My computer tri-boots XP, Vista, and SuSE (GRUB bootloader). Installing Vista overwrites the boot sector with stage1 of their new EFI emulator (at least the older one was an EFI emulator; I haven't looked closely at the new one) ao you'll want to re-install the bootloader (boot off Linux disk, goto a repair console, mount and chroot into your Linux partition, run grub-install). You shouldn't attempt to add another chainloader for Vista; leave the one you had for XP and it will now run Vista's bootloader. Yes, you will need to go through two bootloaders to reach Vista, and you used to need (actually haven't tried yet; I used to test an older beta) three to reach XP because XP won't boot off the EFI emulator so that chainloaded the standard Windows bootloader.
Vista's version of NTFS is fully reverse-compatible, so the Linux drivers work. (It probably won't support the versioning-system-like shadow copy.) Also, the EXT2/3 drivers for XP loaded correctly in Vista (though they might not in the 64-bit, haven't tried that yet). I haven't found any compatibility issues with multipe OSes on one system, as long as they are perarated by partition. Vist will NOT install on anything other than NTFS, however. I haven't tried using th Windows boorlader to access Linux, though it might be possible (Vista's bootloader doesn't use the boot.ini file however, it's now controlled by a configuration app).
Vista can create (and even enlarge) but not shrink partitions, so use qtparted or a similar tool (Partition Magic if you want to use commercial) to create room unless you have a blank disk. Vista will install into as little as 12GB (barely, if you put the pagefile there... but you can put it on XP's partition and save some space; since you cannot hibernate one and load into the other they'll never conflict) but I recommend 20GB or more. That's enough space for the OS install, Office, and the necessary handful of other apps, then use a shared data partition beteen all three OSes. Before anybody cries bloatware, remember that the beta is the ultimate edition, meaning LOTS of stuff (Media Center, full Aero, Windows Collaboration, etc.) and probably has lots of debug code. I'm not saying it's thin, but it runs quite fast, the automatic defrag means you don't eed to worry about tune-ups as much, and on anything other than an older laptop that you're trying to triboot *sheepish grin* 20GB should be doable.
The sad truth is that in a situation where Arabs are a minority, and most terrorists are Arab (debate the truth of that if you like, but don't pretend the conclusion is invalid) you will statisitically have a better chance of finding terrorists if you search only Arabs. The reason we shouldn't do this, from a purely safety-oriented point-of-view is that we will guarantee that some terrorists do get through, we need a better way of searching. I don't think random checks are the best, but one possibility might be to determine what X percent of terrorists are Arab, and have X percent of your security watch them more, and have the rest watch everybody ELSE (i.e. the non-X percent of guards, etc. do not watch Arabs).
It would be great if your example were valid... but it doesn't hold up. "... you might argue that this does not reflect probabilities in the larger population, but... let me use this as an example, to make a mathematical pont." You aren't really making any point; your hypothetical sample is completely unrealistic. This is a real-world, not hypothetical, situation, and you must make arguments that are realistic. The chances of some 115 random people (in the US) including 100 Arabs is fatanstically low; generally speaking the chances that so many as 15 of them *are* Arab would be low. Similarly, you could easily go your entire life grabbing random groups of 15 non-Arabs without finding 2, let alone 5, terrorists in one group. So, while I agree with the point you are trying to make, I am worried that this is being held up as an 'insightful' argument on the topic.
It's a matter of percentages. I agree with essentially every post thus far that stated we shouldn't focus exclusively on Arabs, but your example is flawed, especially for US application.
WarCraft 3's RTS + RPG heros was pretty original. It added real flavor to the campaigns in a way the heros of their earlier RTS's had not, and introduced a completely new and radical concept to RTS gaming, such as going out of your way to get into fights with things because it will ultimately make you stronger, and a strange situation where killing a few enemy heros could be worth losing several times that many of your own units... but the heros don't actually break the game.
I gotta disagree with regard to WarCraft 3. It was the leader of a whole new set of undeniably RTS games that feature RPG-like heros. There was actually a lot of contemplation at Blizzard about making it more RPG-like and toning down the resource harvesting, base building, and unit massing of a traditional RTS, but I think they found the best in-between.
Also, while it isn't exactly new to WarCraft 3, Blizzard games are incredibly moddable, to an extent rarely seen in any game. WarCraft 1 allowed modifying unit attributes so you could make your own balance tweaks. WarCraft 2 expanded on that with a full map editor and more customization of units. StarCraft's trigger-driven maps were quite a revolution, allowing everything from creating your own campaigns to the ever-popular Team fortress, Paintball, Bunker Defense, and similar UMS (Use Map Settings) games. But even SC's editor pales to WC3 (and especially WC3:TFT) where you can create entirely new units, change everything from coloring to collision size to learnable abilities, create your OWN abilities, items, and terrain effects, and more. WC3 allows creation of entirely new races for standard TRS-style gameplay... or truly RPG-like games... or over-the-shoulder camera (3D anybody?) FPS... or games like DotA, an incredibly popular WC3 mod with its own ladder, tournaments, etc. that is often considered to be essentially its own game.
Don't knock good looks. Camera control is fun, even if little more than a gimmick on most RTS... and it keeps people from whining that Blizzard games still have 90's-esque 2D graphics without even making people go out and buy a fancy new video card (i.e. they didn't take it to excess like so many companies do).
With IE7. Text sizing is still supported, but you can also zoom *everything* and the browser will do it with complete disregard for the page fixing a certain font point... but the layout doesn't get (any more) broken because everything is zoomed to scale and maintains aspect ratio.
B-grade was in reference to their console games, mainly... WarCraft had, for the time, great graphics and incredible movies, and required a CD-ROM drive in days when some software still shipped on 5.25" floppies. The full install also demanded a hefty 72MB of hard disk space (~half of which was cinematics, and half game files... for those without the space one or both could be played off the disk). Later Blizzard games have actually not pressed the hardware envelope nearly as much; both StarCraft and Warcraft3 played fine on machines more than two years older than they were. For titles of such magnitude, that's quite impressive.
Agreed... isn't StarCraft still pretty much the largest game in South Korea? It fueled the boom of their Internet cafes, and is still immensely common over there despite being ~8 years old now, and way behind the times on graphics, etc. Its persistence in people's minds is shown in its recent induction into the Walk of Game
This is also proof that pretty looks really aren't the be-all-and-end-all that so many game studios seem to imply today... Yeah, WoW looks good, and WC3 was pretty nice for its time, but I think part of the widespread sales of these games is partially attributable to the facts that SC could be played on a P90 with something like 16MB of RAM, and WC3 on a PIII 450 with integrated video (machines I had at the time, not necessarily the minimum specs). Not your usual idea of a top-notch gaming machine, even when these games were released, but an amazing game requiring only a moderate system will sell better than a moderate game requiring a top-notch system to run its cutting-edge graphics.
Blizzard took a big step in releasing a major game title that required the user to have the CD (WarCraft Orcs and Humans could be installed entirely to disk - if you had 72MB!! to spare - but WarCraft 2, even the original version, could not) but that could be played multiplayer without the disk. Everybody bought the game, because the single-player modes were great and you didn't want to be tied to your friends if you wanted to play, but one disk could introduce a LOT of people to the game... I played StarCraft for the first time on a spawn install after hours at Microsoft. True, Blizzard canned that with SC Brood Wars, where you couldn't spawn install, but WarCraft 3, including expansion, can be played without a CD as long as it was started with one.
There are three people in our family that play RTS, and while I can see us buying multiple copies of a game we all really enjoy, if I know a game can only be played on one machine, I probably won't buy it initally... and if I know it can be played on multiple machines simultaneously, I'm much more likely to try it out because multiplayer is really what strategy games are all about. Even two-player WarCraft understood that, and back before Battle.Net, The Craft of War IPX-over-IP game room on Microsoft's Zone.com was constantly busy with WC2 players.
Most of OneCare isn't about malware; that's what Defender (free, and packaged with Vista) is for. OneCare is a security suite in much the same sense that Norton is (except it doesn't use a constantly noticeable X percent of your CPU and a quarter of your RAM) but it uses Defender for its anti-malware, so if you don't feel like like paying (or already have another tool for antivirus, strong firewall, automated backups and defrags, etc... or don't need one) you need not pay a dime. Personally I like OneCare, but I've put off installing it on Vista because I already have a two-way firewall, automated defrag, and good backup capability, plus I know how to avoid viruses and UAC may well help there. Since it's a testing OS that will get peridically flattened anyhow even a serious infection woulnd't be that big of a hassle.
Out of random curiosity, I tried, and yes, Vista has msconfig. It looks better designed than the one in XP, in fact. But, despite shutting down several boot programs already, I've never needed it; Windows Defender (included with Vista and integrated with Microsoft Update) includes tools for viewing information about startup software (such as file name and path, the exact command run, the publisher, description, and signature, whether the file shipped with the OS, where it is i.e. shortcut in Startup folder or some location in the Registry, and what the SpyNet community has ranked it). It gives you the option to enable, disable, or remove any of these tasks except system vital ones; malware ight be able to exploit this), and is easy to use. Automaic Windows Help (in Vista) will direct you here. However, it works in XP too:
Open Windows Defender (as an admin, if using XP)
Tools (at the top of the page) -> Software Explorer (Vista's UAC prompts at this point)
I've had a (very limited) amount of success doing this with the restoration tools included on the XP installation CDs. It's a slow and painful way to remove infected files, and then you have to hope that Windows' Automated Recovery is smart enough to restore any system files you had to nuke... after which you'll have to patch, possibly re-install some software, etc. Really, they'd better be desperate to not reinstall for some reason.
Vista's recovery tools are far better; a full command prompt (not the crippled thing they call XP's Recovery console), and a much superior automated recovery (I have no idea what it does differently, but it's actually worth something when I mess up some important files and Vista won't boot). Full access to the Recovery points, including the ability to choose which one to restore from, etc. is noce, but most modern malware seems to go after those things first. They're sopposedly better protected in Vista, but I usually use them for a really bad driver or something, not a infection. I haven't yet checked whether I can access the shadow copies of folders from recovery system, although I'm sure I could from Safe Mode. I haven't yet figured out where those are located, but system files, [My] Documents, and so forth are all protected by what amounts to a versioning system, and it's possible you could simply have the system restore affected folders to their state X hours ago, assuming it was quick enough that the older vesions hadn't been destroyed to save disk space. It seems to restore all the files in exactly the condition they were in, and I think it will even remove new files.
Careful: Flash is annoying to many users due to all the adverts that expoit it, and has been a considerable security risk. Between those two reasons, many people outright disable it, at least by default. Furthermore, navigation in Flash pages can be annoying; people have a tendency to hit the Back button, which instead of taking you to the page you were just viewing might navigate you out of the domain or, at the very least, require you to wait while another Flash app loads. Never forget your non-broadband users... Gmail and Yahoo! mail beta are quite usable on dialup, but a lot of Flash content will just hog the lines, in return for an interface that doesn't tell you what page you're about to go to and won't let you open it in a new tab. Finally, consider cross-platform: Flash player is prorietary binary code. Last I checked (my SuSE box is a few feet from here) there was no version of Flash player 8 for Linux yet, let alone an open-source alternative for those who need to compile for exotic systems or just don't like proprietary.
Both page zooming and text resizing work fine in IE7+, though I agree that the layout, by and large, isn't exactly a great improvement. More customization please! I remember back in the antique days of CSS MSN.com had the capability to switch your background color to changing CSS...
New Layout topic would be good; in the absense of such comments like this will appear in random other places.
2H2 + 02 results in 2 water molecules and a decent amount of energy. Hydrogen combustion cars (not fuel cell cars, which are actually electric) use this technique; it produces enough energy to drive the pistons. The reason you see an implosion when a match is inserted into an inverted test tube is because the ware vapor produced cools very quickly, and at atmospheric pressure, water is far denser than H2 or O2. Thus a given mass of the gasses produces a much lower volume of water. However, in space the water vapor produced by the combustion is EXTREMELY expansive. It still cools rapidly (much more so, in fact) but a great deal of thrust can be produced by forcing it (at pressure, within the reaction chamber) out a rocket nozzle. Once exhausted it can cool all it likes; by then the ship is blasting out more water vapor and the rapidly freezing water is far away.
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My computer tri-boots XP, Vista, and SuSE (GRUB bootloader). Installing Vista overwrites the boot sector with stage1 of their new EFI emulator (at least the older one was an EFI emulator; I haven't looked closely at the new one) ao you'll want to re-install the bootloader (boot off Linux disk, goto a repair console, mount and chroot into your Linux partition, run grub-install). You shouldn't attempt to add another chainloader for Vista; leave the one you had for XP and it will now run Vista's bootloader. Yes, you will need to go through two bootloaders to reach Vista, and you used to need (actually haven't tried yet; I used to test an older beta) three to reach XP because XP won't boot off the EFI emulator so that chainloaded the standard Windows bootloader.
Vista's version of NTFS is fully reverse-compatible, so the Linux drivers work. (It probably won't support the versioning-system-like shadow copy.) Also, the EXT2/3 drivers for XP loaded correctly in Vista (though they might not in the 64-bit, haven't tried that yet). I haven't found any compatibility issues with multipe OSes on one system, as long as they are perarated by partition. Vist will NOT install on anything other than NTFS, however. I haven't tried using th Windows boorlader to access Linux, though it might be possible (Vista's bootloader doesn't use the boot.ini file however, it's now controlled by a configuration app).
Vista can create (and even enlarge) but not shrink partitions, so use qtparted or a similar tool (Partition Magic if you want to use commercial) to create room unless you have a blank disk. Vista will install into as little as 12GB (barely, if you put the pagefile there... but you can put it on XP's partition and save some space; since you cannot hibernate one and load into the other they'll never conflict) but I recommend 20GB or more. That's enough space for the OS install, Office, and the necessary handful of other apps, then use a shared data partition beteen all three OSes. Before anybody cries bloatware, remember that the beta is the ultimate edition, meaning LOTS of stuff (Media Center, full Aero, Windows Collaboration, etc.) and probably has lots of debug code. I'm not saying it's thin, but it runs quite fast, the automatic defrag means you don't eed to worry about tune-ups as much, and on anything other than an older laptop that you're trying to triboot *sheepish grin* 20GB should be doable.
The sad truth is that in a situation where Arabs are a minority, and most terrorists are Arab (debate the truth of that if you like, but don't pretend the conclusion is invalid) you will statisitically have a better chance of finding terrorists if you search only Arabs. The reason we shouldn't do this, from a purely safety-oriented point-of-view is that we will guarantee that some terrorists do get through, we need a better way of searching. I don't think random checks are the best, but one possibility might be to determine what X percent of terrorists are Arab, and have X percent of your security watch them more, and have the rest watch everybody ELSE (i.e. the non-X percent of guards, etc. do not watch Arabs).
It would be great if your example were valid... but it doesn't hold up. "... you might argue that this does not reflect probabilities in the larger population, but... let me use this as an example, to make a mathematical pont." You aren't really making any point; your hypothetical sample is completely unrealistic. This is a real-world, not hypothetical, situation, and you must make arguments that are realistic. The chances of some 115 random people (in the US) including 100 Arabs is fatanstically low; generally speaking the chances that so many as 15 of them *are* Arab would be low. Similarly, you could easily go your entire life grabbing random groups of 15 non-Arabs without finding 2, let alone 5, terrorists in one group. So, while I agree with the point you are trying to make, I am worried that this is being held up as an 'insightful' argument on the topic.
It's a matter of percentages. I agree with essentially every post thus far that stated we shouldn't focus exclusively on Arabs, but your example is flawed, especially for US application.
WarCraft 3's RTS + RPG heros was pretty original. It added real flavor to the campaigns in a way the heros of their earlier RTS's had not, and introduced a completely new and radical concept to RTS gaming, such as going out of your way to get into fights with things because it will ultimately make you stronger, and a strange situation where killing a few enemy heros could be worth losing several times that many of your own units... but the heros don't actually break the game.
I gotta disagree with regard to WarCraft 3. It was the leader of a whole new set of undeniably RTS games that feature RPG-like heros. There was actually a lot of contemplation at Blizzard about making it more RPG-like and toning down the resource harvesting, base building, and unit massing of a traditional RTS, but I think they found the best in-between.
Also, while it isn't exactly new to WarCraft 3, Blizzard games are incredibly moddable, to an extent rarely seen in any game. WarCraft 1 allowed modifying unit attributes so you could make your own balance tweaks. WarCraft 2 expanded on that with a full map editor and more customization of units. StarCraft's trigger-driven maps were quite a revolution, allowing everything from creating your own campaigns to the ever-popular Team fortress, Paintball, Bunker Defense, and similar UMS (Use Map Settings) games. But even SC's editor pales to WC3 (and especially WC3:TFT) where you can create entirely new units, change everything from coloring to collision size to learnable abilities, create your OWN abilities, items, and terrain effects, and more. WC3 allows creation of entirely new races for standard TRS-style gameplay... or truly RPG-like games... or over-the-shoulder camera (3D anybody?) FPS... or games like DotA, an incredibly popular WC3 mod with its own ladder, tournaments, etc. that is often considered to be essentially its own game.
Don't knock good looks. Camera control is fun, even if little more than a gimmick on most RTS... and it keeps people from whining that Blizzard games still have 90's-esque 2D graphics without even making people go out and buy a fancy new video card (i.e. they didn't take it to excess like so many companies do).
With IE7. Text sizing is still supported, but you can also zoom *everything* and the browser will do it with complete disregard for the page fixing a certain font point... but the layout doesn't get (any more) broken because everything is zoomed to scale and maintains aspect ratio.
B-grade was in reference to their console games, mainly... WarCraft had, for the time, great graphics and incredible movies, and required a CD-ROM drive in days when some software still shipped on 5.25" floppies. The full install also demanded a hefty 72MB of hard disk space (~half of which was cinematics, and half game files... for those without the space one or both could be played off the disk). Later Blizzard games have actually not pressed the hardware envelope nearly as much; both StarCraft and Warcraft3 played fine on machines more than two years older than they were. For titles of such magnitude, that's quite impressive.
Agreed... isn't StarCraft still pretty much the largest game in South Korea? It fueled the boom of their Internet cafes, and is still immensely common over there despite being ~8 years old now, and way behind the times on graphics, etc. Its persistence in people's minds is shown in its recent induction into the Walk of Game
This is also proof that pretty looks really aren't the be-all-and-end-all that so many game studios seem to imply today... Yeah, WoW looks good, and WC3 was pretty nice for its time, but I think part of the widespread sales of these games is partially attributable to the facts that SC could be played on a P90 with something like 16MB of RAM, and WC3 on a PIII 450 with integrated video (machines I had at the time, not necessarily the minimum specs). Not your usual idea of a top-notch gaming machine, even when these games were released, but an amazing game requiring only a moderate system will sell better than a moderate game requiring a top-notch system to run its cutting-edge graphics.
Blizzard took a big step in releasing a major game title that required the user to have the CD (WarCraft Orcs and Humans could be installed entirely to disk - if you had 72MB!! to spare - but WarCraft 2, even the original version, could not) but that could be played multiplayer without the disk. Everybody bought the game, because the single-player modes were great and you didn't want to be tied to your friends if you wanted to play, but one disk could introduce a LOT of people to the game... I played StarCraft for the first time on a spawn install after hours at Microsoft. True, Blizzard canned that with SC Brood Wars, where you couldn't spawn install, but WarCraft 3, including expansion, can be played without a CD as long as it was started with one.
There are three people in our family that play RTS, and while I can see us buying multiple copies of a game we all really enjoy, if I know a game can only be played on one machine, I probably won't buy it initally... and if I know it can be played on multiple machines simultaneously, I'm much more likely to try it out because multiplayer is really what strategy games are all about. Even two-player WarCraft understood that, and back before Battle.Net, The Craft of War IPX-over-IP game room on Microsoft's Zone.com was constantly busy with WC2 players.
Most of OneCare isn't about malware; that's what Defender (free, and packaged with Vista) is for. OneCare is a security suite in much the same sense that Norton is (except it doesn't use a constantly noticeable X percent of your CPU and a quarter of your RAM) but it uses Defender for its anti-malware, so if you don't feel like like paying (or already have another tool for antivirus, strong firewall, automated backups and defrags, etc... or don't need one) you need not pay a dime. Personally I like OneCare, but I've put off installing it on Vista because I already have a two-way firewall, automated defrag, and good backup capability, plus I know how to avoid viruses and UAC may well help there. Since it's a testing OS that will get peridically flattened anyhow even a serious infection woulnd't be that big of a hassle.
I've had a (very limited) amount of success doing this with the restoration tools included on the XP installation CDs. It's a slow and painful way to remove infected files, and then you have to hope that Windows' Automated Recovery is smart enough to restore any system files you had to nuke... after which you'll have to patch, possibly re-install some software, etc. Really, they'd better be desperate to not reinstall for some reason.
Vista's recovery tools are far better; a full command prompt (not the crippled thing they call XP's Recovery console), and a much superior automated recovery (I have no idea what it does differently, but it's actually worth something when I mess up some important files and Vista won't boot). Full access to the Recovery points, including the ability to choose which one to restore from, etc. is noce, but most modern malware seems to go after those things first. They're sopposedly better protected in Vista, but I usually use them for a really bad driver or something, not a infection. I haven't yet checked whether I can access the shadow copies of folders from recovery system, although I'm sure I could from Safe Mode. I haven't yet figured out where those are located, but system files, [My] Documents, and so forth are all protected by what amounts to a versioning system, and it's possible you could simply have the system restore affected folders to their state X hours ago, assuming it was quick enough that the older vesions hadn't been destroyed to save disk space. It seems to restore all the files in exactly the condition they were in, and I think it will even remove new files.
Careful: Flash is annoying to many users due to all the adverts that expoit it, and has been a considerable security risk. Between those two reasons, many people outright disable it, at least by default. Furthermore, navigation in Flash pages can be annoying; people have a tendency to hit the Back button, which instead of taking you to the page you were just viewing might navigate you out of the domain or, at the very least, require you to wait while another Flash app loads. Never forget your non-broadband users... Gmail and Yahoo! mail beta are quite usable on dialup, but a lot of Flash content will just hog the lines, in return for an interface that doesn't tell you what page you're about to go to and won't let you open it in a new tab. Finally, consider cross-platform: Flash player is prorietary binary code. Last I checked (my SuSE box is a few feet from here) there was no version of Flash player 8 for Linux yet, let alone an open-source alternative for those who need to compile for exotic systems or just don't like proprietary.
Both page zooming and text resizing work fine in IE7+, though I agree that the layout, by and large, isn't exactly a great improvement. More customization please! I remember back in the antique days of CSS MSN.com had the capability to switch your background color to changing CSS...
New Layout topic would be good; in the absense of such comments like this will appear in random other places.
2H2 + 02 results in 2 water molecules and a decent amount of energy. Hydrogen combustion cars (not fuel cell cars, which are actually electric) use this technique; it produces enough energy to drive the pistons. The reason you see an implosion when a match is inserted into an inverted test tube is because the ware vapor produced cools very quickly, and at atmospheric pressure, water is far denser than H2 or O2. Thus a given mass of the gasses produces a much lower volume of water. However, in space the water vapor produced by the combustion is EXTREMELY expansive. It still cools rapidly (much more so, in fact) but a great deal of thrust can be produced by forcing it (at pressure, within the reaction chamber) out a rocket nozzle. Once exhausted it can cool all it likes; by then the ship is blasting out more water vapor and the rapidly freezing water is far away.