Messages

26

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: January 10, 2009, 10:33 AM »

Yes, I agree MS had little choice but to implement some DRM if it wanted to be first to the HD market. And yet, just as with Apple's iTune's DRM, they were still hoping to benefit from lock-in. MS rushed to this market way before they needed to, going well beyond minimum specification (tilt bits being the clear example). I think they want to capture the HD market by being the "favoured" channel (i.e. most zealous!), and thus as Apple did with music, lock the market into its revenue stream. So far they've just damaged their own platform and users with little to show for it. I think once HD content explodes , they want to be the dominant platform to view it, and that is when the money comes in. I think they hope their zealous implementation will not be implementable by others and thus further extend their dominance.

So they they may not be entirely to blame, but who exactly was MS competing against to "force them against the wall" (the PS3)? They could have taken Apple's stance on the PVP, which is wait and see, and implement the minimum necessary only when necessary. They could have under-engineered, knowing that no one else was going to out-zealot them. They rightly could have been less stringent with driver policing which caused such difficulties for many vendors on switching to Vista which directly hurt Vista and its users.

Peter Gutmann's fundamental point is that the PC is driven, and indeed was born, from an open platform. MS tried with palladium, and its step-child WVCP, to close up an impossible to close platform. This was doomed to failure, as Gutmann spends most of his time showing.

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General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: January 09, 2009, 06:34 AM »

Mr Crispy: I've seen a lot of attacks on Peter Gutmann coming from the usual suspects (George Ou and Ed Bott from ZDNet are examples which Peter responded to), but have not seen what I'd consider a clear debunking of the overall position. The DRM issue is still "real", and we can't run with/without for independent analysis. Much of what Gutmann predicted was spot on (driver fiasco, huge additional development burden on graphics card makers, clear fractures in its security well after release). The revocation system by itself is reason enough to hate Vista's DRM, that hasn't just vanished; it is just not utilised at the moment.  Specific technical points in Gutmann's extensive piece were wrong, Gutmann was writing about the whole system in a comprehensive way (make sure you read his PDF, not the older original article) and surely can't have got every point right. But FUD it was not, it was a detailed analysis by an independent observer.

Microsoft went way above what was required of them with the DRM mechanism they introduced (tilt bits being one example). The quotes that Gutmann uses from its own technical documentation of it are clear they were not doing the "minimum" of what was needed, but were zealous in implementation.

"It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond
the strict letter of the specification and provide additional
content-protection features, because this demonstrates their
strong intent to protect premium content"

That is ideological, not technical documentation!

That DRM mechanism is still in Windows 7 AFAIK. To be honest, if it only steals 0.1% CPU cycles is irrelevant. I'm deeply unhappy with the core display systems having revocation mechanisms built-in at its core (even if the purple-pill utility showed what a fiasco Vista signed drivers were and how MS have been unable to use it, as Peter predicted).

28

General Software Discussion / Re: windows 7 beta available for free Jan 9 (!)

« on: January 08, 2009, 12:09 PM »

20GB hard drive - sheesh, don't use it all at once

29

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: January 08, 2009, 04:55 AM »

One of the mistakes Microsoft made with Vista was allowing OEM's (and Intel shares a very large part of this blame) to label even their crappy low end configs with slow cpu's, low Ram and integrated graphics as Vista-ready, which led to a lot of grief. Home Premium should be the bare minimum.

-MrCrispy (January 07, 2009, 07:05 PM)

Well, as other OS vendors have been doing, and now MS themselves are seeming to do with Win 7, it *is* possible to make a revised OS without sinking low-end machines in the first place. I agree that Microsoft's inability to optimise their OS until SP2 (Windows 7) *was* compounded by PC vendors desperate for sales pushing hardware that Microsoft was incapable of optimising for in the 5 years Vista took to bake, but you can hardly blame them.

30

General Software Discussion / Re: The Monkeys Have Hit The Button

« on: January 05, 2009, 07:26 PM »

 

31

General Software Discussion / Re: The Monkeys Have Hit The Button

« on: January 05, 2009, 03:31 PM »

Hirudin: it is a magic carpet app which flies the user to the Egyptian Capital to buy cheap bootlegged software in a bazaar. Having used the private alpha release, I snagged myself a finest copy of Windows 8 BTTF (back-to-the-future edition) for 50 Egyptian cents! 

{me=very excited about Cairo}

32

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: January 04, 2009, 10:53 AM »

Well, as far as i can see from screenshots, the Win 7 installer offers the same 4 "versions" as Vista, so we will have the same stupid user-unfriendly obnoxious choice.

PPS, what URL? 

33

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: January 04, 2009, 09:20 AM »

Thinking about it a bit, I think it is actually terrible that the biggest usability changes are locked into Aero. It means if Home Basic will not include Aero, substantial functionality will be missing for all those users. Windows has long been crippled by poor window management, and treating it as a "luxury" extra is just wrong IMO. Again, Apple was using transparency, scaling live thumbnails, using visually responsive features for years.

Even with no significant hardware acceleration, this all works elegantly on old Apple laptops. Exposé, desktop peeking, live thumbnails are treated as an essential part of the OS interface as they should be. Honestly, my productivity is significantly higher with robust window/app management over and above the crude alt+tab.

The idea of crippling your OS just to pump revenue is despicable (let alone confusing for end users, I'm also 100% with Darwin). Note, I have no problem with "value-added" addons (premium themes, software bundles for "ultimate"), but to break your core UI experiences is just 100 shades of WRONG!       

34

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: January 04, 2009, 05:15 AM »

Hm, I've just played with a copy of Win 7 on a friends Macbook Pro (in VMWare). As the VMWare drivers aren't tuned, Aero was not working. My friend said he thought Win 7 was faster than Vista, though it is well known that Vista hates virtualisation.

Dropping memory down to 512MB, Win 7 is still nicely responsive. That is not the case doing the same with a Vista VM.

I do much prefer the taskbar to XP and Vista, having launch and task management unified is much more intuitive to me. As we had no aero, all the sexy features were not available (which cripples the task bar substantially IMO), and to be honest the overall experience was underwhelming, it really feels like Vista SP3 UI wise. Moving windows to the edge to resize them is nice. Though some have commented that the beta is stable, we constantly froze it using Java 6, and windows experience index would always fail to complete.

One thing I loved compared to Vista - I always put my utilities like process explorer in a directory "Accessories" in "Program Files". Vista made this amazingly irritating with UAC enabled. Win 7 handled it fine, bravo!

I'm sure I'm missing some of the smaller tweaks here and there (I think there are many of the poor UI design bits fixed), Win 7 was nice, but underwhelming. I think it *is* clearly better than Vista resource wise (which is not saying much IMHO).

35

General Software Discussion / Re: Shell Extension City's Best Freeware of 2008

« on: January 02, 2009, 06:27 AM »

Indeed I use Dailyrotation to read what is going on at Shell Extension. It's funny, because for whatever reason, though I use RSS elsewhere, I've always like the 3-column RSS headline format at Dailyrotation (hover headlines to see the text summaries). i find it the most efficient interface, even though it is very "old skool"...

36

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: January 02, 2009, 06:24 AM »

Jason Perlow is not so enthusiatic:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9360

I think he represents the "Don't mess" with my OS brigade[1]. Anything that is not really like XP is a regression. Ed Bott replied:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=630

Thugh I personally find Ed Bott a little too much apologetic sometimes, he raises valid points that most of Jason's issues a really just because he is refusing to adapt to universal search and other new paradigms that IMO are so clearly superior to the old hierarchical clicking. But if you were a grumpy old (wo)man with Vista, you'll still have plenty (or more?) to be tetchy at with Win 7...

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[1] Grumpy old (wo)men syndrome!

37

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it finally time to abandon IE?

« on: December 18, 2008, 03:36 AM »

Darwin: 

38

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it finally time to abandon IE?

« on: December 17, 2008, 07:27 PM »

Is it finally time to abandon IE?

It was finally time to abandon IE numerous years ago. We each have our issues, and IE is mine. I do think IE has been far more a victim of significant attacks over the years (and that is not only because it is used more). MS have spent large resources trying to patch it up and IE7 is much better than the shambles of earlier releases. There are reports and statistics that we can discuss back and forth, I've been there before and don't have the energy to redebate the evidence for IEs worse record, but I think a strong case can be made for it[1].

But when a product with such a poor track record also got no significant engineering spent on its core duty (rendering and presenting HTML) since IE4, and so fully destroyed successful employment of open standards that would have accelerated and facilitated the internet to grow, then that product gets my contempt. IEs half-assed rendering, its failure to follow even proper core underlying protocols like HTTP/1.1, the horrendous mishmash of proprietary and non-proprietary ECMAScript, forcing sites to poor unsemantic markup obfuscating content sharing, the weak user facing user interface, slow performance, and so on gets it in a unique position as the only piece of software I could say I passionately dislike. It has caused legions of web devs endless wasted hours of hacking and their contempt was on full show when MS opened up IE7 and now IE8 to more public scrutiny. IE is still like a sloth smoking opium on supporting technology that would benefit us all as end users. This can only be interpreted as MS using IE as the way to impede effective competition.

I see nothing that is redeeming for it; it is "good enough" only if you ignore the damage it has done and will do to the web we all cherish and depend on so much.

Phew, thats better 
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[1] And smart users can always ensure their protection, knowing the workarounds still doesn't negate the flaws being there in the first place.

39

General Software Discussion / Re: Is XP really that good?

« on: December 09, 2008, 07:01 PM »

So I wonder, what do people do to get a corrupted registry? Note that invalid driver configuration doesn't count, as that would leave a system hosed no matter where system configuration is stored and isn't registry-specific.

-f0dder (December 09, 2008, 01:10 AM)

Well beats me. The owner of the hosed system is a true computer conservative, she runs stuff that she was comfortable from her DOS days (wordperfect > word), she was definitely not a tinkerer in any sense. She runs eudora and netscape, never opens attachments from mail, never wants to try new software, *never* would run a beta, doesnt install service packs/updates until she knows no one else had issues. And yet when we were days away from a crucial deadline (computers seem to sense it!); boom.

My corruption was also not clearly attributable to anything, though I do test lots of software, and am a private alpha tester for several things, so I'm more vulnerable (I'd have to edit registry values sometimes). ErunNT was the only registry-type software I'd run, can't really see how that could cause failure.

40

General Software Discussion / Security Software for OS X

« on: December 08, 2008, 09:22 PM »

Darwin asked me elsewhere if I use any security software in OS X, and I think that is a useful topic on its own for all two OS X users at DC, along with curious Windows users who may enjoy prodding us

Here are the Broad Categories and options:

AntiVirus

• iAntivirus - this is by the same guys that make Threatfire and Spyware Doctor for PC. It is FREE. It is optimised to detect OS X threats only (all 88 of them, including regular apps with possible danger like keyloggers, proof-of-concept code and classic OS <10 virii), and thus it has a tiny database.
• ClamXav - Useful to remove windows virii, open-source and free.
• VirusBarrier X5 - Fairly well regarded. You can get it And 10 other apps  (including Little Snitch outgoing firewall) for a spectacular discount ATM: http://www.mupromo.com/winter.php
• Mcafee and Norton - universally reviled as junk, badly written for OS X. Some consider Norton the clearest piece of malware on the mac!
• Sophos - I've seen no one using this, I suspect it is corporate only.

Firewalls

• Built-in - Leopard has two outgoing firewalls, an application-based and a port-based (ipfw from FreeBSD, Tiger just has IPFW). Waterroof and Noobproof are very comprehensive GUIs to control it.
• Little Snitch - an outgoing application firewall. Low resource useage, a very nice UI, and on special offer over winter (see Virusbarrier above).
• Intego Netbarrier - Same guys who make Virusbarrier, used by quite a lot of users and with generally positive reviews. Both incoming and outgoing firewall, very configurable.

Others

• Filedefense - a file system level driver which allows you to allow/deny file access for any application. Good idea but horrible UI, makes Vista's UAC seem like fun!
• MacScan - scans for keyloggers, a few trojans and clean tracking cookies. Nothing major but some people may find it useful (iAntivirus scans for keyloggers and trojans too and it's free).
• Apple Security Guide - Links to documentation for best practive for Leopard and Tiger

What do I use?
Only Little Snitch. Nothing else except for NOD32 on the XP bootcamp partition. There are no viruses in the wild for OS X. There are a smattering of trojans which require user intervention to gain access to the system, or someone may guess my admin password to install them. This is not a high enough threat to warrant using AV for the moment IMO, as long as I exercise caution about "installing" codecs with admin privileges from web popups!. I only use Little Snitch as much for curiosity over outgoing traffic as necessity. Here is a fair article on security and why you don't need an AV yet:

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9511

And for those who saw the "Apple recommends AV software" furore:

http://securosis.com...h-ado-about-nothing/

What do I miss more than anything for OS X security: SandboxIE - I'd love a robust sandbox to allow more reckless behavior online  Core Leopard components are sandboxed, but there is not an adaptation to run user process in a sandbox yet.

41

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your boot time?

« on: December 08, 2008, 08:20 PM »

Think I'll start a new thread as that is off-topic enough to derail a bullet train 

42

General Software Discussion / Re: Is XP really that good?

« on: December 08, 2008, 08:18 PM »

I've seen three cases where a machine was hosed due to registry corruption, one machine was fixed by hacking around in the recovery console:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

The user of the second was smart enough to run ERUNT on a regular schedule and ran an alternative OS to make recovery trivial (XP running bootcamped on my macbook  )

But a third was truly hosed, system restore was useless and several days work was interrupted as that machine was rehabilitated. Google suggests these are not isolated incidences. My experience is that a monolithic store, even with XPs attempts at integrity maintainence, is certainly flawed.

43

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it time to start a new AntiVirus/Internet Security Suite review thread?

« on: December 02, 2008, 04:03 PM »

Darwin: Vipre looks very interesting, I'd love to see it added to av-comparitives.org testing to see how it stacks up.

I also wish there were proper benchmarks done to see how AVs really affect a machine, nothing I've seen is really comprehensive enough...

44

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your boot time?

« on: December 02, 2008, 04:01 PM »

Darwin: I used a custom EFI bootloader and a lot of manual hacking to make a custom Leopard DVD myself, then finding kernel extensions for my hardware; but to be honest I'd recommend just getting Leo4All/iATKOS/Kalyway/JaS pre-built disks (there are both Tiger and Leopard options, I think JaS is the preferred Tiger one). Recently there is a cool OSXTOOL/Boot-132 option that allows you to much more easily go from the retail Leopard (Tiger too?) disk to a hackintosh install directly, but I haven't any experience of that.

As always, the InsanelyMac forums have all the info.

It was good fun from but took time to get all my hardware working (had to go one week without accelerated graphics[1] to find a solution to the ATI card I had, no audio till I got a $5 USB sound card etc). But once it was running, boy did it smoke Vista and XP on the same machine!

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[1] As I've said before though, graphics are so fast in OS X that with no graphics card drivers Leopard was faster in window drawing than XP with the latest drivers! I never understood it because GDI+ should be hardware accelerated AFAIK. 

45

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your boot time?

« on: December 02, 2008, 06:59 AM »

Other than that, I was impressed with the speed, 15 yrs ago; how is OS X comparing to Vista, regarding boot time and loading-of-apps time?

-Curt

On my hackintosh Dell workstation (2GB)[1], OS X Leopard (with more programs installed) used to load approximately 2.5X faster than Vista (after grub had done its thing). It shut down approx 2x faster too. On my macbook, OS X is again >2x faster than XP at startup. Also, one of the brilliant things about OS X is it doesn't seem to get slower the more software you add. I remember spending so much time keeping XP optimised (as many here do too), and my macbook XP is really spartan (it just really runs Matlab as its core duty, I guard against installing too much stuff otherwise), but my Leopard install is filled with trying just about every piece of software under the sun; yet Leopard never slows down over time (except when using iStat Menu which slows startup down enough I don't run it on my laptop).


----
[1]Interestingly, the hackintosh loaded Leopard faster (~40secs) than my current monster Mac Pro (~50secs)...

46

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it time to start a new AntiVirus/Internet Security Suite review thread?

« on: December 02, 2008, 06:11 AM »

Note also that NOD32 has V4 in beta:

http://www.eset.eu/p...2-for-windows-4-beta

Hard to get past the marketing speak, but I think they claim better proactive support, a new sysinspector module to root out rootkits, rescue CDs and lots of graphs!

47

General Software Discussion / Re: Is XP really that good?

« on: December 01, 2008, 07:51 AM »

I don't know about you, but I prefer Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

-Lashiec (November 30, 2008, 06:35 PM)

  

Oh well, it got much better since then, I'm sure. Probably you used some of the first versions, which even by Nick's own admittance were terrible in the toolbar department. And with the new changes coming in 2.8, things are like these UI-wise. Personally, I prefer this kind of interface to the lean one used by NetNewsWire (not to mention this one seems to lack the newspaper-style to show the feeds).

-Lashiec (November 30, 2008, 06:35 PM)

Thanks for that blogpost by da man himself, nice to see things are getting better. I still think that is indicative of the XP-centric design philosophy (UI design comes later if at all), and sadly many programmers simply fail to bother the subsequent refining part as Ray did.

A pinnacle of XP UI? 

HA! I knew you were going to mention Pixelmator . There's a lot of software for the Mac that looks great, but it always baffled me that most of it it's payware, and not exactly cheap. When considering the initial price of a Mac, and the extra you have to pay for most software, the design-advantage starts to feel smaller :-)

-Lashiec (November 30, 2008, 06:35 PM)

Come on, spending money stimulates the economy ya skinflint! 

Seriously, there is lots of free software out there too (and most of the *nix tools are available for OS X too, e.g. Gimp in this case). But you know, when FeedDemon came out there were lots of free RSS readers too for XP (I used just about all of them), and FeedDemon cost $$$ back then; but it was simply better software. Again it is probably the distinction between "good enough" and "wonderful".

48

General Software Discussion / Re: Is XP really that good?

« on: November 30, 2008, 05:46 PM »

 

I used to love Ray Bradbury's Topstyle and FeedDemon, but I find this XP style has too much emphasis on rows of buttons. I haven't used FeedDemon since a while, so it may have gotten better. It used to be a brilliant app nevertheless. I have to admit also I'm no fan of the horrible baby-blue feeddemon (and huge swathes of other windows apps) is smothered in according to its current screenies. The UI should be chromatically mute and not compete with buttons and/or content.

Paint.NET is also a great app (especially for free, why hasn't Microsoft picked it back up yet?), but not what I would think of as optimally designed (a kind of hybrid between paint and photoshop), a bit of a clutter of buttons+panels; it is no Pixelmator 

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Screenines from Feeddemon and NetNewsWire for OS X: http://www.newsgator...fd26-screenshot1.png vs. http://www.newsgator...3.1_readingNews3.png -- unnecessary clutter (why does each XP toolbar have some little arrow widget taking space) and bitmappy unclear icons.

49

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it time to start a new AntiVirus/Internet Security Suite review thread?

« on: November 30, 2008, 10:54 AM »

What I do notice as interesting is that NOD32, which has always had superlative overall reports on av-comparatives.org, has been really slipping dowm the charts both for on-demand and retro-active tests this year (it won overall best AV in 2007). Is that because of the shift to Version 3, and/or is it being outperformed by the new generation of malware more than its peers now?

50

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: November 30, 2008, 10:38 AM »

Hm, what's so new about this? The DirectX SDK has included a reference rasterizer (ie, software-only) for ages.

Really? OK, so one less point for 7. I was impressed that the software-only DirectX was faster than Intels integrated solution though...

Cloud sucks.

They are however great for dreaming in...