" condition.
We've watched Big Brother on CBS, Identity on NBC -- both with no commercials. We've also watched / caught up on Lost & Grey's Anatomy on ABC -- with commercials. Sounds like these stations are doing an end around on iTunes.
I have owned (still do) and loved a Thinkpad, but I have also found my HP 1440x900 3gHz laptop to be exceptional as well. And if I may step into a time machine for a second, the gray-black AC-only Toshiba 80386 laptops were perfect. I saw them everywhere and they never died -- I even crammed Windows 95 on a 5MB model, whose color screen alone was a $1,000 option.
There have been some great laptops -- even the Compaq luggables were good -- but I agree that few will get fired for buying a Thinkpad.
Correlations can be infinite. All are just theories, not facts, no matter how many percentage symbols are used in the article.
How about this theory: (1) sickly people get sick more often and (2) sickly people who get sick more often are not happy about. The problem with this theory, of course, is that it isn't sexy and won't see as many page views.
So which comes first, the data manipulation, the guy who smells a buck in it or the suckers born every minute who lap it all up.
That was the problem. I installed the latest Flash player, reloaded Opera and could play meaningful YouTube videos.
Thank you.
I had v9.0 and now have the latest 9.2 update and can confirm that the large imdb page now loads without 100%ing the processor -- nice.
.0 program, I should have tried this sooner.
On ESPN I still don't get the new story ticker thing and over to the right it says In order to watch videos, please download Macromedia Flash Player 8
I get the following in YouTube: Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Macromedia's Flash Player. Get the latest flash player. yet I haven't turned off JS (to my knowledge) and I thought the latest Flash was built-in to Opera (it used to be).
Thanks for suggesting I update my
Here are several URLs to illustrate Opera weaknesses: (1) this IMDB poll "all previous polls" link makes Opera suck wind, due to its length, size or mass I guess, (2) ESPN (the flash "select stories under the main story" thing does not work in v9 but did in v8), (3) Any youtube.com video -- I currently just load IE to see these, but I heard earlier today that VideoDL.org will convert GooTube URLs so I guess that is a solution.
Note: I would be happy if there is just some config thing I can do to make visiting these URLs better. Thanks.
At least when I open up the Task Manager on XP, every Task uses at least 5MB of RAM, while on 2k most of the Tasks use less than 1MB.
Windows 2K & XP are superb at swapping, so these figures are meaningless unless you are comparing two machines with identical RAM and VM settings. Please say this is so.
I love the command line. Really. But not the Unix command line. Only a computer could ever love C, or a C shell. Humans are forever tortured by both.
Exhibit A, the tar command. Never was so inscrutable and impractical a monstrosity presented to so many grovelling supplicants. No, it does not even compress the archive. Why? Well you see unix must be modular, even when it means that every bullet gets hand-packed before being inserted in the musket. If a finger or two is lost due to a blocked chamber, so be it.
Unix, the triumph of difficulty over usability.
Here is a still living example of fanboys helping fanboys -- a FAQ for the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball game. One of the greatest pins I have ever played, and complicated to say the least, this machine was in arcades a dozen years ago. I benefited from and ended up contributing to this detailed "How To" page many many moons ago, yet it is still accessible to Tibetan farmers young and old. Amazing.
I went for the Comodo firewall today, did the install and as part of it the installer suggested I disable the XP firewall which I agreed to. Then it wanted to reboot but I was (am) in the middle of something that will take another hour or so. The problem is that the installer has already turned off the XP firewall and the average time to penetrate an XP machine without firewall is under an hour. So I turned the XP firewall back on until I reboot, but how many would know to do this?
Why can't the installer turn off the XP firewall _after_ a successful reboot/config/test to make sure it is installed and running.
This is why I give "Funny" modded posts a -3 modifier in my preferences and then browse for comments modded +2 or higher. Not that I don't have a sense of humor.
First of all, I don't think that integrating everything and a kitchen sink in OS is good. Windows should be modular so third-party developers could create all necessary additions.
Someone needs to create a Vista Lite script thingy modelled after the 98 Lite one so that it strips out unneeded crap -- call it Vista Load Leveller.
It snoops your PII hardware and recommends "Press (C)ripple Vista to 98SE level?". Half gig of RAM machines get the "Too (L)azy to install RAM?" prompt. Those with more than a gig of RAM, 3+mHz CPU and 512MB graphics card get a "Click OK to donate an arbitrary amount of your net worth to a third world country"...with only an OK button that is counting down from 5.
I upgraded my mother-in-law's 64MB RAM computer to XP and everything ran (dog slow of course) ok. This included Office 2000 applications. She soon upgraded to 256MB and is happily using that machine right now. [IIRC the cpu speed was about 700mHz]
The oldest machine at our house (of half a dozen) has 320MB of RAM, ancient sub-20GB drives and runs XP Pro acceptably for over 3 years now.
That makes sense to me. I am all for designing for a minimal machine. Using a suitably powerful one.
I think you mean MSIE v4. IE3 was crap and a pain to get things to display properly on it. I forget whether the issues were incompatible javascript or the limited number of graphic images you could show on a page before some were just thumbnailed (or both of those things) but IE4 changed all that. Yes IE4 brought with it the illegal strong arm tactics but it was still a revolution at the time -- Netscape never recovered from it.
IT should get the best computers yet I worked for a large engineering company (NLK Consultants) where the head of IT insisted that we have the weakest computers so that we _wouldn't_ design bloatware. It was idiotic since it slowed us down by a factor of two or three but there was nothing we could do about it. This guy, by the way, was an Electrical Engineer!
Back in the DOS (and then early Windows 3.x) days I looked after computers for a university department that spanned 12 buildings. At the time most companies had either a static Menu.bat file or EXE (e.g. AutoMenu) that displayed a list of applications users could type in at the DOS prompt and then after an application ended, came back to the Menu.
.COM file -- you had to hex edit it to change how long it counted down for, from 1 to 250 seconds.
I had issues like virus scanning (almost no one ran scanners at the time), data backup, disk and network integrity checks to take care of and got tired of travelling from building to building all the time so I wrote a Menu.bat that used errorlevels and a tiny countdown timer
If the user pressed the letter of a program, it returned the EL, I trapped for that and the program launched. If the timer counted down to zero, it returned the character you had designated -- trapping for that allowed me to branch into "other things".
Eventually the system could do remote updates, automated distributed backup, disk & file scanning, email checking (used NuPop and a custom also DOS-based mail ap. I wrote) and even reconnect itself to the network. Combined with command line R&R reports, this meant the power could go out yet the next morning the daily reports needed would be sitting in the printer's output tray.
I also added events that displayed upcoming holidays, company functions and eventually would show birthdays (day & month only) for 3 days ahead (to cover long weekends), and this proved to be one of the most "high touch" (i.e. personally coolest) things I did as it gave recognition to everyone from the lowest position on up. People would stop and wish you happy birthday that you normally never talked to. I personally got and gave more birthday recognition there than all other jobs combined.
The system had become a true information leveller and I think about it whenever the next carefully crippled version of Windows is about to be released. No wonder DOS was kept so limited -- who knows what you could accomplish if it wasn't.
depends on who gives it to them. Extended family give them 10,000 piece LEGO objects that are almost unassembleable, and then are completely useless once assembled, or mechanized marvels that disintegrate instantly or sucks batteries like an industrial vacuum.
My wife and I give them things that (1) don't need batteries, (2) are old school -- soccer ball, football, pogo stick, rebounder, training matts and this year a 20' x 25' redwood play structure [we can barely afford it but they need to be migrated away from computer games], or (3) are generic, like LEGO bricks, and so can be used to create a near infinite number of objects (thus defeating the planned obsolescence of most toys and all modern video games).