The secure desktop is actually the most annoying thing about UAC, specifically because it interrupts you and forces your attention to an administrative decision.
There's a security policy that lets you disable the use of the secure desktop for these prompts though.
What was improved for non-gamers, Aero and..... yeah.
Lotsa stuff:
Windows Explorer (quit bitching about the "Up" button and try a breadcrumb!)
Internet Explorer (... of course it still sucked, but it was improved)
USB storage and digital cameras
Security Model (yes, yes, UAC is annoying as fuck, we get it)
....bah fuck it. Just because I liked Vista doesn't mean I'll ever convince anyone else that it was good. One thing I did notice though: Vista and 7 don't have that "entropy" that Windows XP and its predecessors did. Previous editions of NT all kept getting slower and slower the longer it had been since your install date. NT6 doesn't do that. It's quite nice.
One thing that made me smile though: I got to talking with a fellow I know who has worked for Microsoft for the last 15 years or so about 6 months after Windows 7 launched. I pulled him aside, patted him on the shoulder and said, "I have to thank you and your company for releasing a product that has truly shown everyone what a wonderful product Windows Vista really was."
Had we not been in public, I swear I would've made the man cry:D
Hey, just in case you read this, I wanted to actually submit the post I wrote in response to what you said. While I wrote it a couple hours after your post, I lost my net connection and suspended my laptop, and just brought it back online today. Original text, with a few edits, follows:
Have you actually sat down and tried to use them as they're meant to be used? Or have you tried to use them as if you were still using XP?
The ironic thing is that only the ignorant and the extremely insightful tend to understand this.
I used to do that kind of stuff. I installed XP and immediately reverted the UI and start menu from "Fischer Price" to "Windows Classic"...but eventually I realized--from using other peoples' desktops!--how nice it was to have all that stuff one click away behind the start button. I used to revert the Control Panel to "Classic View" (called "Icons View" for Vista/7)--which admittedly is sometimes necessary only on XP it seems, though I admit using NT6 with Office I only can't seem to find the "Mail" applet--and while it was familiar to me, I again gradually realized how much of a pain in the ass it became to help people over the phone because I had no idea what their control panel UI was actually laid out like.
Some time later, I found out why these UI elements are changed. Microsoft spends craploads of money on R&D to empirically determine that a UI change is good for a majority of use cases. I've found over the years that most change-fearing power users need to know these things before they can attempt to use the changes a new Windows iteration presents to them.
Alas, however, there will always be exceptions to the rule, even though they might drive you nuts, don't worry. When those people fall behind because they can't use productivity enhancements out of sheer ignorance and unwillingness to at least learn or attempt to understand, you can just chuckle quietly to yourself while you watch them waste time.
Because Slashdotters like to pretend they are uber-31337 Linux haX0r d00dz even though they are probably using Microsoft Windows and iPhones to say how cool Linux is and how lame other platforms are, despite having never actually used Linux.
WTF is wrong with you? Linux is rock solid and I love using it for appliance-type setups in my deployments. And kernel hacking is by far one of my favorite past times.
Skype uses interesting techniques to punch holes in firewalls to allow that peer-to-peer connection. Rather than relying on some type of dynamic port mapping via UPnP, Skype's central server (or perhaps the supernodes?) tell each computer to contact the other, causing the NAT device to dynamically map the required ports at the time a call is made. From what I've heard, the NAT traversal that Skype uses was pioneered by them, but I believe the technique has since been adopted by many other applications.
Skype has a little checkbox somewhere that says "Use ports 80 and 443" as alternates. Unchecking that might help you here.
with lose/loose you can't even enjoy the excuse of just mixing up homophones.
It's not just you, but it likely depends on how you were taught English. The curriculum I was given for early English was Phonics. As a result, even though I usually spell things correctly, lose/loose is one that I find myself correcting frequently as I write.
"Lose" with the single O and single E separated by the S phonetically stipulates a long O sound, like "dose" or "grope." The problem with "loose" is that, depending on what that E on the end is for, you get different pronunciations; it could be "looz" or "luce."
Content & the thesis mattered more than perfection.
I don't know about you, but when I'm reading something and a word is misspelled, particularly if it's misspelled as a completely different word or has all the same letters as a completely different word, or something like a comma is out of place, I become almost completely derailed by the sentence.
Ah okay. I thought so, but I might very well be thinking back to the "use cases" I read for putting them on different servers. Something about caching KMS servers, if you use different ones you want to turn it off so they round-robin until activation is successful I think.
Either way, the one thing that MS has botched with respect to KMS is administration. KMS really should be a Server Role that's administered through MMC instead of a bunch of wildly spread out VBScripts:P
I don't know where you read that, but Office 2010 uses KMS too. I don't know if they can be on the same server though... we use MAK for Office because it has a significantly lower deployment in our enterprise when compared to Windows.
I take it that you've never used KMS before. As someone who has deployed both XP with a VLK and 7 with KMS, I have to say that KMS is the one thing that Microsoft has finally gotten right about license management. You don't even put keys in your images or scripted installs anymore. It's completely automatic.
but you can turn that around. You ask the judge "what's an ottoman?", and he can tell you that it's the BDSM thing, because he wants to see the defendant found guilty.
Very true. However, judges are elected officials for a reason.
Not that such a reason holds water, but whatever. Being hypothetical can take arguments back and forth for eternity.
Of course it would be all right, but anyone with extensive knowledge about a crime or situation that will be prosecuted or defended in a courtroom would likely be dismissed during jury selection.
The point of a trial and its "expert witnesses" is that members of the jury take their understanding of the situation at hand from the proceedings in the courtroom, and then use that understanding on an individual basis to deliberate with others about whether or not reasonable doubt exists in light of each's interpretation of what they've been presented.
Even if the juror in question had read the article beforehand and then was looking it back up, she is explicitly doing so in violation of the process of the trial, and that's the difference. When things like this occur, the defendant's trial is no longer fair.
Remember, jury members come from all walks of life.
Sadly, jury duty pays so poorly and missing work is so heavily frowned upon in this country that juries tend to be filled only with those "too stupid to get out of jury duty."
I would personally welcome the opportunity, but I'm well informed enough about a variety of subjects that I'd likely get dismissed in jury selection.
They are not allowed to look up material about the case. The definition of a term in general may or may not be about the case. That's a complex question of law. Say for example this rape occurred on an "Ottoman" and a juror looked up what that word meant...
Frankly I think the judge over reacted by declaring a mistrial.
If that juror looked up "Ottoman" on Wikipedia and someone had decided to troll the hell out of it by replacing the content of the page with a snippet of the BDSM page and this picture, that could be a problem.
The rules exist not because things like that happen constantly, but because they can happen. Excepting the rule on a circumstantial basis exacerbates the inevitable probability that such an exception is the wrong decision.
Rathering "ten guilty men go free than one be wrongfully imprisoned" and all that.
You must be downloading movies (125GB/700MB == ~150 movies)?
Who acquires 700MB rips anymore? Torrent users?
Last I checked, being able to "archive" to a CD-R isn't really top priority for anyone who enjoys and likely few who contribute to the scene. The scene is about providing or acquiring the same content you would normally get in a **AA approved package, only with better compatibility, picture quality, and freedom of use.
When the scene ceases to provide (for free, I might add) a better product than the morons that produce the product through legitimate distribution channels, people will stop using it.
The point is that 700MB DVD rips are a legacy product from a time when no one had DVD burners, and hard drives and internet connections were an order of magnitude or more smaller and slower than they are today.
The fact that it takes less time to get the same product (an 8.4GB 1080p copy of something, for example) from the intarwebz than it does to actually go to the store and buy or rent it is rather pathetic.
I just use different passwords everywhere, and track 'em in a database here. Most sites let you stay logged in, plus the browser remembers a lot of them, so it's really very little trouble. And the benefit - that a hack on one site doesn't compromise any other... that's worth a lot. Especially if you're doing *any* financial stuff on the net.
I used to to the same thing. I combined it with "tiered" passwords, ie a financial password, a super strong password, a medium level password, and a throwaway that my friends and family know. For other sites, I basically lived by the "Password Reset" feature and the browser's password manager.
Then I started listening to Security Now, and Steve Gibson just kept going on and on about how awesome LastPass is, so after hearing it for a few weeks I decided to check it out. I fiddled with it for a few hours and started converting pretty much everything over to it. It's fully encrypted (ie. lose your master password without designating a "Master" computer to hold on to a decryption key, and you're screwed) and has plugins for every major browser, works on Mac/Windows/Linux, and they've got iPhone, Android, and Blackberry apps. It's very slick, and of course, since password storage is centralized, you don't have to worry about syncing a USB stick or whatever. That was the only thing that kept me from implementing KeePass or Roboform.
I suggest you try it. I probably couldn't live without it now.
If I make known to you that I don't like it when you fart right next to me, and you compromise by farting in the bathroom instead, I have zero right to bitch about the bathroom smelling like farts.
>>> Seriously, the risks of second hand smoke in an outdoor area are very small compared to the risks indoors.
Doesn't matter, it's the smell not the tiny chance of cancer.
That's the most asinine thing I've read all day.
Perhaps you should audit everything we do to ensure we do it in a fashion that is most amenable to your senses. But that wouldn't be fair to the people who are offended by having to look at you as you walk by. You could easily take a different route to your destination.
It's not that seeing you is bad for their health; it's just that you're so damned ugly.
Your smoking, on the other hand, contributes jack and squat.
His smoking contributes to making him happy and/or satisfied. You could very easily say the same thing about gay sex.
Especially given how some smokers, when foul weather hits, seem to think its their god given right to blockade the entrances and exits to building so that they can light up. Same with bus shelters and crowded streets.
You see, that's not a problem caused by smoking or by cigarettes.
You have a problem with people who are stupid, rude, and inconsiderate of you. However, there's a statistical link between people with those traits and smoking. There are further links between such and poverty. How cute that they all line up, eh?
Maybe if we use some of those exploitive cigarette taxes to fund education and etiquette courses for smokers, we wouldn't be so rude and inconsiderate anymore. And maybe if we didn't pay through the nose for a pack of smokes to pay for all kinds of stupid shit that we don't get to enjoy, we wouldn't feel so empowered to be inconsiderate.
No one on the legislative side of the issue actually considers the smokers. The only consideration is "Me" and "Mine."
Slashdot Mirror
The secure desktop is actually the most annoying thing about UAC, specifically because it interrupts you and forces your attention to an administrative decision.
There's a security policy that lets you disable the use of the secure desktop for these prompts though.
What was improved for non-gamers, Aero and ..... yeah.
Lotsa stuff:
....bah fuck it. Just because I liked Vista doesn't mean I'll ever convince anyone else that it was good. One thing I did notice though: Vista and 7 don't have that "entropy" that Windows XP and its predecessors did. Previous editions of NT all kept getting slower and slower the longer it had been since your install date. NT6 doesn't do that. It's quite nice.
:D
One thing that made me smile though: I got to talking with a fellow I know who has worked for Microsoft for the last 15 years or so about 6 months after Windows 7 launched. I pulled him aside, patted him on the shoulder and said, "I have to thank you and your company for releasing a product that has truly shown everyone what a wonderful product Windows Vista really was."
Had we not been in public, I swear I would've made the man cry
Have you actually sat down and tried to use them as they're meant to be used? Or have you tried to use them as if you were still using XP?
The ironic thing is that only the ignorant and the extremely insightful tend to understand this.
...but eventually I realized--from using other peoples' desktops!--how nice it was to have all that stuff one click away behind the start button. I used to revert the Control Panel to "Classic View" (called "Icons View" for Vista/7)--which admittedly is sometimes necessary only on XP it seems, though I admit using NT6 with Office I only can't seem to find the "Mail" applet--and while it was familiar to me, I again gradually realized how much of a pain in the ass it became to help people over the phone because I had no idea what their control panel UI was actually laid out like.
I used to do that kind of stuff. I installed XP and immediately reverted the UI and start menu from "Fischer Price" to "Windows Classic"
Some time later, I found out why these UI elements are changed. Microsoft spends craploads of money on R&D to empirically determine that a UI change is good for a majority of use cases. I've found over the years that most change-fearing power users need to know these things before they can attempt to use the changes a new Windows iteration presents to them.
Alas, however, there will always be exceptions to the rule, even though they might drive you nuts, don't worry. When those people fall behind because they can't use productivity enhancements out of sheer ignorance and unwillingness to at least learn or attempt to understand, you can just chuckle quietly to yourself while you watch them waste time.
Because Slashdotters like to pretend they are uber-31337 Linux haX0r d00dz even though they are probably using Microsoft Windows and iPhones to say how cool Linux is and how lame other platforms are, despite having never actually used Linux.
WTF is wrong with you? Linux is rock solid and I love using it for appliance-type setups in my deployments. And kernel hacking is by far one of my favorite past times.
You're so judgmental!
-Sent from my iPhone.
It was the non-stop display of smug holier-than-thou photos of Jimmy Wales and all his cronies that did it for me.
Just think of it... The Jimmy Wales mug, the Time Magazine mug from Zuckerberg, and the mug of Cristopher Walken.
All staring at you. Staring deep into your soul.
Wales wants what you have. Zuck knows what you have. And Walken will be damned if he doesn't convince you to give it to them.
The amount of awesome in this thread is almost too much to handle. I demand screenshots.
And the obligatory picture.
Skype uses interesting techniques to punch holes in firewalls to allow that peer-to-peer connection. Rather than relying on some type of dynamic port mapping via UPnP, Skype's central server (or perhaps the supernodes?) tell each computer to contact the other, causing the NAT device to dynamically map the required ports at the time a call is made. From what I've heard, the NAT traversal that Skype uses was pioneered by them, but I believe the technique has since been adopted by many other applications.
Skype has a little checkbox somewhere that says "Use ports 80 and 443" as alternates. Unchecking that might help you here.
Your point is more in depth than the one I was getting at here.
:)
Very good post
with lose/loose you can't even enjoy the excuse of just mixing up homophones.
It's not just you, but it likely depends on how you were taught English. The curriculum I was given for early English was Phonics. As a result, even though I usually spell things correctly, lose/loose is one that I find myself correcting frequently as I write.
:D
"Lose" with the single O and single E separated by the S phonetically stipulates a long O sound, like "dose" or "grope." The problem with "loose" is that, depending on what that E on the end is for, you get different pronunciations; it could be "looz" or "luce."
Maybe it should be "loose" and "looce" instead
In my day we had penmanship exams... :D
Hahaha! I went to a Catholic school for K-6, and they graded me on penmanship. I routinely got a C :D
Content & the thesis mattered more than perfection.
I don't know about you, but when I'm reading something and a word is misspelled, particularly if it's misspelled as a completely different word or has all the same letters as a completely different word, or something like a comma is out of place, I become almost completely derailed by the sentence.
:P
Spell check doesn't fix bad writing though
Ah okay. I thought so, but I might very well be thinking back to the "use cases" I read for putting them on different servers. Something about caching KMS servers, if you use different ones you want to turn it off so they round-robin until activation is successful I think.
:P
Either way, the one thing that MS has botched with respect to KMS is administration. KMS really should be a Server Role that's administered through MMC instead of a bunch of wildly spread out VBScripts
I don't know where you read that, but Office 2010 uses KMS too. I don't know if they can be on the same server though... we use MAK for Office because it has a significantly lower deployment in our enterprise when compared to Windows.
OGA/WGA/activation is pointless.
It's not pointless, but it is annoying.
I take it that you've never used KMS before. As someone who has deployed both XP with a VLK and 7 with KMS, I have to say that KMS is the one thing that Microsoft has finally gotten right about license management. You don't even put keys in your images or scripted installs anymore. It's completely automatic.
but you can turn that around. You ask the judge "what's an ottoman?", and he can tell you that it's the BDSM thing, because he wants to see the defendant found guilty.
Very true. However, judges are elected officials for a reason.
Not that such a reason holds water, but whatever. Being hypothetical can take arguments back and forth for eternity.
Of course it would be all right, but anyone with extensive knowledge about a crime or situation that will be prosecuted or defended in a courtroom would likely be dismissed during jury selection.
The point of a trial and its "expert witnesses" is that members of the jury take their understanding of the situation at hand from the proceedings in the courtroom, and then use that understanding on an individual basis to deliberate with others about whether or not reasonable doubt exists in light of each's interpretation of what they've been presented.
Even if the juror in question had read the article beforehand and then was looking it back up, she is explicitly doing so in violation of the process of the trial, and that's the difference. When things like this occur, the defendant's trial is no longer fair.
Remember, jury members come from all walks of life.
Sadly, jury duty pays so poorly and missing work is so heavily frowned upon in this country that juries tend to be filled only with those "too stupid to get out of jury duty."
I would personally welcome the opportunity, but I'm well informed enough about a variety of subjects that I'd likely get dismissed in jury selection.
They are not allowed to look up material about the case. The definition of a term in general may or may not be about the case. That's a complex question of law. Say for example this rape occurred on an "Ottoman" and a juror looked up what that word meant...
Frankly I think the judge over reacted by declaring a mistrial.
If that juror looked up "Ottoman" on Wikipedia and someone had decided to troll the hell out of it by replacing the content of the page with a snippet of the BDSM page and this picture, that could be a problem.
The rules exist not because things like that happen constantly, but because they can happen. Excepting the rule on a circumstantial basis exacerbates the inevitable probability that such an exception is the wrong decision.
Rathering "ten guilty men go free than one be wrongfully imprisoned" and all that.
You must be downloading movies (125GB/700MB == ~150 movies)?
Who acquires 700MB rips anymore? Torrent users?
Last I checked, being able to "archive" to a CD-R isn't really top priority for anyone who enjoys and likely few who contribute to the scene. The scene is about providing or acquiring the same content you would normally get in a **AA approved package, only with better compatibility, picture quality, and freedom of use.
When the scene ceases to provide (for free, I might add) a better product than the morons that produce the product through legitimate distribution channels, people will stop using it.
The point is that 700MB DVD rips are a legacy product from a time when no one had DVD burners, and hard drives and internet connections were an order of magnitude or more smaller and slower than they are today.
The fact that it takes less time to get the same product (an 8.4GB 1080p copy of something, for example) from the intarwebz than it does to actually go to the store and buy or rent it is rather pathetic.
I'm sorry that you have issues.
I just use different passwords everywhere, and track 'em in a database here. Most sites let you stay logged in, plus the browser remembers a lot of them, so it's really very little trouble. And the benefit - that a hack on one site doesn't compromise any other... that's worth a lot. Especially if you're doing *any* financial stuff on the net.
I used to to the same thing. I combined it with "tiered" passwords, ie a financial password, a super strong password, a medium level password, and a throwaway that my friends and family know. For other sites, I basically lived by the "Password Reset" feature and the browser's password manager.
Then I started listening to Security Now, and Steve Gibson just kept going on and on about how awesome LastPass is, so after hearing it for a few weeks I decided to check it out. I fiddled with it for a few hours and started converting pretty much everything over to it. It's fully encrypted (ie. lose your master password without designating a "Master" computer to hold on to a decryption key, and you're screwed) and has plugins for every major browser, works on Mac/Windows/Linux, and they've got iPhone, Android, and Blackberry apps. It's very slick, and of course, since password storage is centralized, you don't have to worry about syncing a USB stick or whatever. That was the only thing that kept me from implementing KeePass or Roboform.
I suggest you try it. I probably couldn't live without it now.
I don't think you get it.
If I make known to you that I don't like it when you fart right next to me, and you compromise by farting in the bathroom instead, I have zero right to bitch about the bathroom smelling like farts.
>>> Seriously, the risks of second hand smoke in an outdoor area are very small compared to the risks indoors.
Doesn't matter, it's the smell not the tiny chance of cancer.
That's the most asinine thing I've read all day.
Perhaps you should audit everything we do to ensure we do it in a fashion that is most amenable to your senses. But that wouldn't be fair to the people who are offended by having to look at you as you walk by. You could easily take a different route to your destination.
It's not that seeing you is bad for their health; it's just that you're so damned ugly.
Your smoking, on the other hand, contributes jack and squat.
His smoking contributes to making him happy and/or satisfied. You could very easily say the same thing about gay sex.
Especially given how some smokers, when foul weather hits, seem to think its their god given right to blockade the entrances and exits to building so that they can light up. Same with bus shelters and crowded streets.
You see, that's not a problem caused by smoking or by cigarettes.
You have a problem with people who are stupid, rude, and inconsiderate of you. However, there's a statistical link between people with those traits and smoking. There are further links between such and poverty. How cute that they all line up, eh?
Maybe if we use some of those exploitive cigarette taxes to fund education and etiquette courses for smokers, we wouldn't be so rude and inconsiderate anymore. And maybe if we didn't pay through the nose for a pack of smokes to pay for all kinds of stupid shit that we don't get to enjoy, we wouldn't feel so empowered to be inconsiderate.
No one on the legislative side of the issue actually considers the smokers. The only consideration is "Me" and "Mine."
When people order stuff via my web site
DUDE!
;-)
...you forgot to plug your website!