Had to comment on this one:
I know swapping is the case because I'm writing this on a laptop with 2GB of RAM that is almost unbearable to use without 2GB of ReadyBoost flash. Readyboost has nothing to do with swap - it's a way for the system to pre-cache more data using Superfetch. One of the design requirements of Readyboost is that you can pull the device at any time,w tih no warning,a nd the system will remain stable (it might complain, but won't even crash an application unless that app is directly using the device for a non-Readyboost purpose). Since swap is basically very slow RAM (live data, critical to the running of the various apps and the OS itself, is stored there) Readyboost obviously can't be used for it. There's a reason Windows generally won't let you put a pagefile on removable storage.
Readyboost is nice, but I run with 2GB main RAM and under 1GB of Readyboost (sometimes none at all) and the only difference is that EVE Online takes a second or two longer to start when it must pull some stuff from the disk rather than Flash. It's still faster than on XP.
People like you are the main thing I don't like about/. You offer nothing useful to the discussion, state "facts" so blatantly false that a 4-year-old would probably be suspicious, and wrap it all up in just the right groupthink to manipulate the moderators into getting enough points that the single point I could give you wouldn't make a difference.
literally ten times the disk space Normally I'd let this go since you're within a factor of 3, but if you're going to throw around the word "literally" you had better mean it. Vista (Ultimate) takes just under 13GB. XP MCE is over 2GB, though admittedly that was a pared-down OEM install, not a fresh-off-the-disk like Vista was. In any case, it hardly matters from a home user perspective; computers these days come with drives easily 15x the size they were in 2002.
absolutely nothing new in the way of end-user features What the FUCK are you talking about? Instant search? Previous versions? Sidebar? Spam filtering and instant search in the included mail client? Per-application volume control? Useful dialogs when you move/copy folders or files in a way that would result in overwriting others? Automatic processor scaling, etc. resulting in substantial battery life improvement? Superfetch (a couple of my games start whole seconds faster)? The ability to see live views of your windows without switching applications (my favorite Aero feature, far more than just eye candy)? Bi-directional firewall with excellent configuration tools? ASLR for protection against most return-to-libc attacks? The ability to re-size and otherwise modify partitions while the system is mounted and running? Automatic defragmentation? There are plenty more, but these are just some of the ones I personally find coolest.
fit their install image into 300 MB of space Windows 2000, maybe. Vista, even SP0 and Home, nope. And they took hours to install - Vista takes 20 minutes (literally) and everything except the very start and end are unattended.
packed new features by the hundreds So does Vista - far more than XP, in my experience. Not to say XP wasn't an improvement over 2000; it had new features (Welcome screen, a firewall and WiFi support that weren't really useful until SP2, Data Execute Protection, fairly bad CD burning and zip support, easily corrupted system restore also found in ME, and later the Tablet and MCE editions...) I'm sure I'm missing a few; it's been years since I used either regularly and some details have faded. Honestly though, XP was a stop-gap between 2000 and "Longhorn" and most of its features were small (auto-hiding idle system tray icons) or took a service pack or two to really come out (the firewall, etc.)
Probably not, since all the screenshots I've seen still use the Windows window manager.
Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager is the one I use, and it's nice - great features, light weight, hasn't crashed in ages since I updated to the latest version, includes a window recovery tool to find and restore orphaned windows if it does crash, nice customizable shortcuts, free of cost and open source. Vista users with the WDM can get live views in the modes displaying all desktops, or all windows on the current desktop, but the features apparently work on XP too (just with static images). URL: http://www.codeplex.com/vdm
It burns a lot of CPU time, uses a lot of bandwidth, crashes browsers, and - not for the first time - has serious security issues.
On Firefox, there's an extension called Flashblock. It blocks Flash by default, but allows you to re-enable it on a page-wide or applet-by-applet basis. Several other extensions will do the same thing.
In IE7, you can double-click a spot in the status bar (third box, right to left, of the boxes just to the left of the security zone indicator (the thing that usually says Internet)) or open the Add-on Manager from Tools in the command bar or menu bar, and disable or enable the Flash ActiveX control. This will globally enable or disable flash, but doesn't take effect on a given page until that page is refreshed. Alternatively, the third-party add-on IE7Pro has applet-by-applet flash blocking.
I realize that some sites need it, and on those there's nothing you can do about this problem except hope Adobe updates their software ASAP. For everywhere else though, do yourself a favor and block it.
Here's an equally blunt response for you: You're wrong, 32-bit OSes can access up to 64GiB of RAM using a feature called PAE. It's a bit of a hack and has some downsides - for example, no individual 32-bit program can access more than 4GiB, and some drivers aren't compatible with it (which is why it isn't enabled by default in client versions of Windows). However, the hardware has been capable of it since the Pentium Pro CPUs (mid 90s)
In reference to the GP, there are typically two variants of standard Linux kernels available for a x86 system: Default (or similar) and Big, BigSMP, or similar. The SMP stands for Symmetric MultiProcessing (ability to use multiple CPUs, CPU cores, execution paths, etc.) and has been integrated into the Default kernel for some time now. The "big" kernels also support PAE. This is not in the default due, I believe, to the risk that some kernel modules such as drivers don't handle PAE correctly (the Wikipedia page also mentions that PAE-enabled kernels won't run on non-PAE-capable CPUs, though this is hardly a concern on any modern machine).
By "crazy graphics bugs" I hope he doesn't seriously mean the way things tend to "stick" to the desktop if the system is too busy to clear them when they are supposed to fade, or some such... because that's a problem Vista doesn't have (if using Aero) and XP does. I have yet to see a singe "crazy graphics bug" of the sort described in TFA in Vista. Maybe he should update his drivers?
Faster and more responsive depends on your metric. Vista opens my programs MUCH faster than XP, because SuperFetch has already cashed them into RAM in anticipation of (for example) my regular afternoon roaming gang in EVE Online (a game with a large memory footprint that takes upwards of 8 seconds to load in XP). Vista is also so much faster at searching it's not even in the same league as XP - there are after market add-ons that come a lot closer, but Vista's search blows anything shipping with XP out of the water, and its integration into the Start menu means that after just a few weeks of using Vista it was so automatic that I couldn't understand at first why it wasn't working when I had to use an XP machine. XP certainly also had its moments when you would double-click on My Computer, nothing would happen, so you're wait a few seconds and double-click again. Repeat a couple times until suddenly it works, and four identical windows open at once.
"System lock on login" is the one that made me actually go RTFM, because I couldn't believe ANYBODY was that blatantly wrong. One of the well-known issues with XP is that immediately after login, for up to 5 minutes in the case of one machine I saw, the system is too busy to do anything else - in fact, trying to start another program during this time slows things down so much that it takes longer than waiting for it to finish loading completely, then starting the app. Vista still takes a while on bootup (though you could reduce this by not using the sidebar; for me it's worth it) but it's much better about allowing you to do other things during bootup. Then again, I upgraded from a (pre-loaded with a ton of shitty software) OEM copy of XP to a clean version of Vista, whereas the reviewer presumably went the other way.
For the multitasking one I have no clue WHAT the idiot is on; the kind of halt-the-whole-system-I'm-busy described in TFA has never happened to me on either XP or Vista, save when a truly excessive amount of swap was in use (and that was on XP, years ago when I ran with under half a gig of RAM).
File copy and delete got a lot faster when they released a patch somewhere near 2 months back that resolved a lot of the "calculating" delay. It might still be slower, but it also has vastly better options with regard to file overwriting, and as somebody who used to run as a limited user on XP the ability to do a file operation in a restricted location without starting a special instance of Explorer as admin make's the slight delay quite worth it.
I'm not sure where the comment on Windows Update is coming from; the Background Intellignet Transfer Service used in XP is still used in Vista, and I have yet to see either one slow down my web browsing. Maybe large file downloads are affected a bit, but I've certainly not found Vista worse than XP.
The driver issue is mostly a third-party one, but I've had no troubles in months either except for nVidia and their refusal to support their laptop cards with the official drivers (I'm using a modified INF file with a much newer driver than is officially available for the card, and it works great). Vista can also load 95% of XP drivers in my experience; the sole serious exception is network device or service drivers.
Since Vista automatically checks online for new drivers, I've found it much BETTER at locating drivers than XP was - for example, it automatically found my webcam driver, while before I had to go dig through HP's site.
Requires less hardware I'm not going to argue, except to point out that Vista's needs are pretty perfectly aligned with Moore's Law and XP's needs (roughly 8x the officia
Technically it could've happened on Vista Actually, it couldn't. Vista neither uses nor even has a boot.ini file (it's not even there in some legacy form). Vista's bootloader is rather more complex than ntldr, mostly (AFAIK) because it needs to be for BitLocker (Vista's full-drive encryption tool, which requires a separate boot partition since the entire system volume gets encrypted). This new bootloader also uses a different configuration store, and boot.ini has been removed entirely.
Actually... almost none do, really. The problem is that the games modify files in restricted locations - typically their own install folders - and assume they have the access to do so. The correct way to handle this is to simply (as Administrator, or at a cost of one UAC prompt on Vista) modify the folder's privileges such that all users, or at least your (normal, restricted) account has full access to said folder. It's a marginal reduction of security - a virus could then infect or trash the game executable - but unlikely to be a problem, and if you know to do it, the actual process is very easy.
This kind of thing is actually one of the most common reasons any program needs admin privileges to run. It's very easy to solve, so it is at least worth trying.
All that said, as other people have pointed out, the installer that caused this particular issue runs with full admin privileges. It's probably possible, by modifying a lot of ACLs, to install the update without admin privs (easier if it was installed without them in the first place, which actually works) but it's not something most people would even attempt.
On the offhand chance you read this, I'd love to know: Is there any particular reason that the series is to be 12 books? I mean, even leaving aside the number of plot lines that must be wrapped up* I had simply always thought 13 was a more expected number; there are a few 'significant' numbers in WoT and 13 seems to pop up more than most. Was 12 books selected for any particular reason? If you really love Jordan's creation and are as good at conclusions as other posters have said, I look forward to reading your end to the series... but I wonder, does it need to be in one volume? I'd always assumed that Tarmon Gai'don (the last battle, itself) would occupy much if not all of the final book (defense of the Two Rivers, presumably a much smaller event than Tarmon Gai'don, occupied a decent chunk of book 4 - and I loved it) but given how much remains to be wrapped up, and that the story doesn't seem quite ready for said battle (not that this means it won't happen anyhow) I think I would love TWO final books even more.
Just curiosity, and my $0.02.
* I don't recommend reading this list by anyone who hasn't finished book 11; this may contain spoilers:
Egwene and the siege of the tower, Seanchan attacking the tower as Egwene dreamed, the growing split in the Black Tower, Arad Doman's chaos due to Seanchan, Dragonsworn, Whitecloaks, the Forsaken, and of course their own great general, Matt, Tuon, and the Seanchan Empress herself (and their version of the Prophesies), Elayne with her pregnancy and the struggles for Caemlyn, Galad and the Whitecloaks, Gawyn and Egwene, Faile, Galina, Perrin, the Seanchan, and the Aiel, All of the countries Rand doesn't somehow control already (even if you limit yourself to what it shows on the maps, he's only got about half of them), Moridin and the meaning of his constant use of Saa, Moiraine's presumed return, Luc and Isam (are they even different people anymore?), and of course the last battle itself... this is only a partial list, at that.
Actually, I would suggest holding on to the search indexer, for at least a while - it's pretty good about running when you don't even notice, and instant search is a feature that makes so much difference, it's hard to explain. From simple things like finding programs in a few keystrokes (I haven't expanded the Programs list in weeks at least, now - sometimes I got for months without doing so) to instantly filtering your mail and web history to find the message/page with the text you're looking for to hitting Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, or any of a wide number of other services using Start++ (Google it, it's a fantastic powertoy for Vista's Start menu search).
As for my upgrade, it was well over a year ago, and I can't stand to use XP anymore. Like you, I did a clean install, but all the programs I still want to use (and a good many I don't use any more, but used to) all worked out of the box, though a few stored data in their install folder (Bad developers! No donuts!) so I had to change the access permissions to those folders so I didn't need to run them as Admin each time.
All hardware works just fine. Back when I first upgraded I had to use XP drivers for some things (I still do, for the Ext2 Filesystem driver to access my Linux partitions) but they worked fine. By six months ago, all the commercial drivers were labeled for Vista and available on Windows Update. Of course, x64 did complain at bootup about that Ext2 driver, but thankfully it needed only very infrequent reboots (I'm using 32-bit again now; my system isn't nearly as great as yours and I didn't feel x64 was worth the risk of a hassle. I may upgrade later, though.)
That only happened, in my experience, copying into a protected location (requiring UAC elevation) and even then a minute is a ridiculous exaggeration. I'll grant you that it did tend to say it for about 6 seconds though (on my year old, mid-range laptop)... until a couple months ago, when they released a patch that fixed that and a couple other performance issues. File operations are quite painless now. Run Windows Update, or go check online - they released the patch as a standalone before pushing it out over Update.
No offense, but if you're installing the crap on the CDs for cameras or MP3 players, and your version of Windows is newer than 98, you're somewhere between wasting your time and actively massing up your computer. That stuff is all garbage, in my experience. All you need is the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) or UMS (USB Mass Storage) protocol, which have been included in Windows since 2000, I believe. No special software or drivers needed.
Granted, the instructions, should you happen to read them, will probably tell you to use the (heavily branded, often slow and buggy, and possible causes of everything from slow booting to data loss) software they include. No, thank you! Plug and play; it Just Bloody Works (even as a non-admin).
Of course, there is some specialized hardware that is new enough XP won't have drivers for it, beyond perhaps basic capabilities of it's a specialized version of standard hardware (note that Linux isn't likely to give you any more than that, either). Vista is much more likely to have the drivers - it's plug-and-play collection is far newer, and part of the install footprint is over 2GB of relatively common drivers - but even if it doesn't, it can automatically find them online via Windows Update. If that fails, you can search the web manually, and even if there aren't any labeled for Vista, XP drivers will almost always work. Compare that to Linux, where most (binary) drivers will break between kernel versions (and yes, this is an advantage of open-source, but it doesn't make it any less annoying to find a driver for kernel 2.6.8 or - heaven forbid - 2.4.33, that won't work on your newer system).
Aside from the already well-pointed-out fact that newer versions of Nero are compatible and that Nero has broken across other Windows version upgrades as well (a sign, to me, that they tie too closely to the OS), why the hell pay for burner software? The only thing I need third-part software for in Vista is ISOs (and other image files) for which I use ImgBurn; it's free (as in beer, not speech), runs on everything from Win95 (so they claim, never tried) to Vista x64 to Linux via Wine (see comment on Win95; K3B rules). Fast, easy to use, feature-packed, and while I regret that Vista doesn't include an image burner in its disk-burning abilities, I was using ImgBurn on Vista since the Beta 2 days.
No, I'm not associated with ImgBurn in any way other than finding them in a Google search over 18 months ago when I was looking to burn some Linux discs and an early Vista beta, and happily using ever since.
Not to say you're wrong, but if you're right, I'm certainly one of the 5%. For me, Vista makes XP feel like I AM using Win95 (or rather, its contemporary NT4). The most painfully obvious thing missing from XP is certainly the instant search integrated into the Start menu, though the feature I find the most important is certainly UAC - as somebody who likes to tinker with my system, doesn't like running as an Admin, and spent several painful months trying to use XP as a limited user before switching to Linux (openSuse; I tried Ubuntu but it was terrible back then) until Vista reached usability (beta 2, for me), UAC is a truly fantastic feature. That said, all the other features - ranging from big things like Volume Shadow Copies to little ones like notification area bubble not appearing while in a full-screen app (they queue up instead, and are displayed when you return to the Windows desktop) - make XP feel at least as outdated as it is.
Vista has a lot of nice tricks for power users too; the firewall configuration options completely blow away XP's firewall, the updated Task Manager and new performance monitor are fantastic for everything from identifying system processes that are slowing the machine to catching when an app tries to phone home, the configurability of the power options still puts some desktop Linux distros to shame (when I first saw it, it blew them all away - and I still get better battery life in Vista than I do in Linux, even if I leave Aero enabled), and there's an incredible amount one can do with the Registry, either by hand or with third-party tools (so far as I know, there's no MS powertoy anything like TweakUI for Vista yet). Linux may still be more configurable, but most of the changes on Vista are pretty easy and, at worst, will make things run slower or break some features - not render the machine unbootable, or close to it.
Assuming what you say is true, I suppose it really is a case of YMMV. UAC on my system (a year-old mid-range laptop) takes between half a second and maybe 2 seconds if the system is busy with other things (I try to avoid cases that cause extreme performance loss, like starting programs while the startup processes are still executing). It was actually faster on my older (1.5 years) laptop, because that one had an ATI graphics chip (a low-performance one, though it was Aero-capable) and ATI's drivers for Vista were quite good months before Vista was released. nVidia, by comparison, had absolute shit drivers that would crash on every switch out of the secure desktop (where UAC prompts occur) and often did, in fact, take 5 seconds before a driver update reduced the number of video crashes to "merely" a couple a day. If possible, updating your vide drivers might help a lot.
I certainly wouldn't claim Vista is bug-free, but I haven't found its bugs to be things that get in my way generally (the file move bug was the only one I really disliked in the released version, and has been fixed). As for crashes a lot, I've heard that from a guy I know and trust who has a Vista Home Basic machine, so I suppose it must happen to some people, but in my experience it's been quite the opposite. The damn nVidia drivers aside (and I know when they cause issues because a little "Display driver stopped responding and has been restarted" message appears in the notification area) I've had very few issues at all, quite noticeably fewer than on XP in at least the case of Warcraft 3 (which occasionally crashed at random and unpredictable times). IE, Sidebar, and Windows Mail (the Windows apps I have running and in use most often) all are very stable, though in the case of IE that's a relative claim (it does a lot better than Firefox, but will freeze a couple times a month if I leave the same session open long enough).
The argument about Operating Systems isn't so much because people need Windows for Windows' sake (with the exceptions of IIS and Domains/Active Directory, I doubt many businesses rely heavily on any feature specific to Windows itself) as it is because they need it for Windows-based software (well, I suppose you could call the Windows API a "specific feature of Windows itself" but that's not how people view it). As another poster pointed out, the software that organizations and even private citizens rely upon is often limited to Windows, with the Mac/Linux equivalents, if they even exist, being feature-limited or at the very least requiring substantial re-training and re-investment.
The problem with this, of course, is that reversing that kind of situation is very difficult. Without MS actively contributing to Wine/ReactOS, there isn't much they can do to make Windows-only software any less Windows-only. Without a major increase in the market share of alternative OSes, there's little incentive for third-party developers to place much priority in cross-platform development. There's always Java, and I know of a few products that are developed for.NET but are explicitly tested and supported in Mono, but in general, software will have native code components that most companies don't see as worth the hassle to port.
By the way, I'm not sure I agree with the idea that IE is a real monopoly. Yes, it's still the only browser that supports ActiveX and some people still use that, but alternative browsers have become reasonably common - far beyond what alternative OSes have achieved ever since Windows' rise to dominance - and while it's certainly still common enough that people will develop for IE's rendering engine, you also see plenty of sites encouraging visitors to use alternative browsers. Additionally, most sites render fine on IE, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, etc. without any browser-specific customization; with regard to these sites, IE's market share doesn't even matter (it could rise to 100% or drop to nothing over the next month and it wouldn't affect the owners of those sites). Compare this to non-web applications, where true cross-platform is a fairly rare thing, and I'd say IE's market share should be much less of a concern than breaking the chicken-and-egg problem with Windows-specific software.
Please excuse me while I laugh my head off at your ignorance (and believe me, I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt by merely assuming ignorance).
First, Vista DOES have an Administrator account (obviously, else how could you list "Administrator" as a user in the ACLs?). The account (like Ubuntu's root account) is disabled by default; it's a matter of under 15 seconds (including a single UAC prompt) to re-enable it, if for some reason you want to. The only problem here is that by default, it has no password and it is always enabled if the computer boots in Safe Mode.
Second, far from "EVERYBODY" turns off UAC; those who are familiar with the dangers of running as a full Admin will either leave it alone and accept the occasional delay of a couple seconds as a warning that something potentially dangerous is occurring, or will configure it so it doesn't get in the way of their normal activities. The smart ones will probably configure it (and modify the ACLs of what they access so stuff that they don't want to get prompted for doesn't prompt them) and then either run as a limited account or set UAC to demand the user's password, a more Unix-like security model that protects against tampering by somebody who comes by if your away from your desk for a few moments and forgot to press Winkey-L.
"You have to explicitly tell an app to run as Root and even then it balks at you." Okay... go back and read that again. Think about it. Are you honestly saying that right-clicking a file should be all that's needed for privilege escalation? All that right-clicking it does is marks it for escalation WHEN RUN. The actual act of the escalation is carried out by UAC, which IS what it's intended to do (and since it's configurable, this provides a degree of security control far above normal).
As for the apps that don't work... I don't know, maybe I've just been lucky. I use third-party, proprietary and open-source, IM clients and web browsers, software dev tools, image viewing/manipulation software, and games dating all the way back to WarCraft: Orcs and Humans (complete with "Quit to DOS" on the main menu). The only problem I had was one game's online updated didn't work, and I had to get the patches manually. Oh, the horrors...
I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt here that you're relatively inexperienced in computer administration, but please... your arguments are just stupid. So you found the option and turned off UAC? Congrats... I hope that means you're running as a non-admin now (you obviously know SOMETHING about doing so since you mentioned entering a password). Of course, if you'd created a non-admin account from the beginning, it WOULD have prompted you for the admin's password at each UAC prompt. Alternatively, you could have a spent a couple minutes with a search engine and found the configuration option to make UAC demand your password every time even if your account is a member of the Administrators group.
Alternatively, you could use UAC the way it's intended. Don't want somebody messing with your system unauthorized? Winkey-L. Want to restrict your kid (or somebody else) to non-admin areas? Create a limited account for them. Don't want UAC to prompt you when doing something? Modify UAC's configuration and/or the access control list of that thing so you have access without full admin privileges. Want to know whenever a program is attempting to make a significant change to your system? Pay attention to the damn UAC prompts. On my mid-range, more-than-a-year-old laptop, they take well under two seconds most of the time; spare the extra three seconds to make sure it's expected and you've got 5 seconds well spent.
I'd point out the rest of the stupidity of your arguments, but I just read all the way to your last line and realized I'd simply been trolled. I'll post anyways because there probably are people who could use the info, but please... even as a joke, comparing ME and Vista just reeks of trolling, especially from somebody who even pretends to give a damn about security.
You're perfectly correct: the browser (and its plugins) shouldn't be allowed to do this. Running with non-admin permissions helps but your user data can still get badly fscked, user-mode programs can be installed and run silently, etc. You need tighter restrictions, like not allowing the browser to access most of the hard drive under normal conditions.
Sounds like a good reason to use Protected Mode on Vista or to set up an AppArmor profile on Linux: Specifically restrict the browser's permissions. Protected Mode makes this pretty easy, but isn't configurable and isn't available for other browsers.
As a side note, IE7Pro (works on IE6 too, sort of) has ad filtering and flash blocking features, for those who would like AdBlock/FlashBlock functionality (a lot else too, but that's mostly all I use it for) but don't always use Firefox.
I'm sure there are others, but for the record, Vista's firewall effectively offers this option. You can specify protocols, ports, and IP addresses that a given executable (and processes it spawns) are allowed to access. Sure, it's more configuration than most people would bother with, but it's entirely possible. To be honest, it wouldn't too hard to make a script to do it automatically - but I don't play WoW and don't know what access it needs, so I'm probably not the person to do that.
The SUA system on my Vista and (when I used it) XP boxes identifies itself as Interix. While older ("OpenNT") versions of the subsystem may have been crippled, I've had mostly good experiences with Interix. It's a little buggy - things that set environment variables seems prone to segfaulting for some reason - but overall it's been handy. I've frequently used NetBSD's pkgsrc build system for package management, and I've been fairly impressed. The new version of pkgsrc seems to require a version of GCC that doesn't ship with Interix, however.
Out of curiosity, is Interix in the server versions better in any significant way than what's in the current desktop versions?
First of all, files should never be deleted, they should only be hidden, unless the disk is full, of course. Great idea; you've just forgotten to give a name to those files left behind. How about Shadow Copies? Except, if you're going to store shadow copies anyhow, wouldn't it be great to checks if the files has been modified, and store shadow copy of the modifications? You could do it across the whole drive even, and call it Volume Shadow Copies! (Okay, to be fair, Server 2003 and Vista won't actually store a VSC of a file if it was briefly created then destroyed; it needs to persist long enough for the shadow copy service to locate it and create the copy. Still, it works pretty damn well. Also, your suggestion, although it has merit, is missing one important detail: a way to TRULY delete the data if, for example, it's something sensitive and you really want it gone. Oh, and technically you could say that all filesystem (that I know of) do this anyway; that is, they don't actually delete the data off the disk, merely delete the inode from the allocation data. However, nothing is stopping the system from overwriting the exact spot the deleted file was on its next file create.)
Thirdly, if you copy a folder over another one with the same name, the computer should ask you what the purpose is: merge or replace? merge is often as catastrophic as replace if merging results in undesirable file combinations. Yeah, wouldn't it be awesome if it asked if you wanted to leave the old file, replace it with the new file, or rename the new file automatically? Hey, maybe it would even give you a thumbnail, tell you the files' sizes and modified dates (and which one is larger/newer at a glance) and provide big, clear buttons with multiple words on them explaining exactly what each does! Hey, it could even do that for folders too, right? Of course, it might get tedious to constantly approve overwrites, (or ignoring of copies that are already present, or whatever) so maybe it should have an option to remember your response for the rest of the operation...
Forthly, files should be versioned by the O/S, as in VMS. It was a great feature, I don't know why it's missing from all modern O/Ses. See suggested improvement to the first idea. It's not CVS or anything by a long shot, but it's great if I accidentally overwrite a file, such as an image or copy of my resume, with an undesirable change that I can't undo.
Quick question: In Windows and KDE, you can Cut or Copy a file (or folder) using Control-X/C (or right-clicking) and then Paste it somewhere else. If you used Cut, the old file/folder location doesn't get removed until the paste completes successfully. Does this work on OS X? Most of the *work* I don on OS X is repair-related, which usually means I'm using a terminal, so I can't remember if this feature works like I would expect... but there's a reasonable chance I would try it without thinking at some point and potentially screw something up.
Undoing a mod here, but I'd be very interested to know.
By 1997 (one decade ago) there was no operating system in the world that wasn't either UNIX-based, transitioning to UNIX, or shipping with a functional hosted UNIX environment... other than Windows. True for Windows 9x. However, Windows NT was designed from the beginning to be compatible with software written for other operating systems. After all, back when NT was started, OS/2 was the Next Big Thing. The fact that the Win16 and Win32 systems are at the front of what people think of when they think of Windows isn't too surprising - they're all by MS after all, and have massive amounts of software written for them. However, Windows NT originally included two additional subsystems, one for OS/2 and one for POSIX/UNIX. The OS/2 one has been discontinued, but the UNIX subsystem is still being updated at least as far as Vista (haven't checked Server 2008 yet).
In my experience, most things will work even if there are some known compatibility issues. However, I have heard there are some older MS programs that simply don't work on Vista, for reasons I'm not quite sure about. In well over a year of use, I've never come across such a program first-hand however.
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Readyboost is nice, but I run with 2GB main RAM and under 1GB of Readyboost (sometimes none at all) and the only difference is that EVE Online takes a second or two longer to start when it must pull some stuff from the disk rather than Flash. It's still faster than on XP.
Probably not, since all the screenshots I've seen still use the Windows window manager.
Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager is the one I use, and it's nice - great features, light weight, hasn't crashed in ages since I updated to the latest version, includes a window recovery tool to find and restore orphaned windows if it does crash, nice customizable shortcuts, free of cost and open source. Vista users with the WDM can get live views in the modes displaying all desktops, or all windows on the current desktop, but the features apparently work on XP too (just with static images). URL: http://www.codeplex.com/vdm
It burns a lot of CPU time, uses a lot of bandwidth, crashes browsers, and - not for the first time - has serious security issues.
On Firefox, there's an extension called Flashblock. It blocks Flash by default, but allows you to re-enable it on a page-wide or applet-by-applet basis. Several other extensions will do the same thing.
In IE7, you can double-click a spot in the status bar (third box, right to left, of the boxes just to the left of the security zone indicator (the thing that usually says Internet)) or open the Add-on Manager from Tools in the command bar or menu bar, and disable or enable the Flash ActiveX control. This will globally enable or disable flash, but doesn't take effect on a given page until that page is refreshed. Alternatively, the third-party add-on IE7Pro has applet-by-applet flash blocking.
I realize that some sites need it, and on those there's nothing you can do about this problem except hope Adobe updates their software ASAP. For everywhere else though, do yourself a favor and block it.
Here's an equally blunt response for you: You're wrong, 32-bit OSes can access up to 64GiB of RAM using a feature called PAE. It's a bit of a hack and has some downsides - for example, no individual 32-bit program can access more than 4GiB, and some drivers aren't compatible with it (which is why it isn't enabled by default in client versions of Windows). However, the hardware has been capable of it since the Pentium Pro CPUs (mid 90s)
In reference to the GP, there are typically two variants of standard Linux kernels available for a x86 system: Default (or similar) and Big, BigSMP, or similar. The SMP stands for Symmetric MultiProcessing (ability to use multiple CPUs, CPU cores, execution paths, etc.) and has been integrated into the Default kernel for some time now. The "big" kernels also support PAE. This is not in the default due, I believe, to the risk that some kernel modules such as drivers don't handle PAE correctly (the Wikipedia page also mentions that PAE-enabled kernels won't run on non-PAE-capable CPUs, though this is hardly a concern on any modern machine).
By "crazy graphics bugs" I hope he doesn't seriously mean the way things tend to "stick" to the desktop if the system is too busy to clear them when they are supposed to fade, or some such... because that's a problem Vista doesn't have (if using Aero) and XP does. I have yet to see a singe "crazy graphics bug" of the sort described in TFA in Vista. Maybe he should update his drivers?
Faster and more responsive depends on your metric. Vista opens my programs MUCH faster than XP, because SuperFetch has already cashed them into RAM in anticipation of (for example) my regular afternoon roaming gang in EVE Online (a game with a large memory footprint that takes upwards of 8 seconds to load in XP). Vista is also so much faster at searching it's not even in the same league as XP - there are after market add-ons that come a lot closer, but Vista's search blows anything shipping with XP out of the water, and its integration into the Start menu means that after just a few weeks of using Vista it was so automatic that I couldn't understand at first why it wasn't working when I had to use an XP machine. XP certainly also had its moments when you would double-click on My Computer, nothing would happen, so you're wait a few seconds and double-click again. Repeat a couple times until suddenly it works, and four identical windows open at once.
"System lock on login" is the one that made me actually go RTFM, because I couldn't believe ANYBODY was that blatantly wrong. One of the well-known issues with XP is that immediately after login, for up to 5 minutes in the case of one machine I saw, the system is too busy to do anything else - in fact, trying to start another program during this time slows things down so much that it takes longer than waiting for it to finish loading completely, then starting the app. Vista still takes a while on bootup (though you could reduce this by not using the sidebar; for me it's worth it) but it's much better about allowing you to do other things during bootup. Then again, I upgraded from a (pre-loaded with a ton of shitty software) OEM copy of XP to a clean version of Vista, whereas the reviewer presumably went the other way.
For the multitasking one I have no clue WHAT the idiot is on; the kind of halt-the-whole-system-I'm-busy described in TFA has never happened to me on either XP or Vista, save when a truly excessive amount of swap was in use (and that was on XP, years ago when I ran with under half a gig of RAM).
File copy and delete got a lot faster when they released a patch somewhere near 2 months back that resolved a lot of the "calculating" delay. It might still be slower, but it also has vastly better options with regard to file overwriting, and as somebody who used to run as a limited user on XP the ability to do a file operation in a restricted location without starting a special instance of Explorer as admin make's the slight delay quite worth it.
I'm not sure where the comment on Windows Update is coming from; the Background Intellignet Transfer Service used in XP is still used in Vista, and I have yet to see either one slow down my web browsing. Maybe large file downloads are affected a bit, but I've certainly not found Vista worse than XP.
The driver issue is mostly a third-party one, but I've had no troubles in months either except for nVidia and their refusal to support their laptop cards with the official drivers (I'm using a modified INF file with a much newer driver than is officially available for the card, and it works great). Vista can also load 95% of XP drivers in my experience; the sole serious exception is network device or service drivers.
Since Vista automatically checks online for new drivers, I've found it much BETTER at locating drivers than XP was - for example, it automatically found my webcam driver, while before I had to go dig through HP's site.
Requires less hardware I'm not going to argue, except to point out that Vista's needs are pretty perfectly aligned with Moore's Law and XP's needs (roughly 8x the officia
Actually... almost none do, really. The problem is that the games modify files in restricted locations - typically their own install folders - and assume they have the access to do so. The correct way to handle this is to simply (as Administrator, or at a cost of one UAC prompt on Vista) modify the folder's privileges such that all users, or at least your (normal, restricted) account has full access to said folder. It's a marginal reduction of security - a virus could then infect or trash the game executable - but unlikely to be a problem, and if you know to do it, the actual process is very easy.
This kind of thing is actually one of the most common reasons any program needs admin privileges to run. It's very easy to solve, so it is at least worth trying.
All that said, as other people have pointed out, the installer that caused this particular issue runs with full admin privileges. It's probably possible, by modifying a lot of ACLs, to install the update without admin privs (easier if it was installed without them in the first place, which actually works) but it's not something most people would even attempt.
On the offhand chance you read this, I'd love to know: Is there any particular reason that the series is to be 12 books? I mean, even leaving aside the number of plot lines that must be wrapped up* I had simply always thought 13 was a more expected number; there are a few 'significant' numbers in WoT and 13 seems to pop up more than most. Was 12 books selected for any particular reason? If you really love Jordan's creation and are as good at conclusions as other posters have said, I look forward to reading your end to the series... but I wonder, does it need to be in one volume? I'd always assumed that Tarmon Gai'don (the last battle, itself) would occupy much if not all of the final book (defense of the Two Rivers, presumably a much smaller event than Tarmon Gai'don, occupied a decent chunk of book 4 - and I loved it) but given how much remains to be wrapped up, and that the story doesn't seem quite ready for said battle (not that this means it won't happen anyhow) I think I would love TWO final books even more.
Just curiosity, and my $0.02.
* I don't recommend reading this list by anyone who hasn't finished book 11; this may contain spoilers:
Egwene and the siege of the tower, Seanchan attacking the tower as Egwene dreamed, the growing split in the Black Tower, Arad Doman's chaos due to Seanchan, Dragonsworn, Whitecloaks, the Forsaken, and of course their own great general, Matt, Tuon, and the Seanchan Empress herself (and their version of the Prophesies), Elayne with her pregnancy and the struggles for Caemlyn, Galad and the Whitecloaks, Gawyn and Egwene, Faile, Galina, Perrin, the Seanchan, and the Aiel, All of the countries Rand doesn't somehow control already (even if you limit yourself to what it shows on the maps, he's only got about half of them), Moridin and the meaning of his constant use of Saa, Moiraine's presumed return, Luc and Isam (are they even different people anymore?), and of course the last battle itself... this is only a partial list, at that.
Actually, I would suggest holding on to the search indexer, for at least a while - it's pretty good about running when you don't even notice, and instant search is a feature that makes so much difference, it's hard to explain. From simple things like finding programs in a few keystrokes (I haven't expanded the Programs list in weeks at least, now - sometimes I got for months without doing so) to instantly filtering your mail and web history to find the message/page with the text you're looking for to hitting Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, or any of a wide number of other services using Start++ (Google it, it's a fantastic powertoy for Vista's Start menu search).
As for my upgrade, it was well over a year ago, and I can't stand to use XP anymore. Like you, I did a clean install, but all the programs I still want to use (and a good many I don't use any more, but used to) all worked out of the box, though a few stored data in their install folder (Bad developers! No donuts!) so I had to change the access permissions to those folders so I didn't need to run them as Admin each time.
All hardware works just fine. Back when I first upgraded I had to use XP drivers for some things (I still do, for the Ext2 Filesystem driver to access my Linux partitions) but they worked fine. By six months ago, all the commercial drivers were labeled for Vista and available on Windows Update. Of course, x64 did complain at bootup about that Ext2 driver, but thankfully it needed only very infrequent reboots (I'm using 32-bit again now; my system isn't nearly as great as yours and I didn't feel x64 was worth the risk of a hassle. I may upgrade later, though.)
That only happened, in my experience, copying into a protected location (requiring UAC elevation) and even then a minute is a ridiculous exaggeration. I'll grant you that it did tend to say it for about 6 seconds though (on my year old, mid-range laptop)... until a couple months ago, when they released a patch that fixed that and a couple other performance issues. File operations are quite painless now. Run Windows Update, or go check online - they released the patch as a standalone before pushing it out over Update.
No offense, but if you're installing the crap on the CDs for cameras or MP3 players, and your version of Windows is newer than 98, you're somewhere between wasting your time and actively massing up your computer. That stuff is all garbage, in my experience. All you need is the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) or UMS (USB Mass Storage) protocol, which have been included in Windows since 2000, I believe. No special software or drivers needed.
Granted, the instructions, should you happen to read them, will probably tell you to use the (heavily branded, often slow and buggy, and possible causes of everything from slow booting to data loss) software they include. No, thank you! Plug and play; it Just Bloody Works (even as a non-admin).
Of course, there is some specialized hardware that is new enough XP won't have drivers for it, beyond perhaps basic capabilities of it's a specialized version of standard hardware (note that Linux isn't likely to give you any more than that, either). Vista is much more likely to have the drivers - it's plug-and-play collection is far newer, and part of the install footprint is over 2GB of relatively common drivers - but even if it doesn't, it can automatically find them online via Windows Update. If that fails, you can search the web manually, and even if there aren't any labeled for Vista, XP drivers will almost always work. Compare that to Linux, where most (binary) drivers will break between kernel versions (and yes, this is an advantage of open-source, but it doesn't make it any less annoying to find a driver for kernel 2.6.8 or - heaven forbid - 2.4.33, that won't work on your newer system).
Aside from the already well-pointed-out fact that newer versions of Nero are compatible and that Nero has broken across other Windows version upgrades as well (a sign, to me, that they tie too closely to the OS), why the hell pay for burner software? The only thing I need third-part software for in Vista is ISOs (and other image files) for which I use ImgBurn; it's free (as in beer, not speech), runs on everything from Win95 (so they claim, never tried) to Vista x64 to Linux via Wine (see comment on Win95; K3B rules). Fast, easy to use, feature-packed, and while I regret that Vista doesn't include an image burner in its disk-burning abilities, I was using ImgBurn on Vista since the Beta 2 days.
No, I'm not associated with ImgBurn in any way other than finding them in a Google search over 18 months ago when I was looking to burn some Linux discs and an early Vista beta, and happily using ever since.
Not to say you're wrong, but if you're right, I'm certainly one of the 5%. For me, Vista makes XP feel like I AM using Win95 (or rather, its contemporary NT4). The most painfully obvious thing missing from XP is certainly the instant search integrated into the Start menu, though the feature I find the most important is certainly UAC - as somebody who likes to tinker with my system, doesn't like running as an Admin, and spent several painful months trying to use XP as a limited user before switching to Linux (openSuse; I tried Ubuntu but it was terrible back then) until Vista reached usability (beta 2, for me), UAC is a truly fantastic feature. That said, all the other features - ranging from big things like Volume Shadow Copies to little ones like notification area bubble not appearing while in a full-screen app (they queue up instead, and are displayed when you return to the Windows desktop) - make XP feel at least as outdated as it is.
Vista has a lot of nice tricks for power users too; the firewall configuration options completely blow away XP's firewall, the updated Task Manager and new performance monitor are fantastic for everything from identifying system processes that are slowing the machine to catching when an app tries to phone home, the configurability of the power options still puts some desktop Linux distros to shame (when I first saw it, it blew them all away - and I still get better battery life in Vista than I do in Linux, even if I leave Aero enabled), and there's an incredible amount one can do with the Registry, either by hand or with third-party tools (so far as I know, there's no MS powertoy anything like TweakUI for Vista yet). Linux may still be more configurable, but most of the changes on Vista are pretty easy and, at worst, will make things run slower or break some features - not render the machine unbootable, or close to it.
Assuming what you say is true, I suppose it really is a case of YMMV. UAC on my system (a year-old mid-range laptop) takes between half a second and maybe 2 seconds if the system is busy with other things (I try to avoid cases that cause extreme performance loss, like starting programs while the startup processes are still executing). It was actually faster on my older (1.5 years) laptop, because that one had an ATI graphics chip (a low-performance one, though it was Aero-capable) and ATI's drivers for Vista were quite good months before Vista was released. nVidia, by comparison, had absolute shit drivers that would crash on every switch out of the secure desktop (where UAC prompts occur) and often did, in fact, take 5 seconds before a driver update reduced the number of video crashes to "merely" a couple a day. If possible, updating your vide drivers might help a lot.
I certainly wouldn't claim Vista is bug-free, but I haven't found its bugs to be things that get in my way generally (the file move bug was the only one I really disliked in the released version, and has been fixed). As for crashes a lot, I've heard that from a guy I know and trust who has a Vista Home Basic machine, so I suppose it must happen to some people, but in my experience it's been quite the opposite. The damn nVidia drivers aside (and I know when they cause issues because a little "Display driver stopped responding and has been restarted" message appears in the notification area) I've had very few issues at all, quite noticeably fewer than on XP in at least the case of Warcraft 3 (which occasionally crashed at random and unpredictable times). IE, Sidebar, and Windows Mail (the Windows apps I have running and in use most often) all are very stable, though in the case of IE that's a relative claim (it does a lot better than Firefox, but will freeze a couple times a month if I leave the same session open long enough).
The argument about Operating Systems isn't so much because people need Windows for Windows' sake (with the exceptions of IIS and Domains/Active Directory, I doubt many businesses rely heavily on any feature specific to Windows itself) as it is because they need it for Windows-based software (well, I suppose you could call the Windows API a "specific feature of Windows itself" but that's not how people view it). As another poster pointed out, the software that organizations and even private citizens rely upon is often limited to Windows, with the Mac/Linux equivalents, if they even exist, being feature-limited or at the very least requiring substantial re-training and re-investment.
.NET but are explicitly tested and supported in Mono, but in general, software will have native code components that most companies don't see as worth the hassle to port.
The problem with this, of course, is that reversing that kind of situation is very difficult. Without MS actively contributing to Wine/ReactOS, there isn't much they can do to make Windows-only software any less Windows-only. Without a major increase in the market share of alternative OSes, there's little incentive for third-party developers to place much priority in cross-platform development. There's always Java, and I know of a few products that are developed for
By the way, I'm not sure I agree with the idea that IE is a real monopoly. Yes, it's still the only browser that supports ActiveX and some people still use that, but alternative browsers have become reasonably common - far beyond what alternative OSes have achieved ever since Windows' rise to dominance - and while it's certainly still common enough that people will develop for IE's rendering engine, you also see plenty of sites encouraging visitors to use alternative browsers. Additionally, most sites render fine on IE, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, etc. without any browser-specific customization; with regard to these sites, IE's market share doesn't even matter (it could rise to 100% or drop to nothing over the next month and it wouldn't affect the owners of those sites). Compare this to non-web applications, where true cross-platform is a fairly rare thing, and I'd say IE's market share should be much less of a concern than breaking the chicken-and-egg problem with Windows-specific software.
Please excuse me while I laugh my head off at your ignorance (and believe me, I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt by merely assuming ignorance).
First, Vista DOES have an Administrator account (obviously, else how could you list "Administrator" as a user in the ACLs?). The account (like Ubuntu's root account) is disabled by default; it's a matter of under 15 seconds (including a single UAC prompt) to re-enable it, if for some reason you want to. The only problem here is that by default, it has no password and it is always enabled if the computer boots in Safe Mode.
Second, far from "EVERYBODY" turns off UAC; those who are familiar with the dangers of running as a full Admin will either leave it alone and accept the occasional delay of a couple seconds as a warning that something potentially dangerous is occurring, or will configure it so it doesn't get in the way of their normal activities. The smart ones will probably configure it (and modify the ACLs of what they access so stuff that they don't want to get prompted for doesn't prompt them) and then either run as a limited account or set UAC to demand the user's password, a more Unix-like security model that protects against tampering by somebody who comes by if your away from your desk for a few moments and forgot to press Winkey-L.
"You have to explicitly tell an app to run as Root and even then it balks at you." Okay... go back and read that again. Think about it. Are you honestly saying that right-clicking a file should be all that's needed for privilege escalation? All that right-clicking it does is marks it for escalation WHEN RUN. The actual act of the escalation is carried out by UAC, which IS what it's intended to do (and since it's configurable, this provides a degree of security control far above normal).
As for the apps that don't work... I don't know, maybe I've just been lucky. I use third-party, proprietary and open-source, IM clients and web browsers, software dev tools, image viewing/manipulation software, and games dating all the way back to WarCraft: Orcs and Humans (complete with "Quit to DOS" on the main menu). The only problem I had was one game's online updated didn't work, and I had to get the patches manually. Oh, the horrors...
I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt here that you're relatively inexperienced in computer administration, but please... your arguments are just stupid. So you found the option and turned off UAC? Congrats... I hope that means you're running as a non-admin now (you obviously know SOMETHING about doing so since you mentioned entering a password). Of course, if you'd created a non-admin account from the beginning, it WOULD have prompted you for the admin's password at each UAC prompt. Alternatively, you could have a spent a couple minutes with a search engine and found the configuration option to make UAC demand your password every time even if your account is a member of the Administrators group.
Alternatively, you could use UAC the way it's intended. Don't want somebody messing with your system unauthorized? Winkey-L. Want to restrict your kid (or somebody else) to non-admin areas? Create a limited account for them. Don't want UAC to prompt you when doing something? Modify UAC's configuration and/or the access control list of that thing so you have access without full admin privileges. Want to know whenever a program is attempting to make a significant change to your system? Pay attention to the damn UAC prompts. On my mid-range, more-than-a-year-old laptop, they take well under two seconds most of the time; spare the extra three seconds to make sure it's expected and you've got 5 seconds well spent.
I'd point out the rest of the stupidity of your arguments, but I just read all the way to your last line and realized I'd simply been trolled. I'll post anyways because there probably are people who could use the info, but please... even as a joke, comparing ME and Vista just reeks of trolling, especially from somebody who even pretends to give a damn about security.
You're perfectly correct: the browser (and its plugins) shouldn't be allowed to do this. Running with non-admin permissions helps but your user data can still get badly fscked, user-mode programs can be installed and run silently, etc. You need tighter restrictions, like not allowing the browser to access most of the hard drive under normal conditions.
Sounds like a good reason to use Protected Mode on Vista or to set up an AppArmor profile on Linux: Specifically restrict the browser's permissions. Protected Mode makes this pretty easy, but isn't configurable and isn't available for other browsers.
As a side note, IE7Pro (works on IE6 too, sort of) has ad filtering and flash blocking features, for those who would like AdBlock/FlashBlock functionality (a lot else too, but that's mostly all I use it for) but don't always use Firefox.
I'm sure there are others, but for the record, Vista's firewall effectively offers this option. You can specify protocols, ports, and IP addresses that a given executable (and processes it spawns) are allowed to access. Sure, it's more configuration than most people would bother with, but it's entirely possible. To be honest, it wouldn't too hard to make a script to do it automatically - but I don't play WoW and don't know what access it needs, so I'm probably not the person to do that.
The SUA system on my Vista and (when I used it) XP boxes identifies itself as Interix. While older ("OpenNT") versions of the subsystem may have been crippled, I've had mostly good experiences with Interix. It's a little buggy - things that set environment variables seems prone to segfaulting for some reason - but overall it's been handy. I've frequently used NetBSD's pkgsrc build system for package management, and I've been fairly impressed. The new version of pkgsrc seems to require a version of GCC that doesn't ship with Interix, however.
Out of curiosity, is Interix in the server versions better in any significant way than what's in the current desktop versions?
(Okay, to be fair, Server 2003 and Vista won't actually store a VSC of a file if it was briefly created then destroyed; it needs to persist long enough for the shadow copy service to locate it and create the copy. Still, it works pretty damn well. Also, your suggestion, although it has merit, is missing one important detail: a way to TRULY delete the data if, for example, it's something sensitive and you really want it gone. Oh, and technically you could say that all filesystem (that I know of) do this anyway; that is, they don't actually delete the data off the disk, merely delete the inode from the allocation data. However, nothing is stopping the system from overwriting the exact spot the deleted file was on its next file create.) Thirdly, if you copy a folder over another one with the same name, the computer should ask you what the purpose is: merge or replace? merge is often as catastrophic as replace if merging results in undesirable file combinations. Yeah, wouldn't it be awesome if it asked if you wanted to leave the old file, replace it with the new file, or rename the new file automatically? Hey, maybe it would even give you a thumbnail, tell you the files' sizes and modified dates (and which one is larger/newer at a glance) and provide big, clear buttons with multiple words on them explaining exactly what each does! Hey, it could even do that for folders too, right? Of course, it might get tedious to constantly approve overwrites, (or ignoring of copies that are already present, or whatever) so maybe it should have an option to remember your response for the rest of the operation... Forthly, files should be versioned by the O/S, as in VMS. It was a great feature, I don't know why it's missing from all modern O/Ses. See suggested improvement to the first idea. It's not CVS or anything by a long shot, but it's great if I accidentally overwrite a file, such as an image or copy of my resume, with an undesirable change that I can't undo.
I take it you haven't ever truly used Vista?
Quick question: In Windows and KDE, you can Cut or Copy a file (or folder) using Control-X/C (or right-clicking) and then Paste it somewhere else. If you used Cut, the old file/folder location doesn't get removed until the paste completes successfully. Does this work on OS X? Most of the *work* I don on OS X is repair-related, which usually means I'm using a terminal, so I can't remember if this feature works like I would expect... but there's a reasonable chance I would try it without thinking at some point and potentially screw something up.
Undoing a mod here, but I'd be very interested to know.
The SUA (Subsystem for UNIX Applications) page for Server 2003: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/695ac415-d314-45df-b464-4c80ddc2b3bc1033.mspx?mfr=true. Other versions of NT are also supported, though only the higher editions of XP and Vista. I use SUA in Vista almost every day, for everything from make to ssh to SVN.
In my experience, most things will work even if there are some known compatibility issues. However, I have heard there are some older MS programs that simply don't work on Vista, for reasons I'm not quite sure about. In well over a year of use, I've never come across such a program first-hand however.