Well, the entire conceit is utterly unnecessary unless the two partitions are on two separate drives, anyway. XP and Vista are perfectly capable of "repair" installs.
So I still stand by "you're doing it wrong." Or at least "you're so paranoid you're doing stuff that's a waste of time."
Lightweight (under 1.5kg including the power supply), 12h+ REAL battery life, built-in 3G modem
That's unpossible.
It's a challenge to get 12 hours of battery life from even a minscule 3G cellphone display/system while keeping it lightweight, it would be impossible for something with a 9-12" screen. The sad fact is that 3G pulls a lot of power, and even netbooks without 3G can't pull-off 12 hours now. (You're lucky to get a third of that.) Basically, you want a fantasy fairy-dust powered computer.
On the other hand, what do you need 12 hours of battery life for? Do you never sleep? And do all your work in no-outlets-ville?
That set up their own directory in the Documents and Settings directory. That save their games in a directory named after the game in the My Documents directory. That save their games in a directory names after the game in the My Games directory.
All of those are "correct" (meaning, they follow Microsoft's recommendation, and they work in XP and Vista even for users with no admin privileges.)
It's a mess. Not only that more and more games are eating up my system partition space and in most cases can't be convinced to save elsewhere.
Wait, are you saying that your Documents and Settings folder is on your SYSTEM partition? You're doing it wrong, buddy.
Really, how many people share computers? This is a serious question BTW as we've not shared one here for three years now. I have a desktop and a laptop. Wife has a desktop. Seven year old son has one as well.
There's two parts to this question: 1) How many people share computers? (I don't know the answer to this) 2) The implied and whiny, "how come programs don't compensate for my retarded system partition scheme by removing all multi-user support?" To which the answer is: because supporting multiple users doesn't hurt anything. (Except for the one idiot who has it Documents and Settings folder on his system partition for some reason.)
Ok, so two Slashdotters won't buy it because they hate Microsoft. Then again, if they already hate Microsoft, they already don't have an Xbox or a Windows computer to run it on anyway, right?
Which leads immediately to an important issue: most people think they are above average. The "at least believe they do" is a critical piece of the puzzle: a lot of people who believe they have no incentive to join a union in fact would be far better off if they did.
Possibly, but it removes individual choice, and that's really what I object to. I wanted to be a school teacher when I was younger, but it's impossible to be a teacher in my state without belonging to the bloated, inefficient, and abusive union. Both of my parents (my mom a teacher; my dad a former teacher who moved into HR) begged me not to do it for that very reason, based on their own experience.
I'd have no problem with unions if you could be a teacher and also not belong to the union.
I'm a Java developer and DBA, and since I work for the government,
Which government? Which level? I used to work for a county hospital, and it sucked bad. That's my main experience of government work. Well, that, and going into a DMV and seeing how depressed everybody looks.
I get paid around 70K for a strict 9 to 5, monday through friday job, with NO OVERTIME REQUIRED,
Ok, I got that.
incredibly good health, dental, and vision plans,
I got that.
almost four weeks vacation per year,
Alas, I only have three.
PLUS five personal days,
Two personal days, plus three "company days" (normal work days the company gives us off). So I got that.
PLUS 2 1/2 weeks of sick leave,
We don't have a limit on our sick leave, as long as you make arrangements.
PLUS education benefits.
Got that. Also psych benefits. And quarterly expensive team activities (we did a seaplane tour last time, a cruise most recently), weekly "tiki bar" fridays, monthly happy hours, plus tons of ad-hoc celebrations for no reason at all. And cab vouchers, if you drink a bit too much.
And the agency buys me all my books. If I need software to get my work done, I ask my boss, and I get it, usually within a day.
Check and check.
my current project is a 31KLOC Java desktop application involving data processing and calculations.
Wow, data processing and calculations? (I think "data processing and calculations" describes every computer program ever written in history.)
I will say this: 1) You have a better cube than I do. 2) It sounds like you have a great job and enjoy where you work, but!: 3) I doubt many, if any, of the benefits you describe above are yours due to your union membership, 4) You didn't mention the amount of union dues you pay 5) You have a vastly, vastly, vastly, better job than 99.9% of government employees. You're literally the first government IT employee I've ever talked to or heard of who prefers that work to private sector work.
I am assuming you're talking about some US government, here, and I'm guessing Federal level? I have no idea what other nations' governments are like.
I'm a Java developer and DBA, and since I work for the government,
Which government? Which level? I used to work for a county hospital, and it sucked bad. That's my main experience of government work. Well, that, and going into a DMV and seeing how depressed everybody looks.
I get paid around 70K for a strict 9 to 5, monday through friday job, with NO OVERTIME REQUIRED,
Ok, I got that.
incredibly good health, dental, and vision plans,
I got that.
almost four weeks vacation per year,
Alas, I only have three.
PLUS five personal days,
Two personal days, plus three "company days" (normal work days the company gives us off). So I got that.
PLUS 2 1/2 weeks of sick leave,
We don't have a limit on our sick leave, as long as you make arrangements.
PLUS education benefits.
Got that. Also psych benefits. And quarterly expensive team activities (we did a seaplane tour last time, a cruise most recently), weekly "tiki bar" fridays, monthly happy hours, plus tons of ad-hoc celebrations for no reason at all. And cab vouchers, if you drink a bit too much.
And the agency buys me all my books. If I need software to get my work done, I ask my boss, and I get it, usually within a day.
Check and check.
my current project is a 31KLOC Java desktop application involving data processing and calculations.
Wow, data processing and calculations? (I think "data processing and calculations" describes every computer program ever written in history.)
I will say this: 1) You have a better cube than I do. 2) It sounds like you have a great job and enjoy where you work, but!: 3) I doubt many, if any, of the benefits you describe above are yours due to your union membership, 4) You didn't mention the amount of union dues you pay 5) You have a vastly, vastly, vastly, better job than 99.9% of government employees. You're literally the first government IT employee I've ever talked to or heard of who prefers that work to private sector work.
I am assuming you're talking about some US government, here, and I'm guessing Federal level? I have no idea what other nations' governments are like.
No thanks, I much prefer individual bargaining than collective bargaining. I'm making more money and working at a vastly cooler company than ANY unionized employee could possibly be.
McAllister writes. 'Sound familiar? In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.'"
No, it's looking more like Apple is taking a page from Apple (circa 1980s). This is the way Apple's always been: make application development hard, exert as much control as they reasonably can over the platform.
The last time I encountered a corrupted registry was in Windows 98. Either your information is way out-of-date, or you have the misfortune of working with particularly crappy computers. You're welcome to your opinion, but I think the benefits of the registry far overshadow the minuscule odds of it being corrupted in some non-recoverable way.
Then give me a set of reproducible steps to show me this "DRM."
I've asked for this several times from Slashdotters, but the "DRM" seems to be so elusive that nobody, NOBODY, knows how to actually get it to provide evidence it exists. Until I witness it working on my own computer, I'm shoving Vista DRM into the same category as bigfoot and the loch ness monster.
If you want to convince me there's DRM in Vista, PROVE IT TO ME by giving me the steps needed to get my computer to reveal it. Until that happens, let's stop posting this DRM crap.
Yeah, but when you think about the features it enables, I think those trade-offs are well worth it. (Although you're right that the obsession with GUIDs for practically *everything* is mystifying.)
The real point I'm trying to make is that most people who gripe about the registry, or even worse: write software that doesn't use it, have no clue what the registry actually does, what features it enables in Windows, etc. Without the registry, remote administration of a corporate network would be as hard as-- well, as hard as it is to do in OS X or Linux, really. The registry is *why* Active Directory is so popular. (You'll notice that its biggest competitor, Netware, also runs its own registry, for the same technical reasons.)
Programs like telnet are useful, have a minimal footprint, and there is no strong argument for removing them.
There's a strong SECURITY argument for removing it, actually. I'm sure you're one of those people who constantly gripes about Windows' crappy security, then when they take steps to improve it (removing telnet, UAC), you constantly gripe about that as well.
Look, you can install Telnet.exe in like 30 seconds using the "Add/Remove Windows Components" control panel if you really want it. The fact of the matter is, the less-than-1% of users who know what Telnet is and want to use it are all capable of running "Add/Remove Windows Components" (or Googling how to get it back). So do that, then you'll have your precious Telnet, and you can shut up about it.
As for PowerShell, I've used it and I think it's ugly, slow, and found using it to be just plain annoying.
So that you're opinion, but that doesn't say anything about the initial (wrong) complaint that Windows has no shell as powerful as BASH.
but I hope they think about what's necessary a little harder than they did when deciding to remove the telnet client from the default install of Vista.
They removed it because 99.99% of their customers have never used Telnet, and 98% of their users don't even know what Telnet is.
How about putting in some more useful utilities
Telnet surely doesn't meet the criteria of "useful". I hope you don't actually attempt to sell products in your line of work, because you seem to have a really skewed vision of the way most computer users actually behave in the real world.
and maybe a truly powerful CLI that can rival bash?
They already have one, it's called Monad. It's available in XP, too. You should try educating yourself before shoving your foot in your mouth.
The registry has lots of advantages over text-based configuration systems, especially on large networks that need central management. Raymond Chen, Windows guru, has written an article about this:
Frankly, at this point, calling the registry "bloat" is simply ignorance of what it actually does, and how it actually works. The registry is *the* reason that large companies use Windows.
Vista doesn't have DRM, unless you count "the ability to play DRM music in Windows Media Player" as DRM. I've been using Vista Ultimate since it came out, and I've never been restricted from doing anything, ever, by DRM... well, not by Microsoft, I've been hit by Apple's iTunes DRM a couple times.
Windows already has most of your suggestions implemented, the problem is that third-party developers generally ignore it.
There's: * The Application Error Reporter tool thing for reporting crashes (without making the user click through to a website, as in your example.) * The Error Console, a place for applications to record the technical nitty-gritty of the error without bothering the user with it. * Some amount of different "levels" of reporting, for example, the notification tray can be used to report non-fatal errors that never-the-less need reporting.
There's no real way to make a window type that "only" the OS can use. The malware authors would just open one up, take a screenshot and change the text. If you removed the ability to take screenshots, they'd just start up VNC first and do it.
Displaying something only the OS should know is an interesting idea... like let the users customize a window border by splattering paint and then it might be blatantly obvious which windows were their personal design, and which were fakes (different splatter pattern and different colors.) Has anybody seen anything like that implemented?
Of course I'm actually overthinking this; most people would still click malicious popups even if they only remotely looked like real windows at all.
It's worse in the Seattle area, as you have to compete with Microsoft. MS has a tendency to snatch-up anybody entering the marketplace who's even remotely competent, leaving the dregs to the other tech companies in the area.
Thank God for brainwashed Apple and open source users who would rather cut off their own foot than work for BillG, that's the only way we get decent employees. (Half-kidding.)
The electoral college gives states the right to select the President any way they wish. Sure, at the moment, it's done by ballot in every state, but there's no dictate that it *has* to be done that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the entire conceit is utterly unnecessary unless the two partitions are on two separate drives, anyway. XP and Vista are perfectly capable of "repair" installs.
So I still stand by "you're doing it wrong." Or at least "you're so paranoid you're doing stuff that's a waste of time."
There are a million forums and threads dedicated to the financial situation, go to one of those. Christ.
Lightweight (under 1.5kg including the power supply), 12h+ REAL battery life, built-in 3G modem
That's unpossible.
It's a challenge to get 12 hours of battery life from even a minscule 3G cellphone display/system while keeping it lightweight, it would be impossible for something with a 9-12" screen. The sad fact is that 3G pulls a lot of power, and even netbooks without 3G can't pull-off 12 hours now. (You're lucky to get a third of that.) Basically, you want a fantasy fairy-dust powered computer.
On the other hand, what do you need 12 hours of battery life for? Do you never sleep? And do all your work in no-outlets-ville?
The technology is in place, DirectX definitely supports it no problem, the crapshoot is whether the game developer decided to add it in.
That set up their own directory in the Documents and Settings directory.
That save their games in a directory named after the game in the My Documents directory.
That save their games in a directory names after the game in the My Games directory.
All of those are "correct" (meaning, they follow Microsoft's recommendation, and they work in XP and Vista even for users with no admin privileges.)
It's a mess. Not only that more and more games are eating up my system partition space and in most cases can't be convinced to save elsewhere.
Wait, are you saying that your Documents and Settings folder is on your SYSTEM partition? You're doing it wrong, buddy.
Really, how many people share computers? This is a serious question BTW as we've not shared one here for three years now. I have a desktop and a laptop. Wife has a desktop. Seven year old son has one as well.
There's two parts to this question:
1) How many people share computers? (I don't know the answer to this)
2) The implied and whiny, "how come programs don't compensate for my retarded system partition scheme by removing all multi-user support?" To which the answer is: because supporting multiple users doesn't hurt anything. (Except for the one idiot who has it Documents and Settings folder on his system partition for some reason.)
Ok, so two Slashdotters won't buy it because they hate Microsoft. Then again, if they already hate Microsoft, they already don't have an Xbox or a Windows computer to run it on anyway, right?
Dude, that was 27 years ago. You really need to get over it, ok? Move on to how Bush stole the 2000 election from Gore, that's pretty timely. :)
Which leads immediately to an important issue: most people think they are above average. The "at least believe they do" is a critical piece of the puzzle: a lot of people who believe they have no incentive to join a union in fact would be far better off if they did.
Possibly, but it removes individual choice, and that's really what I object to. I wanted to be a school teacher when I was younger, but it's impossible to be a teacher in my state without belonging to the bloated, inefficient, and abusive union. Both of my parents (my mom a teacher; my dad a former teacher who moved into HR) begged me not to do it for that very reason, based on their own experience.
I'd have no problem with unions if you could be a teacher and also not belong to the union.
I'm a Java developer and DBA, and since I work for the government,
Which government? Which level? I used to work for a county hospital, and it sucked bad. That's my main experience of government work. Well, that, and going into a DMV and seeing how depressed everybody looks.
I get paid around 70K for a strict 9 to 5, monday through friday job, with NO OVERTIME REQUIRED,
Ok, I got that.
incredibly good health, dental, and vision plans,
I got that.
almost four weeks vacation per year,
Alas, I only have three.
PLUS five personal days,
Two personal days, plus three "company days" (normal work days the company gives us off). So I got that.
PLUS 2 1/2 weeks of sick leave,
We don't have a limit on our sick leave, as long as you make arrangements.
PLUS education benefits.
Got that. Also psych benefits. And quarterly expensive team activities (we did a seaplane tour last time, a cruise most recently), weekly "tiki bar" fridays, monthly happy hours, plus tons of ad-hoc celebrations for no reason at all. And cab vouchers, if you drink a bit too much.
And the agency buys me all my books. If I need software to get my work done, I ask my boss, and I get it, usually within a day.
Check and check.
my current project is a 31KLOC Java desktop application involving data processing and calculations.
Wow, data processing and calculations? (I think "data processing and calculations" describes every computer program ever written in history.)
I will say this:
1) You have a better cube than I do.
2) It sounds like you have a great job and enjoy where you work, but!:
3) I doubt many, if any, of the benefits you describe above are yours due to your union membership,
4) You didn't mention the amount of union dues you pay
5) You have a vastly, vastly, vastly, better job than 99.9% of government employees. You're literally the first government IT employee I've ever talked to or heard of who prefers that work to private sector work.
I am assuming you're talking about some US government, here, and I'm guessing Federal level? I have no idea what other nations' governments are like.
I'm a Java developer and DBA, and since I work for the government,
Which government? Which level? I used to work for a county hospital, and it sucked bad. That's my main experience of government work. Well, that, and going into a DMV and seeing how depressed everybody looks.
I get paid around 70K for a strict 9 to 5, monday through friday job, with NO OVERTIME REQUIRED,
Ok, I got that.
incredibly good health, dental, and vision plans,
I got that.
almost four weeks vacation per year,
Alas, I only have three.
PLUS five personal days,
Two personal days, plus three "company days" (normal work days the company gives us off). So I got that.
PLUS 2 1/2 weeks of sick leave,
We don't have a limit on our sick leave, as long as you make arrangements.
PLUS education benefits.
Got that. Also psych benefits. And quarterly expensive team activities (we did a seaplane tour last time, a cruise most recently), weekly "tiki bar" fridays, monthly happy hours, plus tons of ad-hoc celebrations for no reason at all. And cab vouchers, if you drink a bit too much.
And the agency buys me all my books. If I need software to get my work done, I ask my boss, and I get it, usually within a day.
Check and check.
my current project is a 31KLOC Java desktop application involving data processing and calculations.
Wow, data processing and calculations? (I think "data processing and calculations" describes every computer program ever written in history.)
I will say this:
1) You have a better cube than I do.
2) It sounds like you have a great job and enjoy where you work, but!:
3) I doubt many, if any, of the benefits you describe above are yours due to your union membership,
4) You didn't mention the amount of union dues you pay
5) You have a vastly, vastly, vastly, better job than 99.9% of government employees. You're literally the first government IT employee I've ever talked to or heard of who prefers that work to private sector work.
I am assuming you're talking about some US government, here, and I'm guessing Federal level? I have no idea what other nations' governments are like.
No thanks, I much prefer individual bargaining than collective bargaining. I'm making more money and working at a vastly cooler company than ANY unionized employee could possibly be.
I was wondering the same thing. Could somebody please define the term "Microsoft-y?"
McAllister writes. 'Sound familiar? In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.'"
No, it's looking more like Apple is taking a page from Apple (circa 1980s). This is the way Apple's always been: make application development hard, exert as much control as they reasonably can over the platform.
The last time I encountered a corrupted registry was in Windows 98. Either your information is way out-of-date, or you have the misfortune of working with particularly crappy computers. You're welcome to your opinion, but I think the benefits of the registry far overshadow the minuscule odds of it being corrupted in some non-recoverable way.
Then give me a set of reproducible steps to show me this "DRM."
I've asked for this several times from Slashdotters, but the "DRM" seems to be so elusive that nobody, NOBODY, knows how to actually get it to provide evidence it exists. Until I witness it working on my own computer, I'm shoving Vista DRM into the same category as bigfoot and the loch ness monster.
If you want to convince me there's DRM in Vista, PROVE IT TO ME by giving me the steps needed to get my computer to reveal it. Until that happens, let's stop posting this DRM crap.
Yeah, but when you think about the features it enables, I think those trade-offs are well worth it. (Although you're right that the obsession with GUIDs for practically *everything* is mystifying.)
The real point I'm trying to make is that most people who gripe about the registry, or even worse: write software that doesn't use it, have no clue what the registry actually does, what features it enables in Windows, etc. Without the registry, remote administration of a corporate network would be as hard as-- well, as hard as it is to do in OS X or Linux, really. The registry is *why* Active Directory is so popular. (You'll notice that its biggest competitor, Netware, also runs its own registry, for the same technical reasons.)
Programs like telnet are useful, have a minimal footprint, and there is no strong argument for removing them.
There's a strong SECURITY argument for removing it, actually. I'm sure you're one of those people who constantly gripes about Windows' crappy security, then when they take steps to improve it (removing telnet, UAC), you constantly gripe about that as well.
Look, you can install Telnet.exe in like 30 seconds using the "Add/Remove Windows Components" control panel if you really want it. The fact of the matter is, the less-than-1% of users who know what Telnet is and want to use it are all capable of running "Add/Remove Windows Components" (or Googling how to get it back). So do that, then you'll have your precious Telnet, and you can shut up about it.
As for PowerShell, I've used it and I think it's ugly, slow, and found using it to be just plain annoying.
So that you're opinion, but that doesn't say anything about the initial (wrong) complaint that Windows has no shell as powerful as BASH.
but I hope they think about what's necessary a little harder than they did when deciding to remove the telnet client from the default install of Vista.
They removed it because 99.99% of their customers have never used Telnet, and 98% of their users don't even know what Telnet is.
How about putting in some more useful utilities
Telnet surely doesn't meet the criteria of "useful". I hope you don't actually attempt to sell products in your line of work, because you seem to have a really skewed vision of the way most computer users actually behave in the real world.
and maybe a truly powerful CLI that can rival bash?
They already have one, it's called Monad. It's available in XP, too. You should try educating yourself before shoving your foot in your mouth.
The registry has lots of advantages over text-based configuration systems, especially on large networks that need central management. Raymond Chen, Windows guru, has written an article about this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907.aspx
Frankly, at this point, calling the registry "bloat" is simply ignorance of what it actually does, and how it actually works. The registry is *the* reason that large companies use Windows.
Vista doesn't have DRM, unless you count "the ability to play DRM music in Windows Media Player" as DRM. I've been using Vista Ultimate since it came out, and I've never been restricted from doing anything, ever, by DRM... well, not by Microsoft, I've been hit by Apple's iTunes DRM a couple times.
Let's stop spreading this crap.
It loses some impact when the family was born with superpowers they didn't do crap to earn.
Windows already has most of your suggestions implemented, the problem is that third-party developers generally ignore it.
There's:
* The Application Error Reporter tool thing for reporting crashes (without making the user click through to a website, as in your example.)
* The Error Console, a place for applications to record the technical nitty-gritty of the error without bothering the user with it.
* Some amount of different "levels" of reporting, for example, the notification tray can be used to report non-fatal errors that never-the-less need reporting.
There's no real way to make a window type that "only" the OS can use. The malware authors would just open one up, take a screenshot and change the text. If you removed the ability to take screenshots, they'd just start up VNC first and do it.
Displaying something only the OS should know is an interesting idea... like let the users customize a window border by splattering paint and then it might be blatantly obvious which windows were their personal design, and which were fakes (different splatter pattern and different colors.) Has anybody seen anything like that implemented?
Of course I'm actually overthinking this; most people would still click malicious popups even if they only remotely looked like real windows at all.
Yup.
Informative?
A guy suggesting, seriously as far as I can work out, that you can replace Outlook with TELNET! is marked "informative?"
It's worse in the Seattle area, as you have to compete with Microsoft. MS has a tendency to snatch-up anybody entering the marketplace who's even remotely competent, leaving the dregs to the other tech companies in the area.
Thank God for brainwashed Apple and open source users who would rather cut off their own foot than work for BillG, that's the only way we get decent employees. (Half-kidding.)
The electoral college gives states the right to select the President any way they wish. Sure, at the moment, it's done by ballot in every state, but there's no dictate that it *has* to be done that way.