Your point about "just go download" the driver is only valid to a point; I'm talking about drivers that just aren't available for Vista; having network connectivity won't help if the driver just isn't out there. Personally, ever since Vista's public Beta 2 (build 5384, released in... April of last year?) I've never had a problem with any Ethernet or built-in WiFi drivers; Vista-compatible versions were available and installed automatically. One very small third-party company had no driver for a outdated external WiFi card, and I once needed to install a third-party VPN client and needed a Vista-compatible version, but beyond that it's not been a problem.
Your comment about "a lot more than 5% of all drivers" is, in a word, ludicrous. How many network devices (or virtual devices, like VPNs) do you think there are? There are drivers for everything from webcams to processors to printers to keyboard to cameras to digital audio players to video cards to HAM radios to external storage devices to... bah. You've GOT to be joking, honestly... you only need one network driver per device chipset, and there really aren't too many of those.
I'm in a generous mood today, so I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that you're not trolling and actually have had problems. A couple of quick points, though:
If you don't want a file/program to cause a UAC prompt, change that file/program so that you have sufficient permissions on the file itself, the folder it's in, and any files or folders that it accesses or modifies (also if it needs to change Registry settings in restricted parts of the Registry, this will be a problem). If the program is still raising UAC prompts, click the Details button on the prompt and see exactly what is causing it. If that doesn't help - for example, if it's just the program itself - right-click the program, go to Properties, to Compatibility, and make sure Run as Administrator isn't checked.
Control panels raising UAC prompts? No shit, Sherlock. UAC is designed to prevent harmful modifications - accidental or intentional - and short of the Registry (which also requires a prompt to edit) or issuing a rm -rf type command on a system folder (which doesn't entirely work in Windows anyway due to file locking), many items in the Control Panel could be described as "easy, user-friendly ways to screw up your system."
If a given program was started with elevated permissions (via UAC), nothing it does will cause another prompt. If only very specific portions of the program need admin privs (and the program itself was started with standard privs), it is possible to get multiple prompts if you try and do multiple such actions, but this is an uncommon situation.
As a random question, how often do you type your root (or user, if using sudo) password on your Linux system? Personally I like being able to trigger the elevation with just a click, but if you want it more Linux-style you can configure UAC to act that way too.
Certainly noticeable. There's one big reason: stability. In XP, video driver crashes were responsible for over 20% of BSoDs, according to the crash report analysis. In Vista (with WDDM), a driver crash causes the screen to freeze for a second or two, flicker, and come back to life. I've seen it happen, both with beta ATI drivers back around a year ago, and with (released) nVidia drivers as recently as this month (seriously guys, WTF? You used to be good.)
DX10 and the Desktop Compositor used for Aero both also require WDDM drivers.
File access will only give a UAC prompt if you don't have full permissions for that file. This generally means anything on the system volume outside your personal folders. Out of curiosity, how often do you need to do this? I'm reasonably certain I must have done it at least once in the last 2 months, but no specific occasion is coming to me. I have ownership of nearly everything on my data partition, and that's where almost all the files I would be modifying are stored. If you want to make an entire folder under your control so no UAC prompts appear when working in said folder, right click the folder, choose Properties, go to Security, click Advanced, and make whatever changes you like (the easiest is to go to the Owner tab and change the folder ownership to yourself; this will need one UAC prompt). Select "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects" (or similar, if you aren't changing ownership but some other property) and click OK a few times. It should show you a quick progress display as Vista recursively changes all the file owners (or whatever) and in the end you'll have all the access you want. Honestly, it's not that hard...
The "two times" thing is a little silly on MS's part, but technically only one of those is a UAC prompt. The other asks whether you want to use UAC to get privilege escalation. The only reason I can think of for this first dialog is because there's some overhead (and annoyance, if you're working on a variety of things at once) associated with switching to the secure desktop where UAC prompts appear, so it's giving you an option to cancel the privilege escalation before the UAC prompt appears. If there's another reason, I've never heard of it, and I wish MS would provide an option to skip the "confirm UAC action" box, but I'm not losing any sleep over it - as I believe I mentioned, I almost never see those prompts.
You don't need to do it every time. Do it exactly once (it's in the file properties for executables or links to executables) and it stays set until you tell it otherwise. If the program is a installer, all executables it creates will automatically have compatibility mode set. Once compatibility mode is set, you never need to even think about it again; just run the program the same way you would run any other.
Out of curiosity, have you ever been through a Windows upgrade cycle before? Compatibility Mode has been around since at least Windows 2000; I have a number of old games that won't run in 2000 (or XP or Vista) without setting compatibility mode clear back to Windows 95 level. Ironically, the newer the OS is, the better the compatibility for some of those programs gets; 95-era apps that had no sound in 2000 might run perfectly in Vista, for example. Strange stuff.
Wow, ignorant much? Vista isn't "breaking" hardware, it's just that some third-party software was so poorly designed, taking advantage of the flaws present in the average XP install (everything from assuming the user was always a full admin to just going ahead and loading kernel modules for any damn thing like DRM or virus scanning) that when MS fixed these issues, a handful of crap software didn't work (or, in the case of programs expecting admin privileges, didn't work without a UAC prompt) anymore.
As for OSes not breaking things just because they're new, what alternate software dimension are you from and can I go there? Old drivers always get replaced in time (although Vista will happily run most XP drivers, the exception being network-related ones since the new network stack has a different NDIS). Software gets updated to use new libraries and kernel features. People make mistakes (there was a release of Ubuntu with no support at all for ATI video cards, as a random semi-recent example), people move on to new and better platforms (contrary to what some people think, even with Classic an OS X user could NOT run all programs for prior versions of MacOS, just as there are DOS programs out there that won't run on NT), and sometimes people don't even know why something changed (a Linux kernel update once changed/dev/random such that the major source of randomness a friend of mine was using was no longer considered, and he started getting really poor performance in one of his programs).
WinVista lacks a LOT of drivers (for fairly common hardware, too). If you have hardware that WinVista doesn't support, you're unhappy (see years of previous complaints about Linux). Technically true, but mostly irrelevant. Vista will load 95% of XP drivers without a hitch - the easiest way is if the driver is shipped as an executable installer, since then even if you forget to set Compatibility Mode before running the installer, Vista will ask you if you want to re-run it in compatibility mode should the install fail. If it just comes as a.inf and.sys file, edit the INF to add Vista to the supported list, and right-click -> Install. The only caveats here are that network drivers won't work on account of the re-written network stack and new NDIS, and XP video drivers will work fine but you lose all the advantages of WDDM.
WinVista also has lots of eye-candy which eats up processor time. So it looks pretty, but runs slower. The eye-candy can be turned off, but then it looks a lot like WinXP. If your GPU is decently powerful (i.e. isn't an integrated solution that leeches off the CPU) you'll almost certainly not see this, as the "eye candy" you refer to (much of it, like the thumbnail views of your running programs, is actually very useful) is offloaded to the GPU. The overhead numbers I've heard for using this model are about 5%, and if you look at the CPU time taken by the DWM (Desktop Window Manager) I've never seen it go higher than 5% and it's usually at 0%
WinVista has a different security model than WinXP and it takes people some effort to learn and in the meantime, they're unhappy with it (again, see years of previous complaints about Linux). The people who see more than 2 or 3 UAC prompts per day, top (I'm using an exaggeratedly large number to catch the "yeah, but my program X always needs admin privileges and I run in 3 times a day" responses; most normal users see maybe this many a month) are either incessant tinkerers or admins who need full control. If you're the former, you probably know how to modify access control lists (even easier in Windows than chmod/chown) so things that you need to access and can access safely will run with your permissions. If you're the latter, either deal with a couple (literally, 2) extra seconds on most administrative tasks or run your account as an unrestricted admin (much like logging into a *nix box as root; it's occasionally handy but not something to do regularly). For the average user who shouldn't be using full admin privs all the time anyway (or your slightly-clued-in user who knows this and experienced the pain of doing things in XP as a non-admin), UAC is arguably Vista's best feature.
Not all of your apps will run with WinVista, unless you use "compatibility mode" or do some extra steps. Since Vista automatically offers to re-run most programs in Compatibility Mode if they didn't work without it, and since MS provides step-by-step instructions and a helpful wizard for resolving compatibility issues, and since it literally takes 5 clicks of the mouse to set compatibility mode to XP SP2, and since the vast majority of apps will run fine on Vista without any Compatibility Mode at all, this really doesn't seem like a major issue to me.
They very nearly undid the major anti-virus industry by initially refusing to include that large business sector in to see their code... Norton, McAfee... Microsoft believed they could do a better job of protecting the buyer. You might actually want to look under the screaming and lawsuit threats regarding this topic, and talk to somebody who was actually there (it now being too late to experience it for yourself as I did).
As another user has already pointed out, the NT kernel's driver loading scheme (which was being used by Symantec et al.) really did need to be fixed, since the same mechanism was being used to install all kinds of malware with absolute permissions.
Back around Vista beta 2, Live OneCare was in beta on XP, and didn't even work on Vista or on x64. It was ages before it did work on Vista, in fact. Hardly seems like MS was streamlining their own antivirus program for their own OS using some mysterious unpublished APIs or something.
MS had already announced that old mechanisms for hooking antivirus software into the kernel wouldn't work, and that they were publishing an API designed to allow an antivirus app to hook filesystem access as needed. Sure, it required changing some code, but it would allow for the increased security and at the same time should prevent a crashed AV app from causing a kernel panic (Norton in particular was an infamous cause of BSODs on XP, although I hear their stability is better now). The API was published long before Vista was released.
However, the real proof that what you imply is incorrect is that back in those days of Vista beta 2, Live OneCare version 1.0 was nearing readiness for XP x86 but still wouldn't even install on Vista, Trend Micro's PC-Cillin 2007 was in open beta, and worked perfectly on Vista (I actually discovered it because MS's own site recommended it). While I no longer run PC-Cillin, I tested it for months and had no problems.
Many months after PC-Cillin 2007 was working perfectly on Vista (even x64), MS gave in to the demands of Symantec and McAfee and reduced the security on x64 Vista to make it easier for the other vendors to get their software working. OneCare might have been in beta on Vista x86 by this point, but still wouldn't run on x64.
Suggesting that MS was using inside knowledge to try and drive the established names in antivirus out of business is simply ridiculous; all the evidence contradicts it. Frankly, I think MS should have just pinned those companies to the wall rather than opening a hole, no matter how well-guarded, in the x64 kernel's PatchGuard, but IANAL and I don't make decisions for MS. However, I quite completely lost all (remaining) respect for Symantec and McAfee at that point.
You may have already encountered this, but I thought this might be handy for you: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/. It's an open-source project sponsored by Microsoft that has two major parts: a plugin for Office 2007 that allows reading and writing of ODF files (and conversion between those formats and 2007's OOXML format) and a command-line converter suitable for batch jobs. The latter should run in Mono (the tool is written in C#), although I'd have to reboot to test it. Novell is also involved; they are producing a OO.o plugin to provide compatibility with OOXML files, but thus far I haven't seen it available for download.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider a "seriously large document"? My mother is a published author, and for at least the last 8 years has done all her work in Word. I've seen book manuscripts and such of roughly 200 pages unbound, standard margins (which are a bit excessive in 2003, but still) and Word has no trouble opening them. One of the computers we're using is a Windows 2000 machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 3 - hardly a performance powerhouse - and I've never heard any complaint. I'm aware that (much) larger documents certainly do exist, but when you're talking about a moderate length YA novel in a single.doc file (created in Word 2003), I'd think that's more than most people are likely to need. I've never seen anything that it did trip on due to length.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just asking how big you're talking about since I've never seen such a problem.
I really wish they would make a Ribbon interface for OneNote. I can understand not using a Ribbon in Outlook 2007 (except in the compose mail view) and the changes they did otherwise more than make up for it, but OneNote could seriously benefit from a more intuitive interface (though to be fair, they have good help and guides, and it's surprisingly accurate regarding what I want to when I press a key). They also need to add the mathematical/scientific auto-correct dictionary; when I type \epsilon I want a fscking (ϵ doesn't seem to be a character the browser will display though it appeared in the text area as I composed it). Word 2007 does this, though you need to enable an option if you want it to do it outside of "Math regions". Would it be so hard to add that auto-correct dictionary to a tool meant for use by students taking notes in class??
Crow over this guys story if you want to, but don't be a hypocrite. Consistency would demand that you call his story FUD against Office 2007.
Most of MS's efforts against Linux adoption have been aimed at the server market, where the difference between Linux and Windows are major - arguably more so than the difference between MS Office 2007 and OO.o (any version). The fact that people are switching to OO.o because Office 2007 is too unusual for them is a strong indication that switching to Linux would have MASSIVE retraining costs.
(Office 2007 isn't that different; have you ever used it? The ribbon is basically a merge of the toolbars and the menus, and the hotkeys haven't changed - I personally found it easier to find many the features I was used to in 2007's interface than in OO.o's, even when I had already found them once before in OO.o and had only installed 2007 a few days ago. YMMV of course but I've never liked OO.o's interface and KOffice isn't really any better.)
I think XP SP2 pops up a warning about it being a file from the internet zone, not sure if the full filename shows up in the warning though It doesn't matter, since jpegs (non-executable data files in general) don't present that warning (The text of the warning is something along the line of "this type of file can harm your computer". Not to mention they would presumably notice the file type while downloading and cancel the download / delete the file. Of course, the fact that anybody GETS these warnings (I haven't gotten one in Skype, but I've seen a couple that were near-identical over AIM) means that there are people out there who are actually stupid enough to ignore the warning...
Hiding the extension is a very most annoying thing though, it's the first setting that I change on a new install of Windows. Agreed, although I actually change roughly half the options in Folder Settings. It's gotten better over time; 2000 you had to change almost all of them, XP only about 80%, Vista is down to nearly 50%. IE's default settings have gotten better too, especially with 7.
I'd like to sympathize, but do you realize you're talking about commercial software that was released initially for a single OS on a single hardware infrastructure? EVE Online already works (mostly, and often only for every 3rd or 4th revision) on Wine, which at least works across all Unix-like OSes I know of (though still only for a single architecture). Turning that into a supported product (by the company that employs the primary Wine devs) isn't that big of a deal. Asking them to port the entire flipping thing to another ISA, with different bit-order and everything... does Stackless Python even run on PPC? If not, they'd need to either port the entire runtime (out of the question) or re-implement the client from the ground up using a different framework (economically unfeasible).
So... while I'm sorry that you're missing out on a great game, you're also still using an architecture that the PC (in the sense of personal computer, not IBM clone... wow, I haven't seen that term in a while) industry has abandoned. Anything that wasn't written with PPC in mind in the first place, or with the considerable care and attention to detail necessary to make it cross-compile properly (some, but not all, open-source software) isn't ever likely to come to PPC. Sorry man... I don't know what to say, except that the industry has rendered your machine obsolete before its time, and I'm sorry about that for your sake. The G5 might burn with the heat of a thousand suns, but it's a great chip in general.
And unless you keep all your important data on an encrypted partition, and use encrypted swap (can you do this in windows??), then you really don't have much protection, and shouldn't assume that the data on your computer is locked down. That's the idea behind BitLocker. When it was discussed on here, a lot of people compared it to FileVault, PGP/GPG, and NTFS EFS (Encrypting File System). The point is, none of those can do the kind of total protection that encrypting EVERYTHING on the system volume (and any others you want protected, except you need an unencrypted boot partition) provides.
Or, to answer your question a little differently: Yes, Windows Vista can encrypt all your data and the swap (pagefile.sys in Windows). My $DEITY, what a terrible OS! Let's all stick with XP!
(Sorry, I've been using Vista and Linux side-by-side for well over a year, and can't stand XP. Sometimes it shows in my posts.)
Or, since the iPhone is basically a computer with a built in cellular radio, consider the equivalent to, for example, a MacBook. Lets assume you live in the US (where you don't pay for data by the kilobyte) but are traveling to Australia (where you do, as a general rule).
MB: In sleep mode, a light glows periodically on the front of the computer iP: So far, nobody has commented on a single way to tell, without explicitly checking, whether the phone is off or sleeping
MB: Clear option is available to turn off, as well as to put to sleep iP: There's a button that *looks* like it turns the phone off, but to actually turn it off you have to hold it for a while instead
MB: While sleeping, turns off radio (WiFi, Bluetooth) and I'm pretty sure if it had an internal modem it would turn that off too so it's not running up data charges just because you didn't explicitly turn off your email program before going abroad iP: Runs up $4800 in charges while on vacation just because it was set up to get email (and didn't turn it off before leaving a country where you have free data access)
MB: Battery only lasts a few days (week or two at best) in sleep mode, so people turn it off or put it in hibernate mode (well, they do with PC laptops, presumably there's a Mac equivalent) when going unplugged for a while iP: TFA doesn't say how long the cruise lasted, but unless the phone ran out of battery after racking up the $4800 charge, it would presumably have gone right on charging
I don't have an iPhone (or any kind of smartphone, just a cheap flip-phone with minimal data capabilities). However, I can tell you with absolute certainty that every phone I've ever owned has a little light that blinks occasionally when the phone is on. If I push the power button, the phone turns off. If I don't, the screen will go black after a while, but it wakes up as soon as I press any button, wakes if I close or re-open the phone, and blinks every few seconds even if I do neither. Are you really telling me that the "it just works" iPhone behaves so very differently (I know it's not a flip-phone, but it's got a fscking toushscreen... I really doubt that just leaving it alone for a few seconds will put it into a deep enough sleep that it appears to be off entirely)!
The default setting is for the iPhone to not check mail automatically. You have to explicitly turn that on. And when you don, does it tell you that it will continue checking even when the phone is in Sleep Mode (or whatever they call the function that most people think is "off")? Because if it doesn't, there's still a serious problem in the design. My current phone (a dumb flip-phone with limited international abilities) has only one "Off" mode, and that is fscking OFF. If I signed into Instant Messenger on my phone and never signed out, it will communicate with the IM network if people IM me (which they will, after all it appears I'm signed in... the difference between that and checking email automatically is trivial). If I press the power button, it stops communicating with the IM network.
Without the phone explicitly telling me otherwise, just because I enable automatic mail checking when I'm in the US (on an unlimited plan) and the phone is in active mode, I would NOT assume the phone is going to continue checking the mail when I turn it "off" in a foreign country. That's a pretty major violation of the "it just works" design philosophy.
Very few designers use Flash to merely "enhance" a page. Flash invariably becomes necessary to access the page's core functionality. The "graceful" degradation usually follows a pretty steep curve (ie. all or nothing). I would actually disagree. Quite a lot of pages these days use things like Flash-based nav bars. These can have pretty effects like fading in and out on mouse-over, which is doable with javascript but you can make very fancy effects in flash with (according to those who develop it, I don't) a minimum of effort (compared to javascript, that's not surprising... what a mess of a language). The thing is, there's effectively no need for flash there, but it can improve the site design, and the client browser supports Flash, it eliminates the need to code to the JS peculiarities of each browser when making pretty visual effects.
That said, it's also quite easy to automatically downgrade this to a basic HTML 1.0-compliant nav bar if needed (most people won't drop it that far, but you get the point). It may be harder to have pictures and text fade in and out, or do little ripply effects on mouseover, but none of that is "core functionality" anyhow.
I forget... do you need to make your code open source/GPL if your code essentially links to libraries of GPL/Open Source projects? Or perhaps if your product is derived from Open Source application source code? GPL, yes. LGPL, no (that's pretty much the only difference - you have to provide access the the LGPL sources, but you can link proprietary code to it at compile time without opening your own code modules). The Open version of RealVNC (which this software seems to be based off of) is GPL licensed, and if you wish to link against it your project must also be GPL licensed. This requirement is what people sometimes refer to the GPL as "viral" for; include any GPLed code and your whole project must now be GPLed.
The sad thing is that, trolling aside, the essence OP's post was correct: You simply must always assume that any commercially available terminal has a keylogger. Actually, having seen tests where somebody brought in some antispyware software and ran a thorough scan on an Internet cafe's machine, your actions may be getting reported to all kinds of people. Leaving aside the standard keylogger malware that usually comes from trojans or drive-by downloads (a lot of cafes in 3rd-world countries use pirate copies of Windows without SP2, or at least they did the last time I spent a great deal of time overseas which was in 2005), it's not unreasonable to assume the cafe owner (or some employee) has planted a keylogger for personal use. I've seen cafe operators running packet monitoring software on their machines, and found hardware keyloggers installed as well.
Your point about most people not having their own machines is valid, but that doesn't change the facts. You simply should never assume a commercial terminal is secure. When we go to an Internet cafe, it they won't let us use our own computers we usually won't even check email. Even with our own laptops hooked into their network, I prefer to do everything possible over SSL.
The thought of blatantly requiring keyloggers on such machines seems a bit unlikely, but in truth it doesn't change my behavior a bit. I've operated this way for years.
I'm guessing that's either due to you using a DX10 card, or because it's a desktop card. Mine (a GeForce Go 7600) gets decent framerates when it works but the driver crashes roughly 10 times a day, mostly depending on how often I need to log in. There was while when I used a beta driver that got great framerates (for a mobile card) and was fully functional... but it managed to crash twice during login, which apparently Vista can't handle and resulted in my first BSOD since RTM, so I switched back to the driver provided by HP for this computer.
Now, the new beta drivers don't even work for laptop cards without more tweaking that I suspect is worthwhile (the installer says I have no supported hardware). That's a real pity, since switching video drivers isn't that much of a pain, and getting framerates of 25 where I used to get 60 and 11 where I used to get 25 really, really sucks.
Actually, ATi's video drivers for Vista are light-years ahead of nVidia's. As somebody who has been using Vista since beta 2 (and loving it - I won't touch any other version of Windows now, given a choice - but I also dual-boot Linux) using ATi video, and switched to nVidia just before Vista was released (largely because ATi's Linux drivers were such utter shit) I must say that ATi's Vista drivers of a full year ago were vastly better than the best nVidia has today. It's gotten to the point where I consider the two seconds it takes to recover the userspace portion of the driver from a crash to be a standard part of the login delay - no joke, it crashes EVERY time. Also about 30% of the time switching in or out of the Secure Desktop. To top it off, I'm using a gimped driver that gives at best 60% performance and won't handle LCD scaling properly (I'm on a widescreen, I don't WANT my 4x3 games stretched to a 8x5 aspect ratio).
I don't know how, exactly, nVidia managed to fuck up so incredibly that their drivers, so long after release, are still so worthless when ATi had stable and fully functional drivers more than half a YEAR before Vista's release. At this point, however, I have no plan to ever give them my money again. If ATi's drivers for Linux pull through, I'll switch over without a second thought the next time I upgrade my hardware.
For example in the case of Eve Online with a few hundred thousand subscribers, an officially supported Cider (Transgaming) client is in works and under beta testing. That is from an all out Microsoft shop. Oooh, where'd you find this, and is it available for download/testing? I'm fscking sick of the way 3 in every 4 Wine revisions seem to break EVE (although some versions that supposedly work STILL don't work for me, so there may be a diferent issue here). In any case, it would be awesome to have an official Linux client. Now if only Ventrilo would get their Linux client out the door...
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu (and although I'm registered on them, I don't browse their forums) but your comment about WoW on Wine is right on the money. I have a friend who, to make a long story short, needed a new OS but didn't want to spend money on it. I told him about Linux and gave him a Knoppix disk to play with (the LiveDVD, which includes a ridiculous amount of software). He tried it out, really liked it, had no problems getting the desktop programs he liked to use running (mostly because many - Firefox, VLC, Gaim/Pidgin - are already open-source) and said he thought the included games were great to. He asked if he could install it, and as we were discussing distros he might want to use, the topic of WoW came up. "I guess I'll cancel my subscription for a while, until I can get Windows again" he said. I directed him to winehq, checked the app database, and told him I'd help him get it running.
A few hours later, after repartitioning and installing openSuse, doing basic configuration stuff, and running the installer (it turns out he didn't need any help getting wine configured) he started WoW. (At this point, we were stymied because the Blizzard downloader doesn't work well at my university - bittorrent-style traffic is firewalled to hell - but he got the standalone patches). It took some tweaking to get adequate framerates, but again, nothing my friend (a Mech. Eng. major) couldn't do himself.
In the end only two things really took any help from me: getting his WiFi working (needed ndiswrapper) and fixing his X11 configuration after a broken nVidia update dropped him into console mode (that failsafe X mode would be really nice). The first took some walking through and a little black magic but works fine now, and his was one of a very few card models not yet supported. The second made me really glad that Yast (Suse's fantastic configuration tool) runs in terminal mode (ncurses-based interface) and has an automatic X configurator (SaX2). The first problem will work itself out in time as driver support improves. The second it sounds like a solution is already in the works.
Moral of the story: Linux is already desktop-ready for many people... as long as they know about Wine. The way I see it, projects like Wine and Mono (more specifically, Mono's re-implementing of things like WinForms) are some of the best things in the world for Linux adoption.
(Now, if only Wine would stop breaking EVE Online in 3 of every 4 revisions, so I could stay in Linux for more than a few hours a day without rebooting back to Windows...)
Slashdot Mirror
Your point about "just go download" the driver is only valid to a point; I'm talking about drivers that just aren't available for Vista; having network connectivity won't help if the driver just isn't out there. Personally, ever since Vista's public Beta 2 (build 5384, released in... April of last year?) I've never had a problem with any Ethernet or built-in WiFi drivers; Vista-compatible versions were available and installed automatically. One very small third-party company had no driver for a outdated external WiFi card, and I once needed to install a third-party VPN client and needed a Vista-compatible version, but beyond that it's not been a problem.
Your comment about "a lot more than 5% of all drivers" is, in a word, ludicrous. How many network devices (or virtual devices, like VPNs) do you think there are? There are drivers for everything from webcams to processors to printers to keyboard to cameras to digital audio players to video cards to HAM radios to external storage devices to... bah. You've GOT to be joking, honestly... you only need one network driver per device chipset, and there really aren't too many of those.
I'm in a generous mood today, so I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that you're not trolling and actually have had problems. A couple of quick points, though:
If you don't want a file/program to cause a UAC prompt, change that file/program so that you have sufficient permissions on the file itself, the folder it's in, and any files or folders that it accesses or modifies (also if it needs to change Registry settings in restricted parts of the Registry, this will be a problem). If the program is still raising UAC prompts, click the Details button on the prompt and see exactly what is causing it. If that doesn't help - for example, if it's just the program itself - right-click the program, go to Properties, to Compatibility, and make sure Run as Administrator isn't checked.
Control panels raising UAC prompts? No shit, Sherlock. UAC is designed to prevent harmful modifications - accidental or intentional - and short of the Registry (which also requires a prompt to edit) or issuing a rm -rf type command on a system folder (which doesn't entirely work in Windows anyway due to file locking), many items in the Control Panel could be described as "easy, user-friendly ways to screw up your system."
If a given program was started with elevated permissions (via UAC), nothing it does will cause another prompt. If only very specific portions of the program need admin privs (and the program itself was started with standard privs), it is possible to get multiple prompts if you try and do multiple such actions, but this is an uncommon situation.
As a random question, how often do you type your root (or user, if using sudo) password on your Linux system? Personally I like being able to trigger the elevation with just a click, but if you want it more Linux-style you can configure UAC to act that way too.
Certainly noticeable. There's one big reason: stability. In XP, video driver crashes were responsible for over 20% of BSoDs, according to the crash report analysis. In Vista (with WDDM), a driver crash causes the screen to freeze for a second or two, flicker, and come back to life. I've seen it happen, both with beta ATI drivers back around a year ago, and with (released) nVidia drivers as recently as this month (seriously guys, WTF? You used to be good.)
DX10 and the Desktop Compositor used for Aero both also require WDDM drivers.
2 points:
File access will only give a UAC prompt if you don't have full permissions for that file. This generally means anything on the system volume outside your personal folders. Out of curiosity, how often do you need to do this? I'm reasonably certain I must have done it at least once in the last 2 months, but no specific occasion is coming to me. I have ownership of nearly everything on my data partition, and that's where almost all the files I would be modifying are stored. If you want to make an entire folder under your control so no UAC prompts appear when working in said folder, right click the folder, choose Properties, go to Security, click Advanced, and make whatever changes you like (the easiest is to go to the Owner tab and change the folder ownership to yourself; this will need one UAC prompt). Select "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects" (or similar, if you aren't changing ownership but some other property) and click OK a few times. It should show you a quick progress display as Vista recursively changes all the file owners (or whatever) and in the end you'll have all the access you want. Honestly, it's not that hard...
The "two times" thing is a little silly on MS's part, but technically only one of those is a UAC prompt. The other asks whether you want to use UAC to get privilege escalation. The only reason I can think of for this first dialog is because there's some overhead (and annoyance, if you're working on a variety of things at once) associated with switching to the secure desktop where UAC prompts appear, so it's giving you an option to cancel the privilege escalation before the UAC prompt appears. If there's another reason, I've never heard of it, and I wish MS would provide an option to skip the "confirm UAC action" box, but I'm not losing any sleep over it - as I believe I mentioned, I almost never see those prompts.
You don't need to do it every time. Do it exactly once (it's in the file properties for executables or links to executables) and it stays set until you tell it otherwise. If the program is a installer, all executables it creates will automatically have compatibility mode set. Once compatibility mode is set, you never need to even think about it again; just run the program the same way you would run any other.
Out of curiosity, have you ever been through a Windows upgrade cycle before? Compatibility Mode has been around since at least Windows 2000; I have a number of old games that won't run in 2000 (or XP or Vista) without setting compatibility mode clear back to Windows 95 level. Ironically, the newer the OS is, the better the compatibility for some of those programs gets; 95-era apps that had no sound in 2000 might run perfectly in Vista, for example. Strange stuff.
Wow, ignorant much? Vista isn't "breaking" hardware, it's just that some third-party software was so poorly designed, taking advantage of the flaws present in the average XP install (everything from assuming the user was always a full admin to just going ahead and loading kernel modules for any damn thing like DRM or virus scanning) that when MS fixed these issues, a handful of crap software didn't work (or, in the case of programs expecting admin privileges, didn't work without a UAC prompt) anymore.
/dev/random such that the major source of randomness a friend of mine was using was no longer considered, and he started getting really poor performance in one of his programs).
As for OSes not breaking things just because they're new, what alternate software dimension are you from and can I go there? Old drivers always get replaced in time (although Vista will happily run most XP drivers, the exception being network-related ones since the new network stack has a different NDIS). Software gets updated to use new libraries and kernel features. People make mistakes (there was a release of Ubuntu with no support at all for ATI video cards, as a random semi-recent example), people move on to new and better platforms (contrary to what some people think, even with Classic an OS X user could NOT run all programs for prior versions of MacOS, just as there are DOS programs out there that won't run on NT), and sometimes people don't even know why something changed (a Linux kernel update once changed
Suggesting that MS was using inside knowledge to try and drive the established names in antivirus out of business is simply ridiculous; all the evidence contradicts it. Frankly, I think MS should have just pinned those companies to the wall rather than opening a hole, no matter how well-guarded, in the x64 kernel's PatchGuard, but IANAL and I don't make decisions for MS. However, I quite completely lost all (remaining) respect for Symantec and McAfee at that point.
You may have already encountered this, but I thought this might be handy for you: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/. It's an open-source project sponsored by Microsoft that has two major parts: a plugin for Office 2007 that allows reading and writing of ODF files (and conversion between those formats and 2007's OOXML format) and a command-line converter suitable for batch jobs. The latter should run in Mono (the tool is written in C#), although I'd have to reboot to test it. Novell is also involved; they are producing a OO.o plugin to provide compatibility with OOXML files, but thus far I haven't seen it available for download.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider a "seriously large document"? My mother is a published author, and for at least the last 8 years has done all her work in Word. I've seen book manuscripts and such of roughly 200 pages unbound, standard margins (which are a bit excessive in 2003, but still) and Word has no trouble opening them. One of the computers we're using is a Windows 2000 machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 3 - hardly a performance powerhouse - and I've never heard any complaint. I'm aware that (much) larger documents certainly do exist, but when you're talking about a moderate length YA novel in a single .doc file (created in Word 2003), I'd think that's more than most people are likely to need. I've never seen anything that it did trip on due to length.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just asking how big you're talking about since I've never seen such a problem.
I really wish they would make a Ribbon interface for OneNote. I can understand not using a Ribbon in Outlook 2007 (except in the compose mail view) and the changes they did otherwise more than make up for it, but OneNote could seriously benefit from a more intuitive interface (though to be fair, they have good help and guides, and it's surprisingly accurate regarding what I want to when I press a key). They also need to add the mathematical/scientific auto-correct dictionary; when I type \epsilon I want a fscking (ϵ doesn't seem to be a character the browser will display though it appeared in the text area as I composed it). Word 2007 does this, though you need to enable an option if you want it to do it outside of "Math regions". Would it be so hard to add that auto-correct dictionary to a tool meant for use by students taking notes in class??
Crow over this guys story if you want to, but don't be a hypocrite. Consistency would demand that you call his story FUD against Office 2007.
Most of MS's efforts against Linux adoption have been aimed at the server market, where the difference between Linux and Windows are major - arguably more so than the difference between MS Office 2007 and OO.o (any version). The fact that people are switching to OO.o because Office 2007 is too unusual for them is a strong indication that switching to Linux would have MASSIVE retraining costs.
(Office 2007 isn't that different; have you ever used it? The ribbon is basically a merge of the toolbars and the menus, and the hotkeys haven't changed - I personally found it easier to find many the features I was used to in 2007's interface than in OO.o's, even when I had already found them once before in OO.o and had only installed 2007 a few days ago. YMMV of course but I've never liked OO.o's interface and KOffice isn't really any better.)
I'd like to sympathize, but do you realize you're talking about commercial software that was released initially for a single OS on a single hardware infrastructure? EVE Online already works (mostly, and often only for every 3rd or 4th revision) on Wine, which at least works across all Unix-like OSes I know of (though still only for a single architecture). Turning that into a supported product (by the company that employs the primary Wine devs) isn't that big of a deal. Asking them to port the entire flipping thing to another ISA, with different bit-order and everything... does Stackless Python even run on PPC? If not, they'd need to either port the entire runtime (out of the question) or re-implement the client from the ground up using a different framework (economically unfeasible).
So... while I'm sorry that you're missing out on a great game, you're also still using an architecture that the PC (in the sense of personal computer, not IBM clone... wow, I haven't seen that term in a while) industry has abandoned. Anything that wasn't written with PPC in mind in the first place, or with the considerable care and attention to detail necessary to make it cross-compile properly (some, but not all, open-source software) isn't ever likely to come to PPC. Sorry man... I don't know what to say, except that the industry has rendered your machine obsolete before its time, and I'm sorry about that for your sake. The G5 might burn with the heat of a thousand suns, but it's a great chip in general.
Or, to answer your question a little differently: Yes, Windows Vista can encrypt all your data and the swap (pagefile.sys in Windows). My $DEITY, what a terrible OS! Let's all stick with XP!
(Sorry, I've been using Vista and Linux side-by-side for well over a year, and can't stand XP. Sometimes it shows in my posts.)
Or, since the iPhone is basically a computer with a built in cellular radio, consider the equivalent to, for example, a MacBook. Lets assume you live in the US (where you don't pay for data by the kilobyte) but are traveling to Australia (where you do, as a general rule).
MB: In sleep mode, a light glows periodically on the front of the computer
iP: So far, nobody has commented on a single way to tell, without explicitly checking, whether the phone is off or sleeping
MB: Clear option is available to turn off, as well as to put to sleep
iP: There's a button that *looks* like it turns the phone off, but to actually turn it off you have to hold it for a while instead
MB: While sleeping, turns off radio (WiFi, Bluetooth) and I'm pretty sure if it had an internal modem it would turn that off too so it's not running up data charges just because you didn't explicitly turn off your email program before going abroad
iP: Runs up $4800 in charges while on vacation just because it was set up to get email (and didn't turn it off before leaving a country where you have free data access)
MB: Battery only lasts a few days (week or two at best) in sleep mode, so people turn it off or put it in hibernate mode (well, they do with PC laptops, presumably there's a Mac equivalent) when going unplugged for a while
iP: TFA doesn't say how long the cruise lasted, but unless the phone ran out of battery after racking up the $4800 charge, it would presumably have gone right on charging
Somebody screwed up big-time here.
I don't have an iPhone (or any kind of smartphone, just a cheap flip-phone with minimal data capabilities). However, I can tell you with absolute certainty that every phone I've ever owned has a little light that blinks occasionally when the phone is on. If I push the power button, the phone turns off. If I don't, the screen will go black after a while, but it wakes up as soon as I press any button, wakes if I close or re-open the phone, and blinks every few seconds even if I do neither. Are you really telling me that the "it just works" iPhone behaves so very differently (I know it's not a flip-phone, but it's got a fscking toushscreen... I really doubt that just leaving it alone for a few seconds will put it into a deep enough sleep that it appears to be off entirely)!
Without the phone explicitly telling me otherwise, just because I enable automatic mail checking when I'm in the US (on an unlimited plan) and the phone is in active mode, I would NOT assume the phone is going to continue checking the mail when I turn it "off" in a foreign country. That's a pretty major violation of the "it just works" design philosophy.
That said, it's also quite easy to automatically downgrade this to a basic HTML 1.0-compliant nav bar if needed (most people won't drop it that far, but you get the point). It may be harder to have pictures and text fade in and out, or do little ripply effects on mouseover, but none of that is "core functionality" anyhow.
The sad thing is that, trolling aside, the essence OP's post was correct: You simply must always assume that any commercially available terminal has a keylogger. Actually, having seen tests where somebody brought in some antispyware software and ran a thorough scan on an Internet cafe's machine, your actions may be getting reported to all kinds of people. Leaving aside the standard keylogger malware that usually comes from trojans or drive-by downloads (a lot of cafes in 3rd-world countries use pirate copies of Windows without SP2, or at least they did the last time I spent a great deal of time overseas which was in 2005), it's not unreasonable to assume the cafe owner (or some employee) has planted a keylogger for personal use. I've seen cafe operators running packet monitoring software on their machines, and found hardware keyloggers installed as well.
Your point about most people not having their own machines is valid, but that doesn't change the facts. You simply should never assume a commercial terminal is secure. When we go to an Internet cafe, it they won't let us use our own computers we usually won't even check email. Even with our own laptops hooked into their network, I prefer to do everything possible over SSL.
The thought of blatantly requiring keyloggers on such machines seems a bit unlikely, but in truth it doesn't change my behavior a bit. I've operated this way for years.
I'm guessing that's either due to you using a DX10 card, or because it's a desktop card. Mine (a GeForce Go 7600) gets decent framerates when it works but the driver crashes roughly 10 times a day, mostly depending on how often I need to log in. There was while when I used a beta driver that got great framerates (for a mobile card) and was fully functional... but it managed to crash twice during login, which apparently Vista can't handle and resulted in my first BSOD since RTM, so I switched back to the driver provided by HP for this computer.
Now, the new beta drivers don't even work for laptop cards without more tweaking that I suspect is worthwhile (the installer says I have no supported hardware). That's a real pity, since switching video drivers isn't that much of a pain, and getting framerates of 25 where I used to get 60 and 11 where I used to get 25 really, really sucks.
Actually, ATi's video drivers for Vista are light-years ahead of nVidia's. As somebody who has been using Vista since beta 2 (and loving it - I won't touch any other version of Windows now, given a choice - but I also dual-boot Linux) using ATi video, and switched to nVidia just before Vista was released (largely because ATi's Linux drivers were such utter shit) I must say that ATi's Vista drivers of a full year ago were vastly better than the best nVidia has today. It's gotten to the point where I consider the two seconds it takes to recover the userspace portion of the driver from a crash to be a standard part of the login delay - no joke, it crashes EVERY time. Also about 30% of the time switching in or out of the Secure Desktop. To top it off, I'm using a gimped driver that gives at best 60% performance and won't handle LCD scaling properly (I'm on a widescreen, I don't WANT my 4x3 games stretched to a 8x5 aspect ratio).
I don't know how, exactly, nVidia managed to fuck up so incredibly that their drivers, so long after release, are still so worthless when ATi had stable and fully functional drivers more than half a YEAR before Vista's release. At this point, however, I have no plan to ever give them my money again. If ATi's drivers for Linux pull through, I'll switch over without a second thought the next time I upgrade my hardware.
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu (and although I'm registered on them, I don't browse their forums) but your comment about WoW on Wine is right on the money. I have a friend who, to make a long story short, needed a new OS but didn't want to spend money on it. I told him about Linux and gave him a Knoppix disk to play with (the LiveDVD, which includes a ridiculous amount of software). He tried it out, really liked it, had no problems getting the desktop programs he liked to use running (mostly because many - Firefox, VLC, Gaim/Pidgin - are already open-source) and said he thought the included games were great to. He asked if he could install it, and as we were discussing distros he might want to use, the topic of WoW came up. "I guess I'll cancel my subscription for a while, until I can get Windows again" he said. I directed him to winehq, checked the app database, and told him I'd help him get it running.
A few hours later, after repartitioning and installing openSuse, doing basic configuration stuff, and running the installer (it turns out he didn't need any help getting wine configured) he started WoW. (At this point, we were stymied because the Blizzard downloader doesn't work well at my university - bittorrent-style traffic is firewalled to hell - but he got the standalone patches). It took some tweaking to get adequate framerates, but again, nothing my friend (a Mech. Eng. major) couldn't do himself.
In the end only two things really took any help from me: getting his WiFi working (needed ndiswrapper) and fixing his X11 configuration after a broken nVidia update dropped him into console mode (that failsafe X mode would be really nice). The first took some walking through and a little black magic but works fine now, and his was one of a very few card models not yet supported. The second made me really glad that Yast (Suse's fantastic configuration tool) runs in terminal mode (ncurses-based interface) and has an automatic X configurator (SaX2). The first problem will work itself out in time as driver support improves. The second it sounds like a solution is already in the works.
Moral of the story: Linux is already desktop-ready for many people... as long as they know about Wine. The way I see it, projects like Wine and Mono (more specifically, Mono's re-implementing of things like WinForms) are some of the best things in the world for Linux adoption.
(Now, if only Wine would stop breaking EVE Online in 3 of every 4 revisions, so I could stay in Linux for more than a few hours a day without rebooting back to Windows...)