When Microsoft stops releasing security fixes for XP [...] like they did to 98 and 2000 when XP came out. How the heck did you get +5 insightful? A quick trip to Wikipedia reveals that Windows 98 security updates ended on 11 July 2006 -- just under a year ago; Windows 2000 security updates will continue until July 13, 2010, and Windows XP security updates won't cease until April 8th, 2014.
What is this 'elevation' you're talking about? Is that something new in Vista or just something that I am unaware of? Please enlighten me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_user_access
The short version: no, not new to Vista; the idea's been in the *nixes (and before?) for yonks. Windows NT/2k/XP did have different privilege levels but few used them for various reasons, everyone just ran as admin all the time (which was the default). The differences in Vista are, firstly, no-one runs as admin (the "administrator" account you create by default is actually a standard account in every way except that you don't need to enter the admin password every time you elevate); two, applications can request to elevate to admin privileges on a task-by-task basis if they need to (pre-Vista setup programs and the like are heuristically 'detected' and automatically told to request elevation for their entire runtime), and three, there's a ton of backward compatibility stuff to try and mitigate the effects of every program written before 2007 wanting admin rights because they're used to them -- even going so far as to virtualise/Program Files/ and HKEY_Local_Machine in your userspace to stop programs which write to them from demanding elevation every time they do.
This isn't really a subjective issue. According to classical typographic theory, Apple's approach improves readability while Microsoft's hinders it. Well, yes, that's correct; but the point is that classic typography theory evolved several hundred years before computer screens, and breaks down in several places with them; mostly due to the much lower resolution of screens (72-100 dpi) as opposed to paper (>300 dpi). For example, classic typography theory holds that serif fonts are easier to read than sans-serif fonts; but in a low resolution situation (i.e. small fonts on a computer screen), serifs can hinder readability in many cases. Classic typography theory was not developed with the use of a grid of pixels in mind.
Why is this article tagged with "DRM"? You need quite a lot of people to tag an article with something for it to show up these days -- do that many people really not know what DRM is that they think TFA is an example of it? Are people just mentally equating it with anti-copyright-infringement methods in general, and tagging without stopping to think about whether something actually is DRM?
Come on, people; if you dilute a phrase enough it is liable to lose its meaning; calling all anti-theft measures from holograms on discs to security guards at the entrance of a shop "DRM" will just detract from legitimate efforts opposing the use of actual DRM to prevent fair use, etc.
The kind of holograms on a DVD / credit card / stamp etc. are called surface relief holograms, which are made by embossing. What this basically means is that once you've got the machine and made the 'negative' from a master copy, you can just stamp it over and over to make more copies with virtually zero marginal cost. Since MS make a *lot* of CDs (they used holograms for XP, can't remember whether they did for previous versions -- and, of course, many other programs like Office); dividing the total cost by the number of CD/DVDs made, I'd frankly be astonished if the net cost per disc was more than a small fraction of a penny.
okay, you just posted exactly the same thing I did and get modded up and I get modded down? I guarantee a british guy modded my post. Hardly. To quote from your post:
"The inventor of the world wide web has been awarded the Order of Merit"
I can't believe someone would be ignorant/arrogant enough to actually name one person as the inventor of the internet The GP was correcting your apparent ignorance on the subject. Neither Tim B-L nor the article summary ever claimed he invented the internet, only the World Wide Web.
HYou miss the point. Having a custom look is one thing; violating basic Windows usability conventions, such as being able to resize a window from any point on the window border, having the close button catchment area extend to the top right hand pixel of the screen when maximized, having a window menu in the top left corner that can also be bought up with alt+space etc. is another.
Yes, lots of Windows apps have their own different look. But no matter how different an application's toolbar/ribbon/buttonclickthingy is from the standard OS one, it can always be accessed from the keyboard by pressing alt. No matter how strange and colourful the close button in the top right corner is, the catchment area always extends to the top right hand pixel when the app is maximized. Etc, etc, you get the idea: interface conventions can be and are broken often and wilfully; usability conventions are not. Learn the difference.
Maybe, but what exactly is the advantage of the horrible skinny, pixelated standard font of Internet Explorer? The font you're referring to is Arial, a Helvitica knockoff, which isn't technically IE's standard font (i.e. the font that shows when no font is specified -- that honour goes to Times New Roman, for some strange reason), but rather the font that shows when a web page specifies a sans-serif font, which most web-sites do these days (e.g. Slashdot, Wikipedia, Google) since sans-serif fonts are easier to read on screen than serif fonts. And the answer is: I don't know. Actually, I happen to agree with you, it is a little narrow at small sizes; personally, I've set Segoe UI (which I'm rather fond of) as the default sans-serif font in my web browser of choice (Opera); which is a big improvement on IE's Arial.
If it's appearing pixellated, though, you just need to turn Cleartype on (even on a non-LCD, doing so will still turn on font-antialiasing). Display Settings -> Appearence -> Effects -> set Font smoothing to 'Cleartype'.
This really does seem to be something that splits people. People who are used to the Windows way of rendering fonts hate the Mac way, and vice versa. I explain the differences here, but the short version:
Mac fonts are designed to look as close to identical on screen as they do when printed: the Mac font renderer (part of Quartz) doesn't force glyphs into exact pixel locations and mostly ignores hints, instead using antialiasing and subpixel rendering to render fonts as print-accurate as possible. Microsoft's core Windows fonts, on the other hand, are very heavily manually hinted at small to medium sizes for maximum legibility on-screen, even if this makes them look quite different to the same fonts in print or at larger sizes.
Again, some swear by the Mac way (particularly graphics designers etc. who need things on screen to look, as much as possible, the same on-screen as what they'll end up as in print), others prefer the Windows way. (Freetype on Linux, I believe, is in-between the two, but I think closer to the Mac way). I can well imagine that on a projector, where text obviously appears very large even at small font sizes and legibility isn't an issue, the Mac way will look better; but that's not to say the Windows way has no advantages.
Apologies for the misunderstanding; I thought you meant the whole highlighting all + different colour for current instance thing was new, rather than just the pulsing.
You mean that black letters on white backgroung actually appear as black letters on white backgroud sucks? You really prefer Windows' black-letters-appear-in-rainbow-colors technology? You're an idiot. All colours on a computer screen are built up by different combinations of primary colours: red, green, and blue. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_color. 'White' is just all three primary colours turned on full; 'Black' is all three turned off. Normally, letters on a computer screen are created by switch individual whole pixels on and off. The difference with subpixel font rendering is the manipulation of the individual 'subpixels' (the red, green, and blue elements that make up a pixel) to effectively triple the horizontal resolution on an LCD screen. So if you have an LCD whose subpixels are ordered RGB, the example text in the link you post will not look coloured, but will look significantly smoother than the not-subpixel-rendered text. If you have an LCD with BGR ordering, or a CRT, you will see 'color fringing'; a good font rendering implementation will automatically switch off subpixel rendering for CRTs. See the Wikipedia article for more details.
Also, I would note that Quartz (which renders fonts on modern Macs) also use subpixel font rendering; MS merely did it first.
The differences in font rendering between Windows and Mac are due to other reasons, which I explain here
Wow, someone finally improved the "Find" feature in browsers. In Safari 3.0 (which I'm using to browse/. right now), when you do a find, it highlights all the occurrences of the search text. Pretty normal. But then when you have it select the next occurrence, the newly highlighted text has a bright orange background with a white box around it which "pulses" by growing bigger and smaller once Hardly new: apart from fancy pulsing effects, Opera's had this for years, except with green instead of orange.
If you haven't noticed already, almost every windows update resets IE as the default browser. No, it doesn't. There is a known bug in Firefox (that should be fixed soon) that makes it think it is no longer the default browser whenever there's an Office update, so it prompts the user to 'become' the default browser. In reality it remains the default browser throughout; this is easily verified by opening a URL or HTML file: it still opens in Firefox. See this post for more.
if you press the green "+" icon, Safari auto-resizes so that horizontal scrolling is not necessary. Much better than full-screen maximize with lots of ugly whitespace. Yay! I always wanted a browser that I have to manually press a button to resize every time I browse to a different website.
Seriously: There are advantages to both the Mac and the Windows way of doing things. Some prefer one, some prefer the other. But I have a PC because I prefer the Windows (/Linux) way of doing things. If I preferred the Mac way of doing things, I would have bought a Mac. And if Apple wants to develop for other operating systems, it should follow the user interface guidelines for the OS for which it is developing.
Seems Apple ported the font-smoothing technology over to Windows as part of Safari. I'm finding it looks a bit too blurry in comparison to Windows' native font-smoothing when viewed on my screen If you want to know the technical reasons for this, they come from the fact that Mac fonts are designed to look as close to identical on screen as they do when printed: the Mac font renderer (part of Quartz) doesn't force glyphs into exact pixel locations and mostly ignores hints, instead using antialiasing and subpixel rendering to render fonts as print-accurate as possible. This comes from the Mac's history of use by graphics designers etc. who need things on screen to look, as much as possible, the same as what they'll end up as in print. Microsoft's core Windows fonts, on the other hand, are very heavily manually hinted at small to medium sizes for maximum legibility on-screen, even if this makes them look quite different to the same fonts in print or at larger sizes (indeed, this manual hinting is what made the original MS 'core fonts' set so popular, even on Linux etc., compared to other fonts available). They've even got a new set of "Cleartype fonts" now specifically hinted for use with cleartype (MS's implementation of a combination of sub-pixel rendering and antialiasing).
Did you read a different comment to me? The guy said he doesn't see how DRM's changing the way people are yada yada, not that Vista is changing the way blah blah.
Not to mention it's a pretty stupid astroturfer who's main comments on an OS relate to how it deals with "DVD rips, MP3's, or Bittorrent files"... -- "The Record Industry Association of America v Microsoft astortufing drone no. 867-5309", anyone?;-)
The fact they're IIS and pirated seems to be moot, the point is many people just don't feel like "proving" to M$ that their version isn't pirated and give up trying to do security updates You don't need to prove anything. You can still get security updates if you fail a WGA check. The only thing failing a check stops you from getting are things like WMP.
Yay, someone who actually read the article and noticed that yet another Slashdot story is deliberately misleading. No big surprise there. If anyone cares to look of the 70,000 domains distributing malware 49% were IIS and 49% were Apache. The "twice as likely" is pure spin based on overall market share and presumably designed to hide the fact that Apache is being used to push out just as much malware as IIS. It's not deliberately misleading unless you have a rather strange misunderstanding about statistics. Of course market share matters.
Yeah, yeah. Most likely, you are falling victim to Windows' misreporting of memory usage. [...] Try this: in Win XP or 2000, look at a piece of software that has been running for a while. go to task manager and look at the memory "used". Minimize the piece of software. Look at the memory usage again. Amazingly, it will have dropped dramatically. Well, yes. If you've minimized a program, the chances are you're not actively using it at that moment, so it makes sense to swap some of the memory that program is using out to the pagefile, to make some space for whatever programs you *are* actively using.
There's a solution if you consider this a bug: in about.config, create a Boolean pref called "config.trim_on_minimize", with a value of "false". This will just tell the OS to not trim memory usage when you minimize Firefox. The downside of this is that the rest of your machine will be much slower when you're not actively using Firefox than it would otherwise, because it's hogging a load of memory even though its minimized.
Personally, I'd leave the OS default behavior alone; if Firefox is minimized it doesn't need to keep a load of crap in memory just because you're uncomfortable with the concept of memory management. In the meantime, stop spreading FUD.
Something the young earth creationists like to jump on is that it's "only" accurate up to ~60,000 years. Another problem with that argument that people rarely mention is that Carbon-14 is but one of many radiometric tests. Tests accurate to over 60,000 years include Uranium-lead dating, Potassium-argon dating, and Rubidium-strontium dating. The tradeoff is typically that the greater age at which a test is reliable, the less precise it is; e.g. Uranium-lead dating can measure the dates of rocks up to 4.5 billion years old, but the age of a 3 billion years old rock is only accurate to the nearest two million years (which is actually pretty damn good if you look at it as a ratio). And, of course, if you have reason to doubt the outcome of one metric, there are many more to check it against.
"iPhone is to much fun to get work done. We must have a windows-based 'business' equivalent." Ummm, MS have had Windows CE since 1996 -- with touch screens -- and smartphones since, I believe, 2002. They're hardly imitating Apple here...
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_privil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control
The short version: no, not new to Vista; the idea's been in the *nixes (and before?) for yonks. Windows NT/2k/XP did have different privilege levels but few used them for various reasons, everyone just ran as admin all the time (which was the default). The differences in Vista are, firstly, no-one runs as admin (the "administrator" account you create by default is actually a standard account in every way except that you don't need to enter the admin password every time you elevate); two, applications can request to elevate to admin privileges on a task-by-task basis if they need to (pre-Vista setup programs and the like are heuristically 'detected' and automatically told to request elevation for their entire runtime), and three, there's a ton of backward compatibility stuff to try and mitigate the effects of every program written before 2007 wanting admin rights because they're used to them -- even going so far as to virtualise
I think you misunderstood: Windows send crash reports to MS for all application crashes, not just Windows crashes.
Why is this article tagged with "DRM"? You need quite a lot of people to tag an article with something for it to show up these days -- do that many people really not know what DRM is that they think TFA is an example of it? Are people just mentally equating it with anti-copyright-infringement methods in general, and tagging without stopping to think about whether something actually is DRM?
Come on, people; if you dilute a phrase enough it is liable to lose its meaning; calling all anti-theft measures from holograms on discs to security guards at the entrance of a shop "DRM" will just detract from legitimate efforts opposing the use of actual DRM to prevent fair use, etc.
The kind of holograms on a DVD / credit card / stamp etc. are called surface relief holograms, which are made by embossing. What this basically means is that once you've got the machine and made the 'negative' from a master copy, you can just stamp it over and over to make more copies with virtually zero marginal cost. Since MS make a *lot* of CDs (they used holograms for XP, can't remember whether they did for previous versions -- and, of course, many other programs like Office); dividing the total cost by the number of CD/DVDs made, I'd frankly be astonished if the net cost per disc was more than a small fraction of a penny.
I can't believe someone would be ignorant/arrogant enough to actually name one person as the inventor of the internet The GP was correcting your apparent ignorance on the subject. Neither Tim B-L nor the article summary ever claimed he invented the internet, only the World Wide Web.
HYou miss the point. Having a custom look is one thing; violating basic Windows usability conventions, such as being able to resize a window from any point on the window border, having the close button catchment area extend to the top right hand pixel of the screen when maximized, having a window menu in the top left corner that can also be bought up with alt+space etc. is another.
Yes, lots of Windows apps have their own different look. But no matter how different an application's toolbar/ribbon/buttonclickthingy is from the standard OS one, it can always be accessed from the keyboard by pressing alt. No matter how strange and colourful the close button in the top right corner is, the catchment area always extends to the top right hand pixel when the app is maximized. Etc, etc, you get the idea: interface conventions can be and are broken often and wilfully; usability conventions are not. Learn the difference.
If it's appearing pixellated, though, you just need to turn Cleartype on (even on a non-LCD, doing so will still turn on font-antialiasing). Display Settings -> Appearence -> Effects -> set Font smoothing to 'Cleartype'.
This really does seem to be something that splits people. People who are used to the Windows way of rendering fonts hate the Mac way, and vice versa. I explain the differences here, but the short version:
Mac fonts are designed to look as close to identical on screen as they do when printed: the Mac font renderer (part of Quartz) doesn't force glyphs into exact pixel locations and mostly ignores hints, instead using antialiasing and subpixel rendering to render fonts as print-accurate as possible. Microsoft's core Windows fonts, on the other hand, are very heavily manually hinted at small to medium sizes for maximum legibility on-screen, even if this makes them look quite different to the same fonts in print or at larger sizes.
Again, some swear by the Mac way (particularly graphics designers etc. who need things on screen to look, as much as possible, the same on-screen as what they'll end up as in print), others prefer the Windows way. (Freetype on Linux, I believe, is in-between the two, but I think closer to the Mac way). I can well imagine that on a projector, where text obviously appears very large even at small font sizes and legibility isn't an issue, the Mac way will look better; but that's not to say the Windows way has no advantages.
Apologies for the misunderstanding; I thought you meant the whole highlighting all + different colour for current instance thing was new, rather than just the pulsing.
Also, I would note that Quartz (which renders fonts on modern Macs) also use subpixel font rendering; MS merely did it first.
The differences in font rendering between Windows and Mac are due to other reasons, which I explain here
Seriously: There are advantages to both the Mac and the Windows way of doing things. Some prefer one, some prefer the other. But I have a PC because I prefer the Windows (/Linux) way of doing things. If I preferred the Mac way of doing things, I would have bought a Mac. And if Apple wants to develop for other operating systems, it should follow the user interface guidelines for the OS for which it is developing.
I have a post above about the differences in implementation in font rendering between Windows and Mac.
...since it has the actual reason the cards didn't work rather than more twitter...
Did you read a different comment to me? The guy said he doesn't see how DRM's changing the way people are yada yada, not that Vista is changing the way blah blah.
;-)
Not to mention it's a pretty stupid astroturfer who's main comments on an OS relate to how it deals with "DVD rips, MP3's, or Bittorrent files"... -- "The Record Industry Association of America v Microsoft astortufing drone no. 867-5309", anyone?
Sadly not.
Basic Conditional probability:
Probability of {Malware given that running IIS} = P{Malware and running IIS} / P{Running IIS}.
So the Slashdot summary was correct: P{Malware given that you're running IIS} is twice as big as P{Malware given that you're running Apache}.
There's a solution if you consider this a bug: in about.config, create a Boolean pref called "config.trim_on_minimize", with a value of "false". This will just tell the OS to not trim memory usage when you minimize Firefox. The downside of this is that the rest of your machine will be much slower when you're not actively using Firefox than it would otherwise, because it's hogging a load of memory even though its minimized.
Personally, I'd leave the OS default behavior alone; if Firefox is minimized it doesn't need to keep a load of crap in memory just because you're uncomfortable with the concept of memory management. In the meantime, stop spreading FUD.