I'm probably a minority on this, but I'll definitely pass on the Apple option. I don't like iTunes, which means I don't like m4a much or FairPlay at all. I don't have an iPod, I have a generic that doesn't even support DRM in any form. When I replace it it will probably be for an alternative MP3 player, with OGG support and, between FairPlay and PlaysForSure, I would take PFS. I severely dislike being boxed into one service and interface application, and since I refuse to pirate anything, I may end up buying music online some day.
My school (University of Washington Seattle) also has free Napster. The only person I know who uses it is the guy who got a free Dell DJ and Napster subscription (the kind where you can place the songs on a player and they don't expire when you leave school). I tried it for a while, and found several things: The free collection - as far as college students are concerned - is a pretty small subset of their total collection. Their software is incredibly poorly written, becoming pointlessly slow and rather unstable if you, for example, try to play an audio stream and download a file at the same time. Their interface is sub-par, with limited sorting capabilities, kind of lame search, and general clunkiness. It was a waste of RAM and disk space. It tried to make a few unexpected modifications to my system, like changing audio file associations.
I once explained all this to some people who were out in front of the HUB asically wondering why nobody used the service. Their response was remarkably similar to AOHell's (from one time that I had to cancel a free trial subscription); they didn't want me to go away, they couldn't believe I didn't like the junk they offered, they kep repeating themselves as if it would convince me or I'd mis-spoken the first time, and they were useless about questions like "Is there some way to use the service without using your software?"
I don't agree with pirating, but I can sure see why so many more people use DC++.
Well one could go with history and note the fact that EVERY new version of Windows has been a lot slower than the predecessor. Meanwhile every version of OS X has been faster than the predecessor.
Slower in what way? Vista already boots faster than XP, which boots WAY faster than 2000 (or any of the *nixes I've used, possible exception OSX since I haven't benchmarked against same hardware). Vista starts apps much faster than XP, probably due to SuperFetch. Switching between running apps is faster. Closing apps is much faster. Searching for files or applications is miles faster. IE7+ is faster than Firefox on most pages, unless FasterFox extension is used (very hard to tell then), and way faster than IE6. The network stack is more throughput-efficient, i.e. faster. The installation takes much longer at present, but requires far less user time, so arguably this too is faster (as one guy who once had had to install XP on a roomful of machines in a day, believe me I wish I'd been installing Vista 5384.) Also, Vista builds really are getting faster as RTM approaches; I've been testing it since beta 1 and each new build I've tried has been superior and faster.
I look forward to seeing Leopard, and I'd love to see dual-booting Mac/Win come into its own, but don't knock Vista just because MS-bashing is fun. It is honestly a superb OS.
Damn, he'd offered to QUIT over that? Oh man, I thought the only reason to use the money on relief efforts was for saving lives. Why didn't more people mention this little fact?
I wonder if MS was thinking along these lines when they built anti-phishing filters into their new e-mail clients and browser. The filters need work - I'm reminded of early-day antispam filters - but the browser-based one isn't bad, and since the way the filter acts in e-mail is to disable all links until you tell the mail client otherwise, false positives aren't actually as bad as they are for spam blockers.
If these filters really do end up having an effect - and I believe it's possible; phishing is usually fairly detectable if you know where to look - next-generation (Vista users, and early adopters who haven't upgraded their OS but have upgraded their browsers, etc) PC users will actually have some protection against an attack that Mac users are still open to.
Or is it a certain love for applications that aren't on macs. (surely not)
Such as most major computer games? The vast majority of specialist software (for research labs, 3D modeling or construction software, etc.)? Developers will want to write code for the mass market, which means Windows - and that's leaving aside the excellent but non-portable Visual Studio. Finally, what about that one little program or set of programs that you've always used and don't want to stop using? Example: Irfanview is an excellent freeware viewer/editor for images and some other media types. It will run in Wine, but even fewer people know about Wine than do about Linux, and there is no Mac version. Little programs like these, even when there are alternatives for them, make switching OSes a hassle that most people just don't see as worthwhile.
I suspect the Skype developers could find a way around this idea. However, the bigger question is whether it will work; the quality sucks (for Skype, meaning it's worse than some - though not all - cell phones) but Skype is usable over dial-up. I think the lower limit it will go to is 16 or 20 kbps per channel, so if you're willing to run simplex (one person talking at a time) a 28.8 would be sufficient.
I have 20+ licenses of Windows XP. I have used Windows from the beginning. I have been in the computer industry for over 20 years. I was an early adopter of DOS. I used wordstar, wordperfect, lotus 123, etc., back when they were the kings. I was an early adopter of Windows 286/386 and encouraged everyone to switch to the Windows like environments... Okay.... and you point is? I'm only one user; I doubt I've purchased more than 5 copies of XP for use on my various machines, and that's counting the copies that come pre-installed. I don't quite see why this train of thought matters.
What, exactly, do you suppose Windows should do so that MS knows it isn't pirated when you try to do something requiring WGA; a nearly-instant check of your computer and OS against a remote database being apparently unacceptable? The one and only thing that comes to mind as being really acceptably secure is to have MS generate a very long key, and then have your copy of Windows send that key whenever validation is required. Of course, this would make it ridiculously easy to violate the whole point of WGA; cloning that authorization would be dead easy, and since nobody is checking whether the computer sending it is the same one the key was issued to, that would be, well... pointless.
If your complaint is that WGA checks frequently, regardless of whether you're trying to download service packs or whatever, let me remind you that the essential puprose of WGA is to (help) prevent piracy. Most people cannot tell, on their own (and even fewer bother to try) whether their softwae is pirated or not... but I hope, at the least, that most people are good enough morally that they would do something if informed that their copy of Windows was stolen. Even if they lack the morals, they might do something to make the damn message go away. Since WGA is effectively transparent in it's day-to-day checking, it doesn't cost you anything... and you the issue of people ghosting hard drives is actually a serious one; some people do it, despite WGA, but not many. In the days before WGA it was much more common. The WGA scans aren't because MS is worried that YOUR copy of Windows might suddenly be a pirated one, they're worried that a copy of Windows that tinks it's your copy might be pirated. Honestly, why do you care?
The kernel differences necessary to implement dynamic permissions elevation - and reduction, as in the case of IE7+ - are not minor. Having the UAC prompt when needed, and (usually) not prompt when unneeded, is something even Linux lacks (at least, I have yet to see a distro capable of it). Kudos to Apple for putting the ability into OSX; that kind of thing isn't very easy.
I think the last time I saw a WinXP screenshot in Vista was build 5280... there may well be a few in the most recent build, though. Are you suggesting the first thing every interface developer should do after a mod is go update the screenshots?!? It's beta; complaining about stuff like that in a product half a year from release is crazy. File a freaking bug report. They've redone the interface (I'm not talking 3D, I'm talking about things like instant search on ths Start menu and an Explorer navigation interface making it much easier to jump back 4 folders and sideways 3, etc.). They've expanded NTFS, improving journaling and adding shadow folders (very big change, nothing like it in previous versions) and symlinks... without breaking backward compatibility. They've improved power management, improved backup utilities, improved system restore, added background defrag, greatly improved the firewall, integrated Defender, added SuperFetch...
Enough of a shopping list? The checkout and exit is that way. The scanners by the doors will make sure you've paid for it all. It really doesn't matter if you've been through them before... but then, they don't actually interfere, either. All they're doing is suggesting you might be a thief.
I'll give you the benefit of a doubt, but that's pretty close to a flame. MS is losing IE market share, mostly to Firefox, and they don't like that. They are most definitey giving a damn about what people want. Many, MANY features now found in IE7 - some of which, like where tabs open and the order in which they close, are still not available in OOTB Firefox - are directly from the user-driven newsgroup requests.
IE7 has almost all ActiveX locked off for Internet zone unless you specifically opt in. Even Trusted Sites like Windows or Microsoft Update are limited in their ActiveX interaction. Most of these exploits are ActiveX based, and while anything the size of a full web browser WILL have holes... IE7 is NOT IE6 with a prettier interface; they've severely redone the security structure.
Now, I use IE7+, which, in my build of Vista, actually lags somewhat behind the version reviewed here... but has better security because of application-level dynamic permissions that XP cannot support. When I must use XP I'll go with either Fx or IE7, but I no longer consider even a locked-down version of IE6 to besufficient for, well, anything (except perhaps downloading Firefox and/or IE7). The security redesign, even in the XP version of IE7, is quite significant. In Vista, I only use Firefox for sites that won't allow beta web browsers (eg. Wells Fargo) as it actually runs with dangerously high permissions compared to IE7+. (It's also a memory hog, and has a slightly rough and wasteful - compared to IE7, not IE6 - interface).
It's also quite easy to disable specific plugins, like the Flash ActiveX control, in IR7; dis- or re-enabling it takes about 4 clicks if you need it for a site, and the rest of the time an annoying and occasionally securtiy-risky addon can't run.
It's beta. If you can't uninstall an app/upgrade using Add/Remove Programs, rather than a specific uninstall program, well... you really should probably wait for ti to go RTM. Yeah, it's annoying that it doesn't automatically uninstall the old version of IE7 for you, and it's annoying thet you have to restart, but 9to the extremely limited extent I use XP these days) I've been doing that for months as new IE7 builds came out, and it really isn't difficult. As for WGA, I'm sorry, but I really don't know what you're complaining about... oh, and IE7 has integrated WGA capability (disable it if you don't want it, but... why??) so you don't even need to run the validator explicitly.
Even those eho don't use IE except where essential (Microsoft Update) should install IE7; a lot of programs use it behind the scenes, and essentially no amount of locking down IE6 can make it as secure as IE7.
Flash Player and Acrobat Reader are both (much too) common programs that run natively in Linux. Adobe in general has been fairly good about porting (at the least) their most common software. The JVM runs natively, allowing Linux to run pretty much any Java app. Apache and most other commercial-quality OSS apps (you mentioned Mozilla yourself) are cross-platform. Real Player is, AFAIK, the only commercial media player available for Linux, and runs natively. ATI's Catalyst video driver configuration program is ported to Linx, although it's unsupported and occasionally broken.
I would go so far as to say that maybe as much as half of the day-to-day software (sadly I must exclude most game titles from this) that runs natively on both Windows and Mac but isn't produced by MS or Apple will also run natively in Linux. Of course, it's a pretty small subset even without the 'day-to-day' limitation, and you can define that limit as you please, but there's a surprising amount of software that, if it's available to Macs from a 3rd party (quite arguably a niche market) it's also available for Linux.
So... because the authorization program repeatedly checks your oftware, it's calling you a thief -- that's the gist of your argument, yes? I sure as heck hope cops never start operating the way you think software should. "This isn't the OS we're looking for. We checked him out one time - at least, he says we did, and there was a guy that looked like him - and he wasn't carrying anything. He can go about his business."
Software doesn't know if it has been tampered with. By your argument, WGA should set a bit in the registry or something, and never check again. When WGA validation is required, the computer sends that bit as a boolean value indicating whther it passed muster. Wow... how long would it take a hacker to crack that and pirate a full-access copy? It doesn't matter WHAT it is - a bit in the registry or a 2048-byte cryptographic key - anything that allows the computer to validate itself without MS making the remote, transaction-based check is pointless. That kind of authorization for (example) a bank account would never fly... so why should it be used for access to a restricted download or service?
For that matter, it would be easy for somebody looking to sell cheap, 'Windows Pre-Installed' hard drives to take one machine with a valid copy, let it validate itself, and and then use a disk imaging program for $50 or less to pirate the untouched, fully valididated, and ready for WGA checks copy of Windows onto a many hard drives as they want. Nobody is "calling you a thief" any more than the airport security guards asking you to step through the metal detector are "calling you a terrorist," hey are simply making sure, just as a routing security check, that you are who and what you say you are (or your OS is as valid as you/it believe it to be).
BTW, you've apparently never used Vista, or just LOVE to hate on MS, but that's quite offtopic.
I think this case is idiotic, but it was fairly inevitable; MySpace does NOTHING to ensure users are of age except asking them. You could be 12 years old, register your real birth date minus 7 years, post some pics off the net -- even other MySpacer's pages -- that look 19, and call yourself ">>>XXX<<<"... None of the admins would know, even if they took the time to look specifically at your profile (having seen some profiles that, for example, blatantly disregard the restrictions on nudity in photos, I know full well that they don't). There really ISN'T any way to know. It's even easier for the 19-year-old to pretend to be a year or three younger... almost nobody gives their real birth year on there; indeed many use 99 years ago, as a sort of "I don't have to tell you!"
As for using the site unmonitored at 14, by 14 my sister and I were certainly trusted to use the Internet safely... but not to go meet people randomly, and I like to think my parents did something right in teaching common sense and practical safety precautions and were thus justified in our freedoms. The only girl I personally know who was sexually assaulted by somebody met on MySpace was 16, and effectively an orphan (her addict mother has no real part in her life). She, as opposed to this girl, has an excuse for not knowing the dangers of what she was doing.
You still have to pay Microsoft to write programs for windows unless it's a batch file
I refer you to the Visual Studio Express Editions. Granted, they are limited versions of the real thing, but VS is a great product; MS deserves to make some money off it. Anyhow, don't bitch about developing for Windows; even the express editions are better than most IDEs.
Lately, a lot of MS people have been going to Google. Why? Google only hires the best. MS still does, and always had, hired truly excellent people. Six years ago, working at Microsoft meant working among the best in the industry.
Besides, your comment makes no sense.
Vista is big, and compared to other OSs bloated, but so are current big Linux distros compared to Linux of five years ago. FC4 has effectively higher requirements (you REALLY want 256 MB system RAM) than XP (not strictly necessary of course, but in general use). Of course, 256 is no problem these days... but hat wasn't always true. We already have computers selling with over 1 GB or RAM; is 512 really going to kill you? As computer tecnology moves forward, OSs get bigger, demand more resources, etc. because if they didn't they would effectively had to stagnate. Or is it something else about Vista? The only point you can fairly peg on the developers at this point is the release schedule, and Vista IS a huge project. You'll probably bitch after it's released, but... even if you have legit grievences then, you can't pin them on the beta code. Things like DRM aren't the engineers' faults at all.
Word? Maybe you hate the format, that at least I could understand, but Word (Office in general) is extremely capable, very very fast, fairly light on resources, and -- with Office 2007 -- has very nice and innovative interface. Please... OO.o is incredible, but still undeniably behind.
IE, in its earlier days, really was a great browser for the environment of the time. Today anything before IE6SP2 is far too insecure to be let out, and even 6sp2 is still much too weak for comfort, but IE7, and especially 7+, are quite acceptable to me. I've gone to sites that will attack IE, and the worst I've gotten was a Protected Mode-triggered query -- on exactly one of these sites -- that was quickly denied and ignored. CSS support is a work in progress, but already better in many places than early versions of Fx, and getting better with every release. They have the best of many different browsers, plus innovations of their own, and while thye might never win back the 10%+ that switched to Fx, they might at least stem the flow. Oh yeah, it's much less of a resource hog, too.
Sure, MS has released some bad software, but please... it's silly, blind, and closed-minded to declare it all bad.
Isn't their new XPS document format an open standard? Granted that you said positive actions don't matter until they stop negative ones, I'd point out that the general/. response was quite negative. I haven't heard of any other open MS formats (although they have new formats under development), but it's a start at least.
Haven't tried the release of 2.6.17 yet, but rcX versions required extracting the firmware for your Broadcom card from a binary such as bcmwl5.sys (Windows driver). The tool bcm43xx-fwcutter does this.
I'm not an Ubuntu guy, but this reference might be useful to anybody trying to make the new Broadcom Wifi driver work in Linux. Very easy steps, and most non-Ubuntu users should find it easy to adapt for their specific distros.
If this is Urge, it's already integrated into WMP11 (in Vista by default, available for XP). If it's not, they'll probably add it to WMP.
Have free music available from new artists for download (myspace style) through the service along with paid songs
Sounds great! I'd love to see more of that. Are you thinking about the MySpace style where artists choose to provide samples of their music for free, or something where MS itself would make select items free for users and pay the artists themselves?
Make sure the device they have under development is as easy to use as the ipod, and that their ad campaign makes them as stylish and trendy
This might be the crux, especailly the ad compaign. I can't deny that the initial iPod ads were the most attractive I had ever seen for a media player, even if they said next to nothing about the player capabilities. I think they are a bit stale now, though... there's room for innovation there. As for the player itself, I actually think the UI on iPods could be improved significantly in a couple places, partially due to limited number of controls. A hardware switch for shuffle, for example, would be nice... it's a bit awkward trying to shuffle an active playlist without simply starting to play the shuffled list of everything, for example. I'm not trying to knock the interface, since most other players are worse, just saying that I didn't find it at all It Just Works, especially if I wanted to do something like, say, shuffle two albums, by different artists, except for that one dumb song... This is the sort of thing I love about WMP11; it's dead easy to do this.
Find a way to grandfather in support for the ipod for people who have ipod hardware already, but wouldn't mind transitioning software, not hardware
Apple refuses to license their DRM, and any commercially purchased music is essentially guaranteed to have DRM, so no non-Apple commercial product will work with the iPod. This is actually an ironically monopolistic move on Apple's part, but if they want to limit their player to their software that's fine by me. I don't see it being a huge problem; plenty of people have switched from other players to iPods, but iPod release cylce keeps telling people 'you want the new one' and people keep buying, so they might well decide to switch to another player instead of another iPod when the new, cool feature come out.
Is this supposed to be Urge, the new beta music store interated with WMP11? Urge is a collaborations of MS with MTV, VH1, and CMT, and looks good if you don't mind an interface based almost ntirely on Flash. Urge is hardly news; at least, not this kind of 'Ooh, first glimpse of a new product!' news, but it IS fairly impressive. You don't need WMP11 to use it, but they do seem to operate together fairly well.
Unless there's another, Microsoft-only must store in the works, the only news here is that they are releasing a player, which -- considering how much MS has begun to ente the hardware market -- isn't terribly surprising. Very, very little is being said ABOUT the palyer, however. I actually think MS has a golden opportunity, if they can swing it, to move in on the iPod market; iPod advertisements are getting stale, and it has been a relatively long time since a new iPod came out. People are speculating on things like a larger, wider screen, and/or touchscreen control; MS has the R&D money to create a device like that, with a competitively-sized drive and battery life, and could probably release it at a good price point.
If there IS a new media store, we seriously need more info here!
The problem is that we need to think like they do. Economic sanctions against a communist dictatorship have little effect, because the citizens are already poor and there's no way we can keep out enough to make those in control realy, really feel the pai they should. Plus, it makes it REALLY easy for them to paint us as the bad guys. What we need is to hit the dictators where it hurts. If eliminating them directly isn't an option (often it isn't) then cut off things ike arms shipments. Trade them commodities for their everyday men, women, and children - food, medicines, even relatively expensive things like TVs or, heck, budget automobiles - instead of Western currency that the dictators can use for anything, anywhere in the world.
Remember the effects of propaganda: citizens of enemy countries will be raised to see you as enemies. This will be a blind, unreasoned, deeply-entrenched belief that will be VERY hard to root out, even if there is no logical or emotional reason for it. You can try counteracting this propaganda, though the odds are against you. Just don't pretend you're goig to see "mass defections" just because America is so much better; these people honestly think you're demon worshippers who have come to rape their children (or something similar). It is terrifyingly easy to for a dictator with control over the media to demonize somebody that the first sight of them you have is their combat uniforms and belts of machine gun ammo marching into town next to tanks that blow up your house because it's in the way, or because a suspected terrorist has taken cover inside. It might inspire some fear in the dictators, but to their people it simply breeds the very terrorists you think you're suppressing.
In other words, if you must use force, use it very carefully, against training camps and the like (not homes of suspicious individuals). Occupations breed insurgencies; if you don't want those, don't try enforcing policies with a big block of troops inside their borders.
Has anybody noticed any major changes to battery life? Vista has dynamic processor scaling that far exceeds XP, and when running on battery my 1.8GHz Turion64 scales between 5% and 75% (a personal setting). If I don't turn off the Glass, however, the GPU (ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M) will keep running pretty hard, presumably draining power. I get a fairly good 3.6 hours (estimated, I haven't tried to run it flat yet) even on a huge (but dimmed) screen.
What have other peple seen? There is also a power option to switch to lower graphics settings in battery mode, which might help out. Any idea how much it helps? What about if you use Basic view? Aero Glass is nice, espcially comparing the alt-tab in XP (essentially the same as back in Win95) to Vista's thumbnail alt-tab or large-scale Flip-3D, and for making sidebar unobstrusive, but I'd happily trade it while mobile for some extra battery life.
I haven't tried but... Vista *will* support EFI (though MS is talking EFI on x64, not 32-bit processors) and previous versions of the beta, at least, used an EFI emulator in the bootloader. I doubt Vista will boot natively on the MacBook, but with Boot Camp I'd say you have a decent shot. I'll admit I considered this question, but as I own no Apple hardware I can't help you here.
Open a folder: less than it used to. the new explorer starts in the same amount of time, but the navigation system is *much* better. Also you can use the search to go almost instantly to a folder from many places, including start menu.
Cut/copy & paste a file (or just move one): same as XP, except for the time you save navigating between folders. Doesn't seem to have a Move to... or Copy to... capability like Konqueror yet. Send To has a *slightly* better default list of options.
Delete a file: same as XP, with one exception: if the file is owned by admin (or anybody other than current user) you will need to go through UAC. Contrary so/. popular belief, this does NOT include every file on your desktop, or even every file you downloaded off the web; in fact I don't think i've seen a single UAC for the desktop yet, though i'm not in the habit of placing UAC-protected files there.
Open full programs list: I honestly don't know. I use the search tool in the Start menu for everything; want Word? Winkey, then type 'word' then press enter. Windows Defender? Same, but type 'defend'. You don't even have to wait for the list of matches to appear, though it does so almost instantly. Okay, jsut for you, I tried it with the mouse: faster, much faster (not sure if this is due to superfetch, or indexing, or... whatever, it's faster.) A word of warning: if you wait *just* long enough for the menu to auto-expand and click right then you'll actually click 'Back' and close the all programs menu (it doens't open in a new space like in XP, which is both cool and allows people to do this by accident. You *can* use the standard start menu if you want instead.) Documents as a menu is also faster, but control panel takes almost as long as before.
Boot from XP install disk, go to Recovery Condole, run fixmbr (to overwite GRUB and the Vista loader). Exit to reboot (remove disk). If you want to re-install GRUB so you can access Linux, insert Linux boot disk, go to a repair shell, mount your root partition and chroot to it, and run grub-install.
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I'm probably a minority on this, but I'll definitely pass on the Apple option. I don't like iTunes, which means I don't like m4a much or FairPlay at all. I don't have an iPod, I have a generic that doesn't even support DRM in any form. When I replace it it will probably be for an alternative MP3 player, with OGG support and, between FairPlay and PlaysForSure, I would take PFS. I severely dislike being boxed into one service and interface application, and since I refuse to pirate anything, I may end up buying music online some day.
My school (University of Washington Seattle) also has free Napster. The only person I know who uses it is the guy who got a free Dell DJ and Napster subscription (the kind where you can place the songs on a player and they don't expire when you leave school). I tried it for a while, and found several things: The free collection - as far as college students are concerned - is a pretty small subset of their total collection. Their software is incredibly poorly written, becoming pointlessly slow and rather unstable if you, for example, try to play an audio stream and download a file at the same time. Their interface is sub-par, with limited sorting capabilities, kind of lame search, and general clunkiness. It was a waste of RAM and disk space. It tried to make a few unexpected modifications to my system, like changing audio file associations.
I once explained all this to some people who were out in front of the HUB asically wondering why nobody used the service. Their response was remarkably similar to AOHell's (from one time that I had to cancel a free trial subscription); they didn't want me to go away, they couldn't believe I didn't like the junk they offered, they kep repeating themselves as if it would convince me or I'd mis-spoken the first time, and they were useless about questions like "Is there some way to use the service without using your software?"
I don't agree with pirating, but I can sure see why so many more people use DC++.
I look forward to seeing Leopard, and I'd love to see dual-booting Mac/Win come into its own, but don't knock Vista just because MS-bashing is fun. It is honestly a superb OS.
Damn, he'd offered to QUIT over that? Oh man, I thought the only reason to use the money on relief efforts was for saving lives. Why didn't more people mention this little fact?
I wonder if MS was thinking along these lines when they built anti-phishing filters into their new e-mail clients and browser. The filters need work - I'm reminded of early-day antispam filters - but the browser-based one isn't bad, and since the way the filter acts in e-mail is to disable all links until you tell the mail client otherwise, false positives aren't actually as bad as they are for spam blockers.
If these filters really do end up having an effect - and I believe it's possible; phishing is usually fairly detectable if you know where to look - next-generation (Vista users, and early adopters who haven't upgraded their OS but have upgraded their browsers, etc) PC users will actually have some protection against an attack that Mac users are still open to.
I suspect the Skype developers could find a way around this idea. However, the bigger question is whether it will work; the quality sucks (for Skype, meaning it's worse than some - though not all - cell phones) but Skype is usable over dial-up. I think the lower limit it will go to is 16 or 20 kbps per channel, so if you're willing to run simplex (one person talking at a time) a 28.8 would be sufficient.
I have 20+ licenses of Windows XP. I have used Windows from the beginning. I have been in the computer industry for over 20 years. I was an early adopter of DOS. I used wordstar, wordperfect, lotus 123, etc., back when they were the kings. I was an early adopter of Windows 286/386 and encouraged everyone to switch to the Windows like environments... Okay.... and you point is? I'm only one user; I doubt I've purchased more than 5 copies of XP for use on my various machines, and that's counting the copies that come pre-installed. I don't quite see why this train of thought matters.
What, exactly, do you suppose Windows should do so that MS knows it isn't pirated when you try to do something requiring WGA; a nearly-instant check of your computer and OS against a remote database being apparently unacceptable? The one and only thing that comes to mind as being really acceptably secure is to have MS generate a very long key, and then have your copy of Windows send that key whenever validation is required. Of course, this would make it ridiculously easy to violate the whole point of WGA; cloning that authorization would be dead easy, and since nobody is checking whether the computer sending it is the same one the key was issued to, that would be, well... pointless.
If your complaint is that WGA checks frequently, regardless of whether you're trying to download service packs or whatever, let me remind you that the essential puprose of WGA is to (help) prevent piracy. Most people cannot tell, on their own (and even fewer bother to try) whether their softwae is pirated or not... but I hope, at the least, that most people are good enough morally that they would do something if informed that their copy of Windows was stolen. Even if they lack the morals, they might do something to make the damn message go away. Since WGA is effectively transparent in it's day-to-day checking, it doesn't cost you anything... and you the issue of people ghosting hard drives is actually a serious one; some people do it, despite WGA, but not many. In the days before WGA it was much more common. The WGA scans aren't because MS is worried that YOUR copy of Windows might suddenly be a pirated one, they're worried that a copy of Windows that tinks it's your copy might be pirated. Honestly, why do you care?
The kernel differences necessary to implement dynamic permissions elevation - and reduction, as in the case of IE7+ - are not minor. Having the UAC prompt when needed, and (usually) not prompt when unneeded, is something even Linux lacks (at least, I have yet to see a distro capable of it). Kudos to Apple for putting the ability into OSX; that kind of thing isn't very easy.
I think the last time I saw a WinXP screenshot in Vista was build 5280... there may well be a few in the most recent build, though. Are you suggesting the first thing every interface developer should do after a mod is go update the screenshots?!? It's beta; complaining about stuff like that in a product half a year from release is crazy. File a freaking bug report. They've redone the interface (I'm not talking 3D, I'm talking about things like instant search on ths Start menu and an Explorer navigation interface making it much easier to jump back 4 folders and sideways 3, etc.). They've expanded NTFS, improving journaling and adding shadow folders (very big change, nothing like it in previous versions) and symlinks... without breaking backward compatibility. They've improved power management, improved backup utilities, improved system restore, added background defrag, greatly improved the firewall, integrated Defender, added SuperFetch...
Enough of a shopping list? The checkout and exit is that way. The scanners by the doors will make sure you've paid for it all. It really doesn't matter if you've been through them before... but then, they don't actually interfere, either. All they're doing is suggesting you might be a thief.
I'll give you the benefit of a doubt, but that's pretty close to a flame. MS is losing IE market share, mostly to Firefox, and they don't like that. They are most definitey giving a damn about what people want. Many, MANY features now found in IE7 - some of which, like where tabs open and the order in which they close, are still not available in OOTB Firefox - are directly from the user-driven newsgroup requests.
IE7 has almost all ActiveX locked off for Internet zone unless you specifically opt in. Even Trusted Sites like Windows or Microsoft Update are limited in their ActiveX interaction. Most of these exploits are ActiveX based, and while anything the size of a full web browser WILL have holes... IE7 is NOT IE6 with a prettier interface; they've severely redone the security structure.
Now, I use IE7+, which, in my build of Vista, actually lags somewhat behind the version reviewed here... but has better security because of application-level dynamic permissions that XP cannot support. When I must use XP I'll go with either Fx or IE7, but I no longer consider even a locked-down version of IE6 to besufficient for, well, anything (except perhaps downloading Firefox and/or IE7). The security redesign, even in the XP version of IE7, is quite significant. In Vista, I only use Firefox for sites that won't allow beta web browsers (eg. Wells Fargo) as it actually runs with dangerously high permissions compared to IE7+. (It's also a memory hog, and has a slightly rough and wasteful - compared to IE7, not IE6 - interface).
It's also quite easy to disable specific plugins, like the Flash ActiveX control, in IR7; dis- or re-enabling it takes about 4 clicks if you need it for a site, and the rest of the time an annoying and occasionally securtiy-risky addon can't run.
It's beta. If you can't uninstall an app/upgrade using Add/Remove Programs, rather than a specific uninstall program, well... you really should probably wait for ti to go RTM. Yeah, it's annoying that it doesn't automatically uninstall the old version of IE7 for you, and it's annoying thet you have to restart, but 9to the extremely limited extent I use XP these days) I've been doing that for months as new IE7 builds came out, and it really isn't difficult. As for WGA, I'm sorry, but I really don't know what you're complaining about... oh, and IE7 has integrated WGA capability (disable it if you don't want it, but... why??) so you don't even need to run the validator explicitly.
Even those eho don't use IE except where essential (Microsoft Update) should install IE7; a lot of programs use it behind the scenes, and essentially no amount of locking down IE6 can make it as secure as IE7.
Flash Player and Acrobat Reader are both (much too) common programs that run natively in Linux. Adobe in general has been fairly good about porting (at the least) their most common software. The JVM runs natively, allowing Linux to run pretty much any Java app. Apache and most other commercial-quality OSS apps (you mentioned Mozilla yourself) are cross-platform. Real Player is, AFAIK, the only commercial media player available for Linux, and runs natively. ATI's Catalyst video driver configuration program is ported to Linx, although it's unsupported and occasionally broken.
I would go so far as to say that maybe as much as half of the day-to-day software (sadly I must exclude most game titles from this) that runs natively on both Windows and Mac but isn't produced by MS or Apple will also run natively in Linux. Of course, it's a pretty small subset even without the 'day-to-day' limitation, and you can define that limit as you please, but there's a surprising amount of software that, if it's available to Macs from a 3rd party (quite arguably a niche market) it's also available for Linux.
So... because the authorization program repeatedly checks your oftware, it's calling you a thief -- that's the gist of your argument, yes? I sure as heck hope cops never start operating the way you think software should. "This isn't the OS we're looking for. We checked him out one time - at least, he says we did, and there was a guy that looked like him - and he wasn't carrying anything. He can go about his business."
Software doesn't know if it has been tampered with. By your argument, WGA should set a bit in the registry or something, and never check again. When WGA validation is required, the computer sends that bit as a boolean value indicating whther it passed muster. Wow... how long would it take a hacker to crack that and pirate a full-access copy? It doesn't matter WHAT it is - a bit in the registry or a 2048-byte cryptographic key - anything that allows the computer to validate itself without MS making the remote, transaction-based check is pointless. That kind of authorization for (example) a bank account would never fly... so why should it be used for access to a restricted download or service?
For that matter, it would be easy for somebody looking to sell cheap, 'Windows Pre-Installed' hard drives to take one machine with a valid copy, let it validate itself, and and then use a disk imaging program for $50 or less to pirate the untouched, fully valididated, and ready for WGA checks copy of Windows onto a many hard drives as they want. Nobody is "calling you a thief" any more than the airport security guards asking you to step through the metal detector are "calling you a terrorist," hey are simply making sure, just as a routing security check, that you are who and what you say you are (or your OS is as valid as you/it believe it to be).
BTW, you've apparently never used Vista, or just LOVE to hate on MS, but that's quite offtopic.
I think this case is idiotic, but it was fairly inevitable; MySpace does NOTHING to ensure users are of age except asking them. You could be 12 years old, register your real birth date minus 7 years, post some pics off the net -- even other MySpacer's pages -- that look 19, and call yourself ">>>XXX<<<"... None of the admins would know, even if they took the time to look specifically at your profile (having seen some profiles that, for example, blatantly disregard the restrictions on nudity in photos, I know full well that they don't). There really ISN'T any way to know. It's even easier for the 19-year-old to pretend to be a year or three younger... almost nobody gives their real birth year on there; indeed many use 99 years ago, as a sort of "I don't have to tell you!"
As for using the site unmonitored at 14, by 14 my sister and I were certainly trusted to use the Internet safely... but not to go meet people randomly, and I like to think my parents did something right in teaching common sense and practical safety precautions and were thus justified in our freedoms. The only girl I personally know who was sexually assaulted by somebody met on MySpace was 16, and effectively an orphan (her addict mother has no real part in her life). She, as opposed to this girl, has an excuse for not knowing the dangers of what she was doing.
You still have to pay Microsoft to write programs for windows unless it's a batch file
I refer you to the Visual Studio Express Editions. Granted, they are limited versions of the real thing, but VS is a great product; MS deserves to make some money off it. Anyhow, don't bitch about developing for Windows; even the express editions are better than most IDEs.
Besides, your comment makes no sense.
- Vista is big, and compared to other OSs bloated, but so are current big Linux distros compared to Linux of five years ago. FC4 has effectively higher requirements (you REALLY want 256 MB system RAM) than XP (not strictly necessary of course, but in general use). Of course, 256 is no problem these days... but hat wasn't always true. We already have computers selling with over 1 GB or RAM; is 512 really going to kill you? As computer tecnology moves forward, OSs get bigger, demand more resources, etc. because if they didn't they would effectively had to stagnate. Or is it something else about Vista? The only point you can fairly peg on the developers at this point is the release schedule, and Vista IS a huge project. You'll probably bitch after it's released, but... even if you have legit grievences then, you can't pin them on the beta code. Things like DRM aren't the engineers' faults at all.
- Word? Maybe you hate the format, that at least I could understand, but Word (Office in general) is extremely capable, very very fast, fairly light on resources, and -- with Office 2007 -- has very nice and innovative interface. Please... OO.o is incredible, but still undeniably behind.
- IE, in its earlier days, really was a great browser for the environment of the time. Today anything before IE6SP2 is far too insecure to be let out, and even 6sp2 is still much too weak for comfort, but IE7, and especially 7+, are quite acceptable to me. I've gone to sites that will attack IE, and the worst I've gotten was a Protected Mode-triggered query -- on exactly one of these sites -- that was quickly denied and ignored. CSS support is a work in progress, but already better in many places than early versions of Fx, and getting better with every release. They have the best of many different browsers, plus innovations of their own, and while thye might never win back the 10%+ that switched to Fx, they might at least stem the flow. Oh yeah, it's much less of a resource hog, too.
Sure, MS has released some bad software, but please... it's silly, blind, and closed-minded to declare it all bad.Isn't their new XPS document format an open standard? Granted that you said positive actions don't matter until they stop negative ones, I'd point out that the general /. response was quite negative. I haven't heard of any other open MS formats (although they have new formats under development), but it's a start at least.
Haven't tried the release of 2.6.17 yet, but rcX versions required extracting the firmware for your Broadcom card from a binary such as bcmwl5.sys (Windows driver). The tool bcm43xx-fwcutter does this.
I'm not an Ubuntu guy, but this reference might be useful to anybody trying to make the new Broadcom Wifi driver work in Linux. Very easy steps, and most non-Ubuntu users should find it easy to adapt for their specific distros.
Is this supposed to be Urge, the new beta music store interated with WMP11? Urge is a collaborations of MS with MTV, VH1, and CMT, and looks good if you don't mind an interface based almost ntirely on Flash. Urge is hardly news; at least, not this kind of 'Ooh, first glimpse of a new product!' news, but it IS fairly impressive. You don't need WMP11 to use it, but they do seem to operate together fairly well.
Unless there's another, Microsoft-only must store in the works, the only news here is that they are releasing a player, which -- considering how much MS has begun to ente the hardware market -- isn't terribly surprising. Very, very little is being said ABOUT the palyer, however. I actually think MS has a golden opportunity, if they can swing it, to move in on the iPod market; iPod advertisements are getting stale, and it has been a relatively long time since a new iPod came out. People are speculating on things like a larger, wider screen, and/or touchscreen control; MS has the R&D money to create a device like that, with a competitively-sized drive and battery life, and could probably release it at a good price point.
If there IS a new media store, we seriously need more info here!
The problem is that we need to think like they do. Economic sanctions against a communist dictatorship have little effect, because the citizens are already poor and there's no way we can keep out enough to make those in control realy, really feel the pai they should. Plus, it makes it REALLY easy for them to paint us as the bad guys. What we need is to hit the dictators where it hurts. If eliminating them directly isn't an option (often it isn't) then cut off things ike arms shipments. Trade them commodities for their everyday men, women, and children - food, medicines, even relatively expensive things like TVs or, heck, budget automobiles - instead of Western currency that the dictators can use for anything, anywhere in the world.
Remember the effects of propaganda: citizens of enemy countries will be raised to see you as enemies. This will be a blind, unreasoned, deeply-entrenched belief that will be VERY hard to root out, even if there is no logical or emotional reason for it. You can try counteracting this propaganda, though the odds are against you. Just don't pretend you're goig to see "mass defections" just because America is so much better; these people honestly think you're demon worshippers who have come to rape their children (or something similar). It is terrifyingly easy to for a dictator with control over the media to demonize somebody that the first sight of them you have is their combat uniforms and belts of machine gun ammo marching into town next to tanks that blow up your house because it's in the way, or because a suspected terrorist has taken cover inside. It might inspire some fear in the dictators, but to their people it simply breeds the very terrorists you think you're suppressing.
In other words, if you must use force, use it very carefully, against training camps and the like (not homes of suspicious individuals). Occupations breed insurgencies; if you don't want those, don't try enforcing policies with a big block of troops inside their borders.
Has anybody noticed any major changes to battery life? Vista has dynamic processor scaling that far exceeds XP, and when running on battery my 1.8GHz Turion64 scales between 5% and 75% (a personal setting). If I don't turn off the Glass, however, the GPU (ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M) will keep running pretty hard, presumably draining power. I get a fairly good 3.6 hours (estimated, I haven't tried to run it flat yet) even on a huge (but dimmed) screen.
What have other peple seen? There is also a power option to switch to lower graphics settings in battery mode, which might help out. Any idea how much it helps? What about if you use Basic view? Aero Glass is nice, espcially comparing the alt-tab in XP (essentially the same as back in Win95) to Vista's thumbnail alt-tab or large-scale Flip-3D, and for making sidebar unobstrusive, but I'd happily trade it while mobile for some extra battery life.
I haven't tried but... Vista *will* support EFI (though MS is talking EFI on x64, not 32-bit processors) and previous versions of the beta, at least, used an EFI emulator in the bootloader. I doubt Vista will boot natively on the MacBook, but with Boot Camp I'd say you have a decent shot. I'll admit I considered this question, but as I own no Apple hardware I can't help you here.
Boot from XP install disk, go to Recovery Condole, run fixmbr (to overwite GRUB and the Vista loader). Exit to reboot (remove disk). If you want to re-install GRUB so you can access Linux, insert Linux boot disk, go to a repair shell, mount your root partition and chroot to it, and run grub-install.