Posts by Prowler

Re: Oh, great!

Trojan Horse or Corleone tactics, the outcome is the same.

I made this image a while back and it fits well today ...

http://i.imgur.com/VCDnUZU.jpg

Re: Simplest solution to XP diehards

@Robert Sneddon

Yes, there are pluses and minuses to using Windows XP or any deprecated OS, in fact this is what planned obsolescence is all about.

The WinXP RAM issue is icky because it is both a physical and legal limit, the physical can be hacked away but they wrote 4 GB into the licensing terms so many sites will not describe the procedures anyway. With a little less cowardice in the community the hacks would easily be explored and implemented, the same way that Win9x has already been fixed to use way more than its 512/1024 RAM limits and 128 GB HDD limit.

The WinXP 2TB limit is only physical with repect to the fact that the GPT system code is not present in XP or 2K3 even though Microsoft could easily backport it the same way they did with 48-bit LBA ( 128 GB limit ) into SP1. Consequently the fixes have already been implemented onboard by HDD manufacturers who unlike Microsoft, do not want to throw away 1/3 of their potential customers on a whim.

So it is clear planned obsolescence, as usual, to get everyone to open their wallets and buy new stuff. People would do well to teach them a lesson and challenge this evil practice at every opportunity.

However, there are advantages to using a relatively lean, clean and mean OS like Windows XP. Not the least of which has to do with what we have been treated to in the news for the past two months. The government spook spy scandal. Windows XP was literally released ( RTM ) as 9/11 occurred and precedes the DRM movement and especially the PRISM fiasco. Longhorn/Vista and everything since quite appropriately is supected as being throroughly compromised by both Hollywood and government. Microsoft famously was the first "partner" and I have little doubt that every line of code since has been written with that first and foremost in mind.

It can be logically reckoned that because of the exposure of Microsoft's collusion with the feds, Windows XP and older systems will remain around many households for a very long time indeed. You would be crazy to just toss the old stuff away because of trendy updates, security FUD ( that's ironic! ) and dancing children with that horrific disaster called Windows 8.

There are no words.

Somehow this does not surprise me, I mean we know there is a large cache of humans that are forever chasing the Bell curve, they exist by definition as sure as those others riding atop and leading it..

It's possible, perhaps even likely that Redmond is secretly administering a large scale IQ test to the citizens of the world, maybe as a hyper-advanced marketing technique where they will ultimately sell the user information of those 8,000 DRM demanders to the highest bidder, because they would certainly be among the most desirable demographic imaginable.

I looked for a good Icon avatar to express my opinion but sadly there is none that suffice. Even the facepalm cannot do this story appropriate justice.

Here is my suggestion for a new avatar for these numerous Microsoft stories ...

http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/9229/rwj.gif

... Head banging against wall.

Re: A pedant writes... <--- perfect!

" Therefore, Sinofsky is not on sabbatical. He is unemployed. "

Not only that, he left on a Monday in time to shake up the stock market. No-one "plans" an exit for a Monday, especially the Monday the week prior to the long Thanksgiving holiday ( which is a perfect opportunity to bury a bad news story ). No, Sinofsky and Ballmer most likely had it out and either he quit on the spot or was fired and escorted out of the building. People in his important and high position never do this. They have transitions with overlap to ease the replacement into the job. If he left on good terms it would have been pre-announced.

So he is at the very least fibbing. The question is why there is no real journalism anymore? Where is Thurrott and his so-called sources? Why hasn't he snagged an interview?

Sinofsky was the Windows Destroyer-in-Chief. If you participated in that sham of a blog you already know this. If you did not you should understand that he would answer a small handful of fluff comments from MetroTards ( "Hey Steve, love the new colors, any chance we'll get some more?" ), while ducking the overwhelming criticism and deleting many others. When the Start Button went away in beta2 ( the CP ) and then Aero Glass *after* beta3 ( the RP ) but *before* the RTM ( the release ) comments were especially harsh and he ignored it all ( even having one of his servants do the Aero announcement ). I have never seen anything so arrogant and disrespectful done to their beloved customers, or to anyone else for that matter.

Steven Sinofsky, Architect of the Metro Matrix!

http://i.imgur.com/llIaLfO.jpg

Re: Sounds more like 8.01 <--- Nailed It!

... and would you believe that they are also bumping the kernel version up to 6.3. So Vista was 6.0, Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 is 6.2 and now Windows 8 Blew is 6.3 ( which quasi-logically might have gone to Windows 9 ). FUBAR all around. So what magical reshuffling of kernel bytes merits this step up? -Rhetorical.

Softie Marketspeak: " Not only will Windows 8.1 respond to customer feedback, but it will add new features and functionality that advance the touch experience and mobile computing's potential "

Meanwhile the rest of the world is already using mobile on the 99% of tablets and phones none of which have "Microsoft" or "Windows" labels anywhere on them. How exactly can they "advance mobile computing's potential" when almost no-one is laying a finger on these MicroTurds. -Rhetorical.

And that's a big fat zero zilch nada on the listening to customer feedback, unless by "customer" they mean those MetroTards complaining that the Win8 desktop still vaguely resembles the productive pre-Win8 desktop. Installing a "Start Screen Button" that points right back to Metro is the biggest middle finger ever directed to a heretofore loyal customer base. Are they truly insane? -Rhetorical.

Steve Jobs may have died, but his ghost is haunting the halls of Redmond wreaking havoc like a ghost in the machine.

Re: This seems rather half-arsed ( you are a very kind person! )

... but it is actually Microsoft delivering the biggest FU in the history of FU's ever delivered to her customers.

And even that is understating it. Ray Charles can see the problems in Windows 8 yet Ballmer and his team of overpaid under-achievers cannot.

For over two years since the first leaked builds tech bloggers have been warning them about this MetroTard walled-garden approach. For over one year since the CP when they pulled the Start Menu we have been overwhelmingly swamping them with comments about this FUBAR fantasy. Sinofsky and his blog were overrun by painstakingly detailed comments and he ignored them and even deleted them.

I'm trying to remember a similar example of corporate suicide and the closest thing I can recall is after IBM lost the i386 war to Compaq and then immediately turned inward, with the same siege mentality that Microsoft now displays, and the result was the relatively locked-down PS/2 with MCA and steep licensing which set the entire 3rd party clone industry against them. They completely gave up 6 or 7 years later, selling off the division and bailing from microcomputers.

Ironically, this incident with IBM is what empowered Microsoft to monopolize the OS and become the billion dollar company they now are. You would think that Microsoft might remember those years starting in the late 1980's, but apparently Steve Ballmer was too busy partying to take notes.

Ah well, maybe this latest Microsoft screw-up will finally wake up the sheeple. Microsoft are copying to the letter the Apple walled-garden approach. The first steps are in killing the x86 operating system and with it all the independent developers that create, sell and even give-away their software outside of Microsoft's blessing. Their version of an app-centric iOS, with a Microsoft Store and approved apps by approved developers may be called Metro but is better known by all of us as pOS.

Re: It's worse than you think.

" As a totally blind Geek, Adobe's site is a nightmare to navigate via Screen Reader Environment (SRE) such as Jaws by Freedom Scientific or NVDA. "

Truth be told their website also sucks for those that can see it. I can only imagine the extra pain visited upon you.

Even to this very day they cannot make the effort to post static links to the latest Flash versions, a personal pet peeve. You are always sent to a browser / OS sniffing page where they decide what you need, never even entertaining the thought of someone going there on a different computer. There is a way to get the so-called offline installers after clicking around for a while, but it is needlessly obtuse. Sun / Oracle does a similarly bad job with Java as do most other high profile software vendors.

Ironically it is always the little guy, the really independent coders of all manner of drivers and utilities that make a nice effort for user-friendly distribution and pages that can be successfully bookmarked.

I must force myself to say something nice about Microsoft now. At least getting files from them is relatively straightforward, even if we must go through some bona fide checking through that WGA genuine checker and whatnot. Yeah, they sniff browsers and operating system and steer you into pages sometimes but I have always been able to load up on files for all architectures and versions from any computer I use.

So listen up Adobe. Everyone from Joe Schmo to Sourceforge to Microsoft itself does it better than you. Enough with the trialware and McAfee malware. Start acting professionally. And leave the good guys alone!

Re: Windows XP was considered a failure when it was first introduced

It's not that WinXP was a failure, or that SP1 magically fixed everything. Actually it was Microsoft who failed because it released WinXP approximately three years before the average consumer hardware could handle it adequately. This is out of blindness from developing on cutting edge hardware and as usual not considering the customer.

XP arrived in 2001 with Pentium 4, specifically the horrific Willamette initial entry at about 1.3 GHz. Memory was still crappy SDRAM. HDD's were just crossing into 48-bit LBA territory but Windows didn't yet understand it. USB was stuck at 1.x on most consumer machines, especially the ones that launched with WinXP. The Motherboards were not yet the cornucopia of features we now expect. In short, it was still 1990's hardware well into the new century.

It wasn't really SP1 that helped, because XP was still a bloated Windows 2000 + Win9x merger. What helped was the greatly enhanced hardware around 2004 with CPU's well over 2 GHz, Northwood and Prescott cores, big L2 caches, inexpensive DDR RAM, large fast HDD's, common USB 2.0 and associated devices and motherboards filled to the rim with features so that most people only needed to add a video card, and many didn't even need that. Running Windows XP with 1GB or 2GB in this era really shined.

XP got a bonafide second wind when Vista faltered and the machines started going over 3 GHz or more, and more importantly had usable multicores, especially Core2 versions. Now it was fast! These machines are alive and well, and will be for some time, and are one of the reasons that Windows XP still hovers around 40% of all Windows systems.

I would urge people to call Microsoft's and her enablers bluff on this. They have a lot of people snowed with that nonsense: "support will end...", as if Microsoft is somehow carrying these WinXP systems on her poor back. Ignore their push to get you to drop more bucks into their pockets. Run those machines as long as possible just to piss them off. I know I am.

Is anyone actually running Windows 8 ...

" ... It's loads faster (on my relatively old laptop) - long time issues have been fixed for copying files etc and it's stable. The menu is quick ... "

[ Fast Boot ] ... It should load faster since by default it employs a hybrid sleep and not a full shutdown and is "resuming" rather than a full POST and bootstrap. Additionally, many people are obviously using newer UEFI streamlined systems rather than traditional BIOS. I guess comparing Apples and Oranges is back in vogue these days.

I have a theory that Metro and Windows 8 appeals to the definitive "serial-tasker", those that operate one task at a time like the instruction pointer in a CPU. They press the "On" button and wait. I say this because a "multi-tasker" would press the computer power button 30 seconds before he needs to jump in and do something. That means, press the button, grab a coffee ( or anything else ) instead of standing there waiting interminably. Multitaskers naturally know how to timeslice so that few seconds at startup never ranked high on the things-to-fix-in-Windows bullet-list when there are so many other real consequential annoyances to address.

[ File Copying ] ... What "copying files" issue might that be? Most people are referring to the yet again updated file copy dialogs, the ones that could have only been designed by a committee and were already getting ridiculous in Vista and 7, but now they have added an option to "pause" a copy. But for what possible reason? Well, I guess it makes sense since a serial-tasker might just need to pause. Multitaskers know enough that they can simply jumpt to something else if a copy takes too long. In truth, copying a file has worked reliably since 1995 for the consumers, but was made foolproof with NTFS based Windows even earlier.

[ Quick Menus ] ... GPU accelerated menus should be fast. Especially since it is essentially only rendering HTML+CSS basic geometry ( Playskool blocks ) in primary colors, kinda like simple webpages from 15 years ago. Were you expecting slow? I'm not impressed by Microsoft advancements here, nor should we be thanking them for these little baby steps forward. By now in 2013, instead of romper room shapes we should have game-engine style 3D user interface elements, like those which already perfected as far back as 1999 ( Q3 and Unreal ). And it should be fully user-customizable, not locked in to their one childish theme.