Nah that's not it. I would have scheduled a disk defragment every 6-8 weeks at the time. I found the culprit was installing and removing applications. Even after removing registry fluff and removing all of the startup nonsense from/CurrentVersion/Run you would still find that over time it got worse.
Logic would tell me that indeed it was a fragmented disk or leftover startup services/applications but a theory from a friend of mine was that it was registry growth that caused the problem. As a dba that made a lot of sense. I mean we don't have any maintenance plans and you can't unload/reload! The 3rd party commercical apps weren't much use for managing the registry either.
I do have it. Yep certainly it's not an actual build of Vista, as I mentioned the interface is slightly different for a start. My point was that Vista was to be a big rewrite and ended up falling short and now they've done it again. I would agree that it's not as bad as it is made out. In fact I'm a strong supporter of the UAC approach and have berated so-called power-users for wanting to turn it off. The same power-users whose PCs I'm am busy repairing most of the time.
My point was more along the lines that they didn't make a huge change in Vista, at least not to the extent promised and it looks like they won't be doing it this time either. The kernel is 6.1, which is a minor release. It is for the most part Vista with the few sore spots smoothed over.
Are you missing the main point that the issue of getting Windows 7 to market so quickly is because Vista was a failure? XP was on the streets for a hell of a lot longer before we saw a replacement, even in beta form. This is a marketing move (not that there's nothing wrong with that) and not the major release number that it's selling itself as.
I know where you're coming from but when I ran XP I found that it did need a reinstall about ever 8-12 months anyway. That disk crunching gets louder and longer and booting seems slower over time.
I can confirm that I refreshed continuously and got all of the keys you posted above also. They must just have that small pool. I guess it's no harm seeing as how it will expire in August anyway.
I found that funny myself. It seems they're happier to be too stubbornly proud to mention other OSes whereas if I was running the show I'd be only too glad to release statistics next week saying how many Linux and Mac users were willing to switch to my new beta.
Wouldn't that be far more valuable? I mean half of slashdot are downloading this while commenting here! I think Microsoft are afraid if they acknowledge the competition it will give them credibility
I don't want to sound cynical about this and I'm not trying to get laughs, but I think Windows 7 still is Vista. This time last year we were talking about Singularity and new kernels and all sorts of magic. Then Vista tanks and miraculously we're here with a beta of the next release being thrown out to anyone who will take it. Aside from a theme resembling KDE3 rendered with Aero and a cutback on UAC it smells funny.
I'm seriously thinking that the Mojave experiment may actually have been brought from the marketing department to the shelves.
and to the parents that don't teach their children how to cope with being bullied.
Bollocks . When mob mentality comes into it, you see how well you stand up against 15-20 people. It's starts with the leader of the cool gang, then it's the cool gang and then it's the people siding with the rest of them to keep on the good side.
It's amazing how one or two bad apples can turn the tables. It is not the Hollywood image of one bigger kid pushing people around - far from it. The big kids, much like bigger dogs, have nothing to prove.
Apologies for replying to myself but my first post doesn't read back the way I intended it to.
I would like something to be done about bullying as a whole, but I suspect that when implemented under the banner of cyber-bullying it will completely miss the point and will likely be doomed to failure. The emphasis on the 'cyber' aspect tells me it'll be cheap and ineffective technological measure when we could be using this opportunity to tackle bullying in the wider scheme.
As an Irish person I'm glad that something is being done about bullying. I was bullied at school a lot and when not being beaten was subject to horrendous psychological bullying.
The main point here though is that so-called "Cyber-bullying" is just bullying. Various organisations have been sensationalising this issue by prefixing [i]cyber[/i] and pretending it's a new issue. What about when I was receiving phone calls at all hours? Was that cyber-bullying? It was just called bullying in my day.
I really think that this whole issue is doing more to harm the reputation of the internet/computers/phones than it is to resolve the larger issue of bullying. All I expect to see from this is a large set of draconian yet ineffective restrictions placed around communication media and this is something that disgusts me for a lot of reasons.
No thanks. I get it often enough in the media without getting it here too. If ever there was an offtopic or flamebait comment it was the aforementioned. Just because it's commonplace does not make it acceptable.
Even if we overlook that "race" is a cultural concept not a scientific one[...]
That makes no excuse for bigotry, nor does it allow for discrimination.
That has to be absolute nonsense. Because it's Fionn Mac Cumhail or at worst in English it's Finn McCool. Even in medieval Irish it'd just have a few extra gh's or dh's...
In all the times I've heard and read the tales I've never seen it spelled like that
Yeah, thanks for maintaining old biases. I'm sure the Aussies get as much grief, but really let's keep that kind of borderline racist attitude off the table and stick to the intellectual and geeky stuff
Interesting as a fluent Irish speaker I am not familiar with Cuil or CÃil meaning knowledge or wisdom or anything similar. It does however mean curls, a goal (as in sports) or occasionally someone's behind - as it does in many languages. The thing is that leaving an 'i' in it means it would be genitive - not a standalone word but part of a reference or possesive case e.g. cÃl, mo chuid chÃil.
Back to the Irish/Aussie thing, a lot of the words you love and know as Australian are in fact rooted in Irish. Let's not forget that Australia was a prisoner colony and Irish being one of the biggest nuisances to the British Empire at the time, we tended to make up a sizeable portion of the population.
I wouldn't be all that surprised. Wood quality has always been a key factor in instruments. Even with electric guitars weight and density are considered a good thing. You'll find people complaining how heavy their Les Paul Custom is yet still play it for the sustain the extra weight provides. And Swamp Ash is a preferred material for Stratocasters and Telecasters because it is very hard while not being as heavy. High density again would provide for more fidelity in sound transfer.But hey, don't expect the science to devalue the old instruments. A '59 'Burst can still cost you $250,000.
Make an effort to parse it, they mean man-made chemicals. Oh I parse it just fine, the point I'm trying to make is that what innocently and with good intentions started out to mean man-made chemicals has unfortunately tarnished the word chemical. You talk about chemicals in the body and they'll shy away as if its a bad thing - though you may be talking about haemoglobin. You will hear people talking who have missed the point that carbon dioxide/monoxide levels are bad and instead choose to believe that carbon is one of the evils of the world and comes from exhaust pipes. Never mind that we are all carbon based ourselves, along with most of our diet.
Sure I understand but the problem now is that they don't understand yet are the ones doing the crusading.
Absolutely agree. The lack of general science knowledge outside of science students (and hey sometimes including science students) really make things hard for those in the know.
You'll hear your mother or someone from the older generation talk about the dangers of chemicals. What a completely abstract and misinformed outlook to have. What is a chemical? EVERYTHING. Water is a chemical. Sugar is a chemical. And of course the examples of toxic things in nature posted above.
I know that may sound pedantic in this forum but this is a point that needs to be made clearer to the 'Think of the children' brigade. I am all for controlling substances that are generally harmful...who isn't...but let's stop running around like headless chicken and get the job done the right way without scaremongering, gossip and chinese whispers.
Yep that is true, or at least it will be for the first few victims. But isn't that what the whole community thing is? If you post it to a Linux site and it's not what it purports to be then it will be pulled apart with the rage of a thousand nerds.
I know where you're coming from but the two arguments reenforce each other. An application won't just run itself. A user has to run it by hand. And to be prompted for a root password a process has to be running to do that. That won't magically happen either. So basically to become infected someone has to go to the trouble of getting the software, install/run it and then give it the root password.
Now I'm not saying that won't happen. Far from it. My argument is that we're away from automated attacks there and onto social engineering attacks. That's a different ballpark altogether. You don't even need a computer to fall victim to one of those...you may have the most secure computer in the world and get a 419 scam in on your fax machine or 'The Bank' calling to verify your account number.
So back to my point - the dragnet attacks aren't going to migrate to Unix systems with anywhere close to the success that they've had on Windows. No system - not even a Unix based one - is perfect, especially when the weakest point and the real target of the attack is the user.
Defaulting to an Administrator on unmanaged systems is in no way, shape, or form an "architectural" problem. I'm not sure I know what you mean. I was referring to the separation between user and administrator;how the system is locked down and away from users hands;deny-by-default and better enforced access controls. I would be interested in hearing what you meant, I just don't follow.
This barely even counts as a bump in the road. Just distribute your malware in a tarball. You'd have to go the social engineering route then. You'd need to convince someone to intentionally execute the contents. You can't be serious can you? That reminds me of the old joke about the Irish computer virus...you get a list of files to delete on your C: drive and a thank you with it.
There are a *lot* of scanners out there attempting automated exploits. I'm pretty sure that's what the GP was referring to. I don't think it's really fair to class them as "directed attacks". True, though as I said less distro are coming with default listening services and NAT makes these tools far less effective. The afflicted user would again need to
intentionally put themselves in that position. Take ssh for instance. Almost all of the tutorials I've read or come across walk through using random ports and using public/private keys...not to mention allowed hosts and/or domains. If you're taking the time to research and set up the port forwarding generally required
you will have already come across those key points several times.
Well it is not completly a windows problem. If people stop using windows then malware writters will make their stuff work on a different platform. Granted Windows Need to run as administrator to do some basic tasks makes it easer to do suff. But how many newbee Linux users run as root all the time. I really don't buy that targetted-system argument. It takes a lot more to damage a Unix-like system for architectural reasons. I can tell you first hand that every new user coming to linuxforums.org is given a good earbashing on why they shouldn't run as root and 99% accept the reasons and move on. With newbie-friendly distros like Ubuntu actually preventing you from logging in as root the number really dwindles. Logging in as root is something that users only do for the first couple of days until they learn better.
Also much of the malware takes advantages of social hacking making the person want to click to add and hit OK for the security alerts. Unix systems don't have execute-by-default permissions.
However if you leave a Linux server running unpached for a while chanses are someone will get in, I have seen that multible times even recently. There's a difference between a directed attack and the type of stuff most Windows users are experiencing. And even with that in mind a lot of distros don't run ssh or other listening services by default. Add to that in this day and age the majority of people are behind NAT routers which require you to specifically forward a port to gain access from the WAN
The main problem with windows is there are too many Windows users That's certainly motivation but that doesn't mean that a switch to Mac/Unix/Linux/BSD/whatever by all will let the malware follow with the same success.
a better security design (however more difficult to maintain) would have a more diverse set of systems. Windows, Unix, Linux, other... so when there is a problem it would be more difficult for it to spread. Glad we can agree!
It is easy to blame Windows but windows has actually gotten fairly secure over the past decade. And it is nowhere as bad as it use to be. I would certainly agree with this. I wouldn't switch back to Windows in a mad fit but I'll give them marks for effort.
Ah I see, that's quite interesting. I took you to mean you had it installed to your system hard disk.
Yep that would certainly mean that a reboot would solve almost anything. As long as you weren't sharing a system with another system that you could damage that would be a nice 'embedded' system, almost like running from a chroot or VM.
I'm glad to see this, and I had forgotten about the old engine. One of the first things I do on a new desktop is try to synchronise the desktop look and feel for Qt and GTK applications.
I use Gnome but I still prefer Amarok and K3b (as you mentioned) to any Gnome offering so it has helped give me a coherent desktop with a much more unified feel. I think I'd like this better as it wouldn't lock me to finding widget themes that are only available for both DEs.
I wouldn't be keen on that myself, that means your media player,browser or similar user application is on the same level as your system services. A similar situation to this is the root cause of problems in Windows in my opinion.
When you think about it, how often do you need to make system changes? I know I'm more busy using my PC than configuring it past the first hour or two of a fresh install.
Slashdot Mirror
Please ignore - posting to undo moderation mishap.
Nah that's not it. I would have scheduled a disk defragment every 6-8 weeks at the time. I found the culprit was installing and removing applications. Even after removing registry fluff and removing all of the startup nonsense from /CurrentVersion/Run you would still find that over time it got worse.
Logic would tell me that indeed it was a fragmented disk or leftover startup services/applications but a theory from a friend of mine was that it was registry growth that caused the problem. As a dba that made a lot of sense. I mean we don't have any maintenance plans and you can't unload/reload! The 3rd party commercical apps weren't much use for managing the registry either.
I do have it. Yep certainly it's not an actual build of Vista, as I mentioned the interface is slightly different for a start. My point was that Vista was to be a big rewrite and ended up falling short and now they've done it again. I would agree that it's not as bad as it is made out. In fact I'm a strong supporter of the UAC approach and have berated so-called power-users for wanting to turn it off. The same power-users whose PCs I'm am busy repairing most of the time.
My point was more along the lines that they didn't make a huge change in Vista, at least not to the extent promised and it looks like they won't be doing it this time either. The kernel is 6.1, which is a minor release. It is for the most part Vista with the few sore spots smoothed over.
Are you missing the main point that the issue of getting Windows 7 to market so quickly is because Vista was a failure? XP was on the streets for a hell of a lot longer before we saw a replacement, even in beta form. This is a marketing move (not that there's nothing wrong with that) and not the major release number that it's selling itself as.
I know where you're coming from but when I ran XP I found that it did need a reinstall about ever 8-12 months anyway. That disk crunching gets louder and longer and booting seems slower over time.
I can confirm that I refreshed continuously and got all of the keys you posted above also. They must just have that small pool. I guess it's no harm seeing as how it will expire in August anyway.
I found that funny myself. It seems they're happier to be too stubbornly proud to mention other OSes whereas if I was running the show I'd be only too glad to release statistics next week saying how many Linux and Mac users were willing to switch to my new beta.
Wouldn't that be far more valuable? I mean half of slashdot are downloading this while commenting here! I think Microsoft are afraid if they acknowledge the competition it will give them credibility
I don't want to sound cynical about this and I'm not trying to get laughs, but I think Windows 7 still is Vista. This time last year we were talking about Singularity and new kernels and all sorts of magic. Then Vista tanks and miraculously we're here with a beta of the next release being thrown out to anyone who will take it. Aside from a theme resembling KDE3 rendered with Aero and a cutback on UAC it smells funny.
I'm seriously thinking that the Mojave experiment may actually have been brought from the marketing department to the shelves.
and to the parents that don't teach their children how to cope with being bullied.
Bollocks . When mob mentality comes into it, you see how well you stand up against 15-20 people. It's starts with the leader of the cool gang, then it's the cool gang and then it's the people siding with the rest of them to keep on the good side.
It's amazing how one or two bad apples can turn the tables. It is not the Hollywood image of one bigger kid pushing people around - far from it. The big kids, much like bigger dogs, have nothing to prove.
Apologies for replying to myself but my first post doesn't read back the way I intended it to.
I would like something to be done about bullying as a whole, but I suspect that when implemented under the banner of cyber-bullying it will completely miss the point and will likely be doomed to failure. The emphasis on the 'cyber' aspect tells me it'll be cheap and ineffective technological measure when we could be using this opportunity to tackle bullying in the wider scheme.
As an Irish person I'm glad that something is being done about bullying. I was bullied at school a lot and when not being beaten was subject to horrendous psychological bullying.
The main point here though is that so-called "Cyber-bullying" is just bullying. Various organisations have been sensationalising this issue by prefixing [i]cyber[/i] and pretending it's a new issue. What about when I was receiving phone calls at all hours? Was that cyber-bullying? It was just called bullying in my day.
I really think that this whole issue is doing more to harm the reputation of the internet/computers/phones than it is to resolve the larger issue of bullying. All I expect to see from this is a large set of draconian yet ineffective restrictions placed around communication media and this is something that disgusts me for a lot of reasons.
Even if we overlook that "race" is a cultural concept not a scientific one[...]
That makes no excuse for bigotry, nor does it allow for discrimination.
from CNN's article: http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/28/technology/cuil.ap/index.htm?eref=rss_topstories
That has to be absolute nonsense. Because it's Fionn Mac Cumhail or at worst in English it's Finn McCool. Even in medieval Irish it'd just have a few extra gh's or dh's...
In all the times I've heard and read the tales I've never seen it spelled like that
Yeah, thanks for maintaining old biases. I'm sure the Aussies get as much grief, but really let's keep that kind of borderline racist attitude off the table and stick to the intellectual and geeky stuff
Interesting as a fluent Irish speaker I am not familiar with Cuil or CÃil meaning knowledge or wisdom or anything similar. It does however mean curls, a goal (as in sports) or occasionally someone's behind - as it does in many languages. The thing is that leaving an 'i' in it means it would be genitive - not a standalone word but part of a reference or possesive case e.g. cÃl, mo chuid chÃil.
Back to the Irish/Aussie thing, a lot of the words you love and know as Australian are in fact rooted in Irish. Let's not forget that Australia was a prisoner colony and Irish being one of the biggest nuisances to the British Empire at the time, we tended to make up a sizeable portion of the population.
I wouldn't be all that surprised. Wood quality has always been a key factor in instruments. Even with electric guitars weight and density are considered a good thing. You'll find people complaining how heavy their Les Paul Custom is yet still play it for the sustain the extra weight provides. And Swamp Ash is a preferred material for Stratocasters and Telecasters because it is very hard while not being as heavy. High density again would provide for more fidelity in sound transfer.But hey, don't expect the science to devalue the old instruments. A '59 'Burst can still cost you $250,000.
Actually GPRS is a 2.5G technology too. 2G was the introduction of digital networks, GSM for most of us.
Edge is technically faster than 2.5G.
Sure I understand but the problem now is that they don't understand yet are the ones doing the crusading.
Absolutely agree. The lack of general science knowledge outside of science students (and hey sometimes including science students) really make things hard for those in the know.
You'll hear your mother or someone from the older generation talk about the dangers of chemicals. What a completely abstract and misinformed outlook to have. What is a chemical? EVERYTHING. Water is a chemical. Sugar is a chemical. And of course the examples of toxic things in nature posted above.
I know that may sound pedantic in this forum but this is a point that needs to be made clearer to the 'Think of the children' brigade. I am all for controlling substances that are generally harmful...who isn't...but let's stop running around like headless chicken and get the job done the right way without scaremongering, gossip and chinese whispers.
Yep that is true, or at least it will be for the first few victims. But isn't that what the whole community thing is? If you post it to a Linux site and it's not what it purports to be then it will be pulled apart with the rage of a thousand nerds.
I know where you're coming from but the two arguments reenforce each other. An application won't just run itself. A user has to run it by hand. And to be prompted for a root password a process has to be running to do that. That won't magically happen either. So basically to become infected someone has to go to the trouble of getting the software, install/run it and then give it the root password.
Now I'm not saying that won't happen. Far from it. My argument is that we're away from automated attacks there and onto social engineering attacks. That's a different ballpark altogether. You don't even need a computer to fall victim to one of those...you may have the most secure computer in the world and get a 419 scam in on your fax machine or 'The Bank' calling to verify your account number.
So back to my point - the dragnet attacks aren't going to migrate to Unix systems with anywhere close to the success that they've had on Windows. No system - not even a Unix based one - is perfect, especially when the weakest point and the real target of the attack is the user.
Ah I see, that's quite interesting. I took you to mean you had it installed to your system hard disk.
Yep that would certainly mean that a reboot would solve almost anything. As long as you weren't sharing a system with another system that you could damage that would be a nice 'embedded' system, almost like running from a chroot or VM.
I'm glad to see this, and I had forgotten about the old engine. One of the first things I do on a new desktop is try to synchronise the desktop look and feel for Qt and GTK applications.
I use Gnome but I still prefer Amarok and K3b (as you mentioned) to any Gnome offering so it has helped give me a coherent desktop with a much more unified feel. I think I'd like this better as it wouldn't lock me to finding widget themes that are only available for both DEs.
I wouldn't be keen on that myself, that means your media player,browser or similar user application is on the same level as your system services. A similar situation to this is the root cause of problems in Windows in my opinion.
When you think about it, how often do you need to make system changes? I know I'm more busy using my PC than configuring it past the first hour or two of a fresh install.
You only need to get your WiFi card working once!
Doesn't Puppy run as root all of the time?