Also interesting to note this hack works only with Vista but not XP or earlier versions of Windows. Why would Microsoft go out of its way to make a system less secure?
What makes you think Microsoft went "out of its way" to make this work? What makes you think it was simply an oversight, or a missing test-case? (Or maybe they never even thought of it and it was dumb luck it didn't work in previous versions. Who knows?)
Does Vista run on a 32bit RISC G4 1.42 Ghz Processor, 1 Gig installed laptop grade RAM with ALL features enabled? That is what I do with the Mini G4.
Probably, but they don't sell that version. (2000 and XP had RISC ports, and Xbox 360 uses the PPC CPU, so they've almost certainly ported to it.)
It'll certainly run fine on an equivalent 32-bit x86 processor with 1 GB RAM and all the features enabled. You might want more RAM to multitask, but I'm guessing you probably want more RAM in your Mac Mini also.
With Vista, UAC pops up when I try to run most programs, delete icons from the desktop, or do just about anything else.
Most of your programs are writing to files or registry hives they shouldn't be writing to, i.e. they're buggy. They were buggy in Windows XP and 2000, also, the only difference is that now Microsoft is telling you they're buggy.
delete icons from the desktop,
Your buggy programs are putting their icons on the All Users desktop, not your personal desktop. This is normal if you select "Install for All Users" when installing them, if not, then they're buggy.
Does Linux not have the concept of each user having their own desktop? OS X certainly does. I don't understand why this would be confusing to anybody reading Slashdot.
or do just about anything else.
Only "anything else" that affects the entire system and not just your own user account.
I think you're mostly blaming Vista for telling you that you run buggy apps. If you were running Windows XP as a normal user, you'd have the exact same problems with the exact same bugs.
I don't even have problems with UAC. I think people knee-jerk against it since it comes up so often early after they install. (While you're installing all your programs, yes, you'll see UAC prompts a lot. If you use a lot of poorly-coded older programs that try to write to protected areas, you'll see it a lot.) Once your software is installed, I find that UAC actually is a reliable indicator that "hey something could be very wrong here" and I find it useful.
Now that you have everything you use already installed, you should try turning UAC back on and re-assessing how you feel about it. I think it's a useful feature, personally.
I also agree that the hatred for Vista is almost entirely coming from people who have never used it, especially on this site. (You still frequently see screeds against Microsoft Bob, a product that was on store shelves for about 6 months over 12 years ago. LET IT GO ALREADY!)
enhanced GPSs that keep tabs on tractors and trailers, and safety systems which issue warnings or even take action to help drivers avoid an accident -- all working in real time.
As opposed to what?
Alert! Alert! You are about to get into an accident, 5 hours ago when this data was collected! Take immediate evasive action 5 hours ago!
It seems reasonable that droids might not be considered sentient life forms. Or rather, the attitude might not be reasonable, but it's plausible that Star Wars society might take that attitude.
Could be. A single throwaway line of dialog to explain it would have been much, much appreciated-- I'd been annoyed at a lack of explanation for that since the original movies, and it drives me batty that Lucas decided to "explain" how The Force works and neglected to ever explain what the deal is with droids.
Couple more things to reply to, since I'm not getting any work done today anyway:
You'll like the Clone Wars cartoons, then. He was even more badass then -- by Ep III, he'd been severely injured.
I couldn't stand the animation style. I didn't get very far in without giving up. Plus the irritant that the "episodes" were like 5 minutes long.
Are droids slaves? Some appear to be free-willed, at least. Could be both.
In Mos Eisley, Amidala makes a huge deal that it's one of the last remaining planets where slavery is legal, the Republic banned it everywhere under its control. So were droids excepted from this law? The ship captain who raised Leia used R2 and C3PO as slaves, definitely, and he wasn't in Mos Eisley.
That was one of the larger problems I had with it -- unavoidable, but still. The prequels had absurdly more advanced tech than the original series. There's an explanation for this, but it's still weird.
See, now that didn't bother me. The Imperial ships were all clean and shiny and looked pretty much like all the prequel ships looked. The "dirty" ships were ships like the Falcon, Slave I, the Hutt sail-barge, some of the Rebel Fleet (although other ships in it looked to be in good shape, like Ackbar's.) The Falcon and Slave I are 30+ years old, so those would be worn and dirty. You could easily argue that things like the Falcon's hyperdrive being a big lever and having banks of little lights was an improvisation or uncompleted repair made at one point. The use of plastic buttons in the Imperial ships could just be a cost-cutting measure, or any dozens of other explanations. The Rebel Fleet is probably very hard to maintain and keep running, considering the Empires owns the vast majority of shipyards, thus it would also have unpainted ships and improvised repairs.
The actual technology level was the same: holograms had the same fuzzy appearance, blasters and droids looked and worked identically. I always figured in the Star Wars universe they hit some plateau of technology that nobody has been able to really innovate past-- they can build little hovering scout droids, but they've never invented teleportation, for example. (Especially if you play the games like Knights of the Old Republic, which takes place something like 2,000 years before the movies, and the technology level is still the exact same as in the movies!)
Except for the part where R2, who is in all of them, actually has fewer gadgets later on.
This is a case where a limitation (the prop guy saying "no way, we can't pull that off") actually makes the final product better. The CGI guys have (virtually) no limit to the kind of crap that can pop-out of R2, and so crap constantly pops out of him.
I actually re-watched the "new" trilogy recently, mostly because I wanted to see if Phantom Menace was as bad as: 1) I remembered (the answer is no) 2) Everybody says it was (also no)
With a bit of editing, the movie could have been at least as good as Return of the Jedi. I still have a lot of gripes, though:
1) The "new" trilogy doesn't have a consistent villain, unless you count Palpatine. (Except the naive viewer won't know Palpatine is a villain until the third movie; in the first movie, he's simply the Senator from Naboo.) It was really, really disappointing that Darth Maul was just, bam, dead. Bye-bye Sith. It didn't help that the character was hardly even a character; maybe one speaking line, hired stunt-man instead of an actor, etc. Darth Vader had twenty times more dialog in the A New Hope. (I don't know who invented Grievious, but I really really liked that character in Episode III and I think it would have been great if he was *the* villain throughout the trilogy. He was strong, scary, had killed Jedi before, and was more than a little crazy (smashing out the window and walking along the outside of the ship to escape.) Good combo.)
2) The raceway announcer. The pod racers *were* a good action sequence, if only Lucas had cut or replaced that two-headed announcer guy from it. He wasn't funny, he contributed nothing to the plot (except explaining some things about the race that could easily have been better done by Wato, Amidala, C3PO, or anybody really. Even Jar-Jar was watching.)
3) Mitichlorians. Everybody's talked about this, but if your movie has magic (and, yes, the Force is magic), MAKE IT BE MAGIC! Don't try to explain it with science, or just looks stupid. (Take your que from, say Star Trek with never attempted to explain exactly how their artificial gravity actually worked; it would be a stupid explanation because it can't possibly work, and we all know that.)
4) The scene where Anakin blows up the ONE ship with the droid safety trigger with a lucky shot. I was actually ok with him fumbling into the battle, as long as you assume R2 was doing most of the actual driving (the movie never makes it clear how much R2 was doing and how much Anakin was), but: A) How did he get through the shield when all the other Naboo fighters couldn't dent it? IIRC, they never answered this, he just somehow magically was through. They even put in a line of dialog from the Naboo pilots saying "how'd he do that?" Cripes, Lucas, don't point out to the audience that it doesn't make sense! B) Why is the main power generator for a battleship IN THE DOCKING BAY? That one makes my head hurt. Even for a ship that never, ever would be attacked it makes no sense; a bad landing could blow the whole ship up.
5) It would have been nice if one of these movies explained some things. How come Gungans have no representation in the Senate? (At least, not until the second movie when Jar-Jar joins.) Are droids slaves? Some appear to be free-willed, at least. Where does R2 keep the 24 new gadgets he seems to have every movie, and who refills his rocket-fuel?
The good things: The special effects were good, and I mean really convincingly good. Except for a couple cheesy moments, the action sequences, also, were good. The art design was simply brilliant. I loved everything about the Gungan army and the droid army.
This post is way too long, but the short story is that the movie is not nearly as bad as people say it was. "Not meeting expectations" is not the same thing as "crappy movie." Additionally, with only a small amount of editing (the points I mentioned above), it could have been made much, much better.
Excuse me for the psychological response, but do you literally believe what you've just typed? Specifically:
In the UK, I can say "Gordon Brown is a noxious prick" without any legal repercussions. If I was in the US, I couldn't say that about George W Bush without being arrested.
Do you honestly and truly believe that?
Have you ever seen a TV show made in the US? They make fun of Bush all the time, saying a lot worse things than "noxious prick." Pick any random late-night show, especially if they have one of those blow-hard Hollywood celebs as a guest (like Tim Robbins) and see what they call Bush on it. And that's aired to millions of people on a daily basis!
If you truly believe that posting you just made, you have to be delusional. Or extremely ignorant of the US. If it were illegal to say "George Bush is a noxious prick" the entire population of San Francisco would be in prison or court.
Windows has a bunch of HP drivers built-in. All the HP "PCL" printers basically speak the same language, so selecting a similar printer model is going to work correctly 99% of the time. For when it doesn't, backtrack to the earliest of that model-line (for example, a LaserJet II or Deskjet 510. I don't remember the specific models, but I think those are the oldest ones built-in to Windows.) You might get lower res, but it'll usually work.
Using actual HP drivers are a waste of time; they're crap.
Paint.NET suffers from update-itis also. At least I don't have to click the most recent version on a webpage, though. But it still has to download, completely uninstall itself, then reinstall itself before I can look at the damned image, and it has one of these updates every week it seems like. (And they're all minor, like 0.0.0.1.)
My favorite thing about Quicktime is how it somehow maliciously registers itself as the *only* way Internet Explorer can view a PNG image. Apparently Apple didn't get the memo about IE7. So click a http://test.com/test.png link and be prepared to wait half an hour while Quicktime does-- whatever the hell it does. Then when it finally shows the image, there's no way to resize or save it like you can with a JPG or GIF.
But it gets better. Quicktime also tries to auto-update itself when it detects a newer version. But apparently the IE plug-in writers didn't get the memo that Quicktime can run GUI-less as a PNG viewer inside IE. So while you're trying to view a PNG, what you actually get is a dialog saying "do you want to update Quicktime?" which is attached to no windows and impossible to answer without force-quitting IE. Most of this time this dialog opens *behind* the IE window.
As far as I can tell it's impossible to turn off this "helpful" feature in Quicktime's or IE's options.
Apple software (on Windows at least) just bites. I was actually pleasantly surprised by Safari, not because it's all that good, but because it's not a giant ball of crap like Quicktime and iTunes are. (I won't get into iTunes; I have work to do. Suffice it to say that Microsoft's Zune might be popular, but the software runs a dozen times better than iTunes.)
Only when they harass me on my way home from work to some some idiotic petition or another. I always just ask if Greenpeace is still opposed to nuclear power, and if they say yes, I keep walking. Haven't had to listen to them yet.
But the point is, if HP puts it there when you buy the computer (and yes I'm calling out HP by name: my HP laptop had orders of magnitude more of that shit installed than any Dell I've ever bought), the user's not going to remove it unless they're pretty technical. And technical users probably aren't running this anti-spyware tool, anyway. So suddenly every single HP PC sold it marked as having spyware, giving their numbers a huge boost.
Of course it complicates things, seeing as Wild Tangent is actually spyware. But you can't necessarily blame the user for it being on there, and you certainly can't blame Microsoft if their OEMs pre-load spyware on the machines. In this case, it would say absolutely nothing about Windows security, since the OEM purposefully bypassed the security to load it on.
(Microsoft could try a campaign to get more control over what software is shipped with Windows computers, and then you could watch Slashdot go crazy about how evil they are. It's a no-win for them.)
P.S. Why the hell is HP still in business? Their computers are loaded to the gills with so much crap that they take 3 hours to boot the first time (I wish that was an exaggeration!). And when you put in the Windows CD to restore a clean system, HP slipstreamed the crap on the Windows CD too! And these guys are selling more computers than Dell? Do customers just like abuse?
I'd love it if these anti-spyware companies would actually educate users on what exactly cookies are and what they're used for, instead of just decreeing that they are spyware and deleting them.
Of course, when they declare they're spyware, suddenly their tool finds 200 pieces of "spyware" on every computer! Look how effective it is!
They continue to ignore the issue, though. In Vista, from what I hear, file copy has actually gotten worse.
Ugh! I hate people who haven't even used Vista telling people how crummy Vista is. What city do you live in? I've never been there but I hear it's a giant ball of suck!
Anyway, you'll be happy to hear that whoever told you that is a filthy liar and you should kick them in the shins. Vista fixes the bug you mentioned.
That all said, I've had the same complaint about Windows for a long time. But Windows isn't/wasn't the only OS with the same problem-- I've been a long-time Mac user, and Apple's had the same bug for ages as well. (I think it was finally fixed in OS X, been awhile since I used a Mac though.)
Unix-like systems (with the exception of MAC OS X, which frightens me a bit) are heading here. Intrusion alert systems coupled with execution limiting, role based security systems (apparmor and selinex).
Apple realizes that OS X has, as a significant share of its market, this thing called "normal people." "Normal people," in case you've never encountered one before, have no clue how to use any of the stuff you just outlined above.
The real issue at hand here is the following:
1) The OS has to ask the user whether they want to run the code. This is true regardless of the certainty the OS has that the code is unsafe. (There's an exception for items that are known to be 100% unsafe, but of course we're already doing that in every OS.)
2) Because of this, the user can choose to run unsafe code.
Nothing in Linux solves this. Nothing in OS X solves this. Nothing in Windows solves this. It's possible that there's nothing any OS can possibly do to solve this.
To me, core tenants of civil disobedience are: 1) You admit that you're breaking the law openly 2) You're willing to accept the punishment for it
If you're hunched over in your basement watching pirated movies, you're doing neither of those.
I don't considering pirating movies as "civil disobedience," I consider it "being greedy." The civil disobedience is just a rationalization that pirates happen to often use. (Some others: "it's not illegal if I don't keep it for more than 48 hours" "the company that made it went out of business anyway".)
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Also interesting to note this hack works only with Vista but not XP or earlier versions of Windows. Why would Microsoft go out of its way to make a system less secure?
What makes you think Microsoft went "out of its way" to make this work? What makes you think it was simply an oversight, or a missing test-case? (Or maybe they never even thought of it and it was dumb luck it didn't work in previous versions. Who knows?)
Does Vista run on a 32bit RISC G4 1.42 Ghz Processor, 1 Gig installed laptop grade RAM with ALL features enabled? That is what I do with the Mini G4.
Probably, but they don't sell that version. (2000 and XP had RISC ports, and Xbox 360 uses the PPC CPU, so they've almost certainly ported to it.)
It'll certainly run fine on an equivalent 32-bit x86 processor with 1 GB RAM and all the features enabled. You might want more RAM to multitask, but I'm guessing you probably want more RAM in your Mac Mini also.
This is a large site, and the people running Vista are, by definition, not the same people as the ones running Unix.
It's impossible to use TWO operating systems!!!
With Vista, UAC pops up when I try to run most programs, delete icons from the desktop, or do just about anything else.
Most of your programs are writing to files or registry hives they shouldn't be writing to, i.e. they're buggy. They were buggy in Windows XP and 2000, also, the only difference is that now Microsoft is telling you they're buggy.
delete icons from the desktop,
Your buggy programs are putting their icons on the All Users desktop, not your personal desktop. This is normal if you select "Install for All Users" when installing them, if not, then they're buggy.
Does Linux not have the concept of each user having their own desktop? OS X certainly does. I don't understand why this would be confusing to anybody reading Slashdot.
or do just about anything else.
Only "anything else" that affects the entire system and not just your own user account.
I think you're mostly blaming Vista for telling you that you run buggy apps. If you were running Windows XP as a normal user, you'd have the exact same problems with the exact same bugs.
I don't even have problems with UAC. I think people knee-jerk against it since it comes up so often early after they install. (While you're installing all your programs, yes, you'll see UAC prompts a lot. If you use a lot of poorly-coded older programs that try to write to protected areas, you'll see it a lot.) Once your software is installed, I find that UAC actually is a reliable indicator that "hey something could be very wrong here" and I find it useful.
Now that you have everything you use already installed, you should try turning UAC back on and re-assessing how you feel about it. I think it's a useful feature, personally.
I also agree that the hatred for Vista is almost entirely coming from people who have never used it, especially on this site. (You still frequently see screeds against Microsoft Bob, a product that was on store shelves for about 6 months over 12 years ago. LET IT GO ALREADY!)
enhanced GPSs that keep tabs on tractors and trailers, and safety systems which issue warnings or even take action to help drivers avoid an accident -- all working in real time.
As opposed to what?
Alert! Alert! You are about to get into an accident, 5 hours ago when this data was collected! Take immediate evasive action 5 hours ago!
It seems reasonable that droids might not be considered sentient life forms. Or rather, the attitude might not be reasonable, but it's plausible that Star Wars society might take that attitude.
Could be. A single throwaway line of dialog to explain it would have been much, much appreciated-- I'd been annoyed at a lack of explanation for that since the original movies, and it drives me batty that Lucas decided to "explain" how The Force works and neglected to ever explain what the deal is with droids.
Couple more things to reply to, since I'm not getting any work done today anyway:
You'll like the Clone Wars cartoons, then. He was even more badass then -- by Ep III, he'd been severely injured.
I couldn't stand the animation style. I didn't get very far in without giving up. Plus the irritant that the "episodes" were like 5 minutes long.
Are droids slaves? Some appear to be free-willed, at least.
Could be both.
In Mos Eisley, Amidala makes a huge deal that it's one of the last remaining planets where slavery is legal, the Republic banned it everywhere under its control. So were droids excepted from this law? The ship captain who raised Leia used R2 and C3PO as slaves, definitely, and he wasn't in Mos Eisley.
That was one of the larger problems I had with it -- unavoidable, but still. The prequels had absurdly more advanced tech than the original series. There's an explanation for this, but it's still weird.
See, now that didn't bother me. The Imperial ships were all clean and shiny and looked pretty much like all the prequel ships looked. The "dirty" ships were ships like the Falcon, Slave I, the Hutt sail-barge, some of the Rebel Fleet (although other ships in it looked to be in good shape, like Ackbar's.) The Falcon and Slave I are 30+ years old, so those would be worn and dirty. You could easily argue that things like the Falcon's hyperdrive being a big lever and having banks of little lights was an improvisation or uncompleted repair made at one point. The use of plastic buttons in the Imperial ships could just be a cost-cutting measure, or any dozens of other explanations. The Rebel Fleet is probably very hard to maintain and keep running, considering the Empires owns the vast majority of shipyards, thus it would also have unpainted ships and improvised repairs.
The actual technology level was the same: holograms had the same fuzzy appearance, blasters and droids looked and worked identically. I always figured in the Star Wars universe they hit some plateau of technology that nobody has been able to really innovate past-- they can build little hovering scout droids, but they've never invented teleportation, for example. (Especially if you play the games like Knights of the Old Republic, which takes place something like 2,000 years before the movies, and the technology level is still the exact same as in the movies!)
Except for the part where R2, who is in all of them, actually has fewer gadgets later on.
This is a case where a limitation (the prop guy saying "no way, we can't pull that off") actually makes the final product better. The CGI guys have (virtually) no limit to the kind of crap that can pop-out of R2, and so crap constantly pops out of him.
Thanks for the reply.
I actually re-watched the "new" trilogy recently, mostly because I wanted to see if Phantom Menace was as bad as:
1) I remembered (the answer is no)
2) Everybody says it was (also no)
With a bit of editing, the movie could have been at least as good as Return of the Jedi. I still have a lot of gripes, though:
1) The "new" trilogy doesn't have a consistent villain, unless you count Palpatine. (Except the naive viewer won't know Palpatine is a villain until the third movie; in the first movie, he's simply the Senator from Naboo.) It was really, really disappointing that Darth Maul was just, bam, dead. Bye-bye Sith. It didn't help that the character was hardly even a character; maybe one speaking line, hired stunt-man instead of an actor, etc. Darth Vader had twenty times more dialog in the A New Hope. (I don't know who invented Grievious, but I really really liked that character in Episode III and I think it would have been great if he was *the* villain throughout the trilogy. He was strong, scary, had killed Jedi before, and was more than a little crazy (smashing out the window and walking along the outside of the ship to escape.) Good combo.)
2) The raceway announcer. The pod racers *were* a good action sequence, if only Lucas had cut or replaced that two-headed announcer guy from it. He wasn't funny, he contributed nothing to the plot (except explaining some things about the race that could easily have been better done by Wato, Amidala, C3PO, or anybody really. Even Jar-Jar was watching.)
3) Mitichlorians. Everybody's talked about this, but if your movie has magic (and, yes, the Force is magic), MAKE IT BE MAGIC! Don't try to explain it with science, or just looks stupid. (Take your que from, say Star Trek with never attempted to explain exactly how their artificial gravity actually worked; it would be a stupid explanation because it can't possibly work, and we all know that.)
4) The scene where Anakin blows up the ONE ship with the droid safety trigger with a lucky shot. I was actually ok with him fumbling into the battle, as long as you assume R2 was doing most of the actual driving (the movie never makes it clear how much R2 was doing and how much Anakin was), but:
A) How did he get through the shield when all the other Naboo fighters couldn't dent it? IIRC, they never answered this, he just somehow magically was through. They even put in a line of dialog from the Naboo pilots saying "how'd he do that?" Cripes, Lucas, don't point out to the audience that it doesn't make sense!
B) Why is the main power generator for a battleship IN THE DOCKING BAY? That one makes my head hurt. Even for a ship that never, ever would be attacked it makes no sense; a bad landing could blow the whole ship up.
5) It would have been nice if one of these movies explained some things. How come Gungans have no representation in the Senate? (At least, not until the second movie when Jar-Jar joins.) Are droids slaves? Some appear to be free-willed, at least. Where does R2 keep the 24 new gadgets he seems to have every movie, and who refills his rocket-fuel?
The good things:
The special effects were good, and I mean really convincingly good.
Except for a couple cheesy moments, the action sequences, also, were good.
The art design was simply brilliant. I loved everything about the Gungan army and the droid army.
This post is way too long, but the short story is that the movie is not nearly as bad as people say it was. "Not meeting expectations" is not the same thing as "crappy movie." Additionally, with only a small amount of editing (the points I mentioned above), it could have been made much, much better.
Excuse me for the psychological response, but do you literally believe what you've just typed? Specifically:
In the UK, I can say "Gordon Brown is a noxious prick" without any legal repercussions. If I was in the US, I couldn't say that about George W Bush without being arrested.
Do you honestly and truly believe that?
Have you ever seen a TV show made in the US? They make fun of Bush all the time, saying a lot worse things than "noxious prick." Pick any random late-night show, especially if they have one of those blow-hard Hollywood celebs as a guest (like Tim Robbins) and see what they call Bush on it. And that's aired to millions of people on a daily basis!
If you truly believe that posting you just made, you have to be delusional. Or extremely ignorant of the US. If it were illegal to say "George Bush is a noxious prick" the entire population of San Francisco would be in prison or court.
British people are crazy.
Windows has a bunch of HP drivers built-in. All the HP "PCL" printers basically speak the same language, so selecting a similar printer model is going to work correctly 99% of the time. For when it doesn't, backtrack to the earliest of that model-line (for example, a LaserJet II or Deskjet 510. I don't remember the specific models, but I think those are the oldest ones built-in to Windows.) You might get lower res, but it'll usually work.
Using actual HP drivers are a waste of time; they're crap.
Paint.NET suffers from update-itis also. At least I don't have to click the most recent version on a webpage, though. But it still has to download, completely uninstall itself, then reinstall itself before I can look at the damned image, and it has one of these updates every week it seems like. (And they're all minor, like 0.0.0.1.)
Meant to say that Zune might *not* be popular. You always typo and leave out the negating words, for some reason. Stupid brain.
My favorite thing about Quicktime is how it somehow maliciously registers itself as the *only* way Internet Explorer can view a PNG image. Apparently Apple didn't get the memo about IE7. So click a http://test.com/test.png link and be prepared to wait half an hour while Quicktime does-- whatever the hell it does. Then when it finally shows the image, there's no way to resize or save it like you can with a JPG or GIF.
But it gets better. Quicktime also tries to auto-update itself when it detects a newer version. But apparently the IE plug-in writers didn't get the memo that Quicktime can run GUI-less as a PNG viewer inside IE. So while you're trying to view a PNG, what you actually get is a dialog saying "do you want to update Quicktime?" which is attached to no windows and impossible to answer without force-quitting IE. Most of this time this dialog opens *behind* the IE window.
As far as I can tell it's impossible to turn off this "helpful" feature in Quicktime's or IE's options.
Apple software (on Windows at least) just bites. I was actually pleasantly surprised by Safari, not because it's all that good, but because it's not a giant ball of crap like Quicktime and iTunes are. (I won't get into iTunes; I have work to do. Suffice it to say that Microsoft's Zune might be popular, but the software runs a dozen times better than iTunes.)
Only when they harass me on my way home from work to some some idiotic petition or another. I always just ask if Greenpeace is still opposed to nuclear power, and if they say yes, I keep walking. Haven't had to listen to them yet.
I think we all agree about that.
But the point is, if HP puts it there when you buy the computer (and yes I'm calling out HP by name: my HP laptop had orders of magnitude more of that shit installed than any Dell I've ever bought), the user's not going to remove it unless they're pretty technical. And technical users probably aren't running this anti-spyware tool, anyway. So suddenly every single HP PC sold it marked as having spyware, giving their numbers a huge boost.
Of course it complicates things, seeing as Wild Tangent is actually spyware. But you can't necessarily blame the user for it being on there, and you certainly can't blame Microsoft if their OEMs pre-load spyware on the machines. In this case, it would say absolutely nothing about Windows security, since the OEM purposefully bypassed the security to load it on.
(Microsoft could try a campaign to get more control over what software is shipped with Windows computers, and then you could watch Slashdot go crazy about how evil they are. It's a no-win for them.)
P.S. Why the hell is HP still in business? Their computers are loaded to the gills with so much crap that they take 3 hours to boot the first time (I wish that was an exaggeration!). And when you put in the Windows CD to restore a clean system, HP slipstreamed the crap on the Windows CD too! And these guys are selling more computers than Dell? Do customers just like abuse?
I'd love it if these anti-spyware companies would actually educate users on what exactly cookies are and what they're used for, instead of just decreeing that they are spyware and deleting them.
Of course, when they declare they're spyware, suddenly their tool finds 200 pieces of "spyware" on every computer! Look how effective it is!
Or to over-use the old quote:
The first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time. The last 10% of the code takes 90% of the time.
They continue to ignore the issue, though. In Vista, from what I hear, file copy has actually gotten worse.
Ugh! I hate people who haven't even used Vista telling people how crummy Vista is. What city do you live in? I've never been there but I hear it's a giant ball of suck!
Anyway, you'll be happy to hear that whoever told you that is a filthy liar and you should kick them in the shins. Vista fixes the bug you mentioned.
That all said, I've had the same complaint about Windows for a long time. But Windows isn't/wasn't the only OS with the same problem-- I've been a long-time Mac user, and Apple's had the same bug for ages as well. (I think it was finally fixed in OS X, been awhile since I used a Mac though.)
It could have all the problems you listed and still be the "greatest IDE ever." The greatest software will have bugs in it, too, you know.
:) If VS isn't it, what do you feel is the "greatest IDE ever?"
So you really haven't said anything at all.
Unix-like systems (with the exception of MAC OS X, which frightens me a bit) are heading here. Intrusion alert systems coupled with execution limiting, role based security systems (apparmor and selinex).
Apple realizes that OS X has, as a significant share of its market, this thing called "normal people." "Normal people," in case you've never encountered one before, have no clue how to use any of the stuff you just outlined above.
The real issue at hand here is the following:
1) The OS has to ask the user whether they want to run the code. This is true regardless of the certainty the OS has that the code is unsafe. (There's an exception for items that are known to be 100% unsafe, but of course we're already doing that in every OS.)
2) Because of this, the user can choose to run unsafe code.
Nothing in Linux solves this. Nothing in OS X solves this. Nothing in Windows solves this. It's possible that there's nothing any OS can possibly do to solve this.
I dunno, the original post says he already has 10 computers. I'm pretty sure all his web serving needs are taken care of.
To me, core tenants of civil disobedience are:
1) You admit that you're breaking the law openly
2) You're willing to accept the punishment for it
If you're hunched over in your basement watching pirated movies, you're doing neither of those.
I don't considering pirating movies as "civil disobedience," I consider it "being greedy." The civil disobedience is just a rationalization that pirates happen to often use. (Some others: "it's not illegal if I don't keep it for more than 48 hours" "the company that made it went out of business anyway".)