Discussion on:

Don't be misled by these 10 Windows Vista myths

Your post seems to be very reasonable.

I think the problem here starts on TR when we get some people who are so extreme in their positions that honestly, I don't think their positions are even defensible.

There is NO reason a kernel should fit on a floppy. There is NO reason why a little DRM isn't acceptable.

But anytime any party takes a stance so extreme, well, that's the problem. And it happens more times than not on TR.

Some DRM in some form or another (surely not in the form it is today) is necessary to protect intellectual property. Conversely, it can't be so restrictive as to infringe on users' rights either.

And a kernel should be as lean and efficient as possible, but you make an excellent argument...hardware is cheap nowadays and end users want as much functionality as possible especially if they are plucking down hundreds of dollars for a new PC and/or Vista.

Well said. The right of users are surely just as important as the rights of the artist.
So far, the way I've seen DRM used has been far too restrictive on the user who has just, after all, bought the content so that they can enjoy it as they see fit.
If I want to buy a CD and rip it a compressed format so it won't clog up my mp3 player, that should be my business. If I want to watch video content through an un-DRM-able port, I should be able to. I shouldn't find that it's switched off or blocked.

I have no problem with a technology that ensures that the artist gets what they deserve (I think the middle men take far too big a slice, so maybe they should try to reduce the percentage they take , but I feel that when it's for my own personal use, I should be allowed to do whatever the hell I want with content I just payed a much more than fair price for.

That's what I have a problem with. The big corporations are entitled to try to protect their interests, but when they go too far (as I believe they have with their take on digital "rights") I think the consumer has to make a stand.

And I thought I was the only one to see that gentlemans point.

No, that's what they pay the hardware manufacturers for. The manufacturers have the spec sheets for their products--after all, they're the ones who make them. Linux users (yes, "zealot" does not always follow the word "Linux"; it's not a fixed phrase like "traffic light" or "corrupt Republican") have to reverse engineer the hardware in order to even start writing the drivers.

"I have no degree and can run circles around the newbies in the industry that do." Yes, and six months later, once they've absorbed everything you know, they're off to bigger and better things because they came in with a lot of knowledge you didn't have. Meanwhile, you stay firmly stuck in the rut you're quite comfortable in, then brag about how much of an expert you are at the three things you know how to do.

Speaking as someone who has a degree in, among other things, computer science and engineering, here is the difference between me and you: you know (maybe) how to configure a DHCP server and think you're a genius. I know how build the hardware (and I mean down to the level of designing the IC, not going down to CompUSA and buying a bunch of pre-made parts) for the server, write the DHCP application from scratch, use it on my own network, and then make it all purty and easy to use so that even non-degreed hotshots like you can push a button and tell the world what wizards you are because you knew which button to press. (All thanks to the efforts of computer science graduates and electrical engineers.)

If I said I was a doctor or brainsurgeon then it would be "WOW that's amazing" and they'd listen to my every medical world.

But when you are a Computer Scientist or Engineer they say "aw I can use an ATM and play World of Warcraft. Yoo suxorz dood. I invented 1337 5p33k"

I suppose I can derive a little pleasure when they post "I watercooled my computer with liquid ammonium and it broked." or "I installed Windows Vista on my new machine with HDDVD and I cant see the screen."

Reminds me of the time I once saw someone post on nn - er, the thing before there were these browser things and forums - that they were the first to discover a bug in 1971 in the original C implementation only to have Dennis Richie reply that: no, he was the first.

But you try telling the young people of today that and they won't believe ya.

Engineering work isn't done until the item is so easy to use that even a monkey could do it. (Apple understood this, and that's why they've sold about 6.02 x 10^23 iPods.) Unfortunately, once the engineer has succeeded in their craft, people then say, "Big deal. It's just a simple piece of equipment. Anyone could build something like that. It doesn't take some fancy degree or nothin'." Sure--and an auto mechanic could design and build a Ferrari from scratch.

"But you try telling the young people of today that and they won't believe ya." I think their response would probably be something like, "Who's Dennis Ritchie? Was he that guy who was on Monday Night Football and always said those big words?"

I LOLd on Ava and Dennis Ritchie. At least we have respect for their work, my friend.

When I was in school, my main group of friends were engineers and compsci guys. As a matter of fact, my first 2 years, I was in the comp engineering track, but I ultimately shifted gears and went IS.

Basically, I found out after a bit of stubbornness that I didn't have the mindset to be an engineer. But even that bit of experience has helped me to understand where they're coming from.

Also, i've been lucky enough in my years of working in IT to meet up with some wicked cool old-school unix jockeys, programmers and engineers. Hell, I remember spending hours "helping" a "retired" tech for one of my vendors rebuild a Novell 3 installation while listening to stories of his working with the government in the seventies on all kinds of neat tech and of course, DARPA and such.

Coolest guy i've ever met.

Anyway, where I was going with this is that i've met many an old-timer and have nothing but respect for all those folk who have gotten us to where we are today and the bloody amazing things that I can do on current tech.

But i've also met a few old-timers that deserve THAT respect, but because of the way they treat people or talk down to them, i'd never show it. Why? Because they're asses. I'll chalk some of it up to that general engineer lack of social graces, but some people are just pricks and i'll treat them as such.

Yea, right, you don't even know the difference. You are realy rather caught up with your self. Chill out a bit please. -d

That you can go mine some silicon out of the ground and make everything from scratch. You really should try out for the show Survivor. You might win.

So, remind me again, Mr Professor, why are you in Tech Support? Shouldn't you be aspiring to something larger in life?

I needed an excellent example of some uneducated snob who thinks he knows better to clarify what we were talking about.

Cheers!

I'm getting my Master's degree in computer science while also getting yet another Bachelor's degree in biology in order to get into bioinformatics, and my job's hours fit my schedule well while also having high pay and is something I'm interested in. Did something like that occur to you, or did you just assume I'm going to be working at the help desk the rest of my life?

Please stop sucking yourself off in public - it's just not decent.

I have been reading this thread in order to gain a little more insight on the vista OS and the IT reaction to the software and this lummox appears to bash everyone with a different opinion then his, and his arguments (which have some valid points) just turn out to be reasons for him to be abusive to others. if this is the attitude that he maintains in a work enviroment then he is costing his employer more then he is worth.(if I don't like the guy I have to deal with in a company then I swap companys.) seems that when I was building modems for a major AC manftr. in the late 80's early 90's, they were the one's signing the check for parts, labor, and had their own programers working with us. Didn't see any M$ poeple lending a hand. Nope, didn't have anyone but the engineers and scripters and little ol me "assembler dude" and as for his lack of degrees I can't speak bad of that, since I have none myself I won't be calling the "Kettle" black. But I am almost 50 and would not benefit from a career change this late in the game I'll keep the schooling for after I retire (only way to stay current in tech.) and work with what I have now.(home repair, roofing, sideing, Ect. and PC service for about 50 home users)this provides me with a more stable income then the tech field will. and I get out more too.(no musty server room for me!!)I love being my own boss!!!!!

so with your "Extensive" training and obvious "Humility" we should value your viewpoint because.............? please pay no attention to this as someone seems to have hacked my account

Questions about your response:

1) What content right now supports DRM and requires it to be on the graphics card. Maybe I understand this differently than you, but all my content (new and old) works as is right now, and should when I get a Cable tuner from ATI as well.

64bit Drivers: The day of release of windows vista the rtm updated a number of drivers through windows update for 64-bit vista. I have had no problem finding any devices on my 5 64 bit systems (mixtures of AMD/INTEL and ATI/NVIDIA components including the Sound Blaster Audigy 4 card). That comment just doesn't hold water. I have had great drivers available for every single piece of hardware on 5 64bit legacy systems since day one of release. I think your comment isn't a current one about driver compatibility. If you need help finding anything please email me.

As for firewalls how about Tiny Firewall 64 which works on vista and CA just aquired. As far as 64bit compliant anti-virus, have you ever heard of AVAST! It works great.. I like it better than Norton/Symantec and McAffee..

There might be some alternatives for things you are saying are problems that you haven't looked at or addressed.

And then you proceed to say this can't be true because you're using Vista and XP.

Yes, of course. Silly me. I didn't realize that the only operating systems on the planet were made by Microsoft. I guess this "Linux" thing I keep hearing everyone talk about is a new game or some kind of cell phone or MP3 player or something. I was under the impression that it was an operating system. Thanks for straightening me out on that one.

...found this link:

http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/about78184.html

Not too good at this "internets" thing, are ya?

You should take some time to get to know who you're responding to, lest you make a fool of yourself, newbie.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to dual-boot SuSE and Windows XP:
1. Install Windows
2. Install Linux
You're done.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to dual-boot Linux (pick a flavor) and Vista:
Oh, sorry, it's too big to post here. Just follow the link and thank Microsoft for making things so easy for you.

I was so pissed when the Vista installer blew away my Redhat partition.

After mucho tweaking I VMWared Vista.

If you didn't have Windows format that partition, the data is probably still there, but the boot loader was overwritten. It's not all that difficult to fix, if that's the problem.

Vista fragged the MBR but RedHat 6.0 was particularly ****** about it. It was only a temporary install to hunt down a customer problem with our website so I turfed it.

You posted a false statement, I disproved it.

You then backed up a rung, claiming victory. Obviously, you've been posting on forums longer than me, since i've seen that tactic for years.

Nice.

Let's not talk newb, okay? I may be new to this forum, but i've been online for a long time.

Long enough, in fact, to come across threads like this on other sites loaded with garden-variety pseudo-griefers many times. It never gets any better.

Fun though.

That there are other operating systems besides Windows?

If you've been around a while, you should know enough to lurk for a while before shooting your mouth off.

He's going to say that technically you said that you can't dual boot Windows Vista and Linux.

Nevermind the fact that Windows blindly hoses your MBR and then you need to be an ubergeek to figure out how to fix it in both Linux and Vista. Technically this "myth" is true - You cant dual boot Vista and Linux because a layperson cannot do it. Not quite sure how friendly Vista is to Macs.

Technically I can dualboot windows XP and windows Vista on a Pentium Pro - if I could crap a crapload of RAM in it and with LN2 cooling and cutting down the fancy bits out of the OS - it will install and run.

Then we could bust the myth:Vista needs a Pentium 4

By the way, I love the word myth - it originally meant: a story or universal truth that may or may not be based on fact. Today, like many words it's meaning is distorted.

Dictionary.com:
Myth: a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon

or

a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation

I'm not going to judge vista yet, as I haven't loaded up the beta version yet to try it out...however I will be doing that soon.

I did hear something the other day that intrigued me though. I was told by a systems administrator that VISTA, due to it's lovely genuine validation tool, performs constant communication back and forth to Microsoft. Therefore, this would effect a companies bandwidth - especially when you have 500 PC's with VISTA on them.

I was wondering if anyone else had heard of this, or if this is one of those "myths".

Cheers!

Neil.

I don't think they communicate constantly, as in a real-time connection. I think they communicate monthly or something like that with a centralized key server (which should be on the internal network). In the past, once you validated your copy, it was validated for good (or until you reinstalled Windows). This has changed now, and Windows will now revalidate itself without any other reason than it's been 30 days since it did it last. The process exchanges a small amount of information, so it shouldn't consume too much bandwidth.

It sounds like the sysadmin simply misinterpreted what "validates itself constantly" means.

Agreed. I haven't seen or had complaints about the traffic when Vista machines are on the network.

Microsoft are probably just sending an encrypted version of your registration key and a hash of your hardware anyway. I can't see MS setting up the hulkingly huge high-bandwidth machine required for daily or even weekly updates from 50 million machines the cost would exceed the benefits.

The "big brother" model will be fine for one or two thousand users but once market penetration occurs the computational and network power to handle a weekly update would increase exponentially and equal the kind of servers that Blizzard uses for World of Warcraft.

I'd be surprised if the traffic is more than 5 or 6 packets.

Definitely FUD, definitely not a problem and definitely false.

There's a whitepaper somewhere that goes into a little bit more detail, but yeah. That's about right.

Thanks lads! (or lasses) :O)

That's exactly what I needed to know...I thought it was a little "out there" for MS to do something like that...

Cheers!

N.

I'm not able to connect to the net regularly from one of my machines, so wil this revalidation stop the machine from working?

was more chatty than XP, so it might degrade bandwidth, but I've not heard anyone confirm the claim.

The article is correct in all its points but I thought it wasn't to clear or convincing on two big points. Security and Vista not just being xp with eye candy. There's way to much though to talk about right here so I suggest looking at Wikipedia for a starting point. Look into sub articles for more information. They have done a lot of re architecting and added a lot of good features under the hood.

Here are some examples of improvements:
New and improved faster network stack.
The audio stack has been overhauled for greater fidelity (I think they use 32 bit floating point now instead of 16), extensibility and more stability (pushed up into user mode more)
Many driver systems where pushed further into user mode to reduce instability caused by faulty drivers. For example a printer no longer needs to have kernel access (if I remember correctly). Yay BSOD goes bye bye!
More stability features like deadlock prevention and resolution.
New kernel transaction manager to provide atomic operations on files, groups of files, files over network, and the registry preventing system corruption and inconsistency.
New media system that places audio and video at very high thread priority (above real time) so you don't get studder while other CPU intensive stuff starts up.
Readyboost and superfetch which have already been shown through various tests to improve app load times a lot.
Power options that let you configure and tweak your system exactly the way you want. Everything from PCI express power to Wireless power.
Sleep that keeps programs in memory but shuts down rest of computer to super conserve energy but still jump back in a matter of seconds. Not to mention it protects your session by transfering memory into hard disk too.
Automatic volume shadow copy is a very nifty technology that gives you snapshots of files in time but is very efficient with disk space since it only stores changes in the data.
How about WPF and .net 3? Uber cool platform to create really slick apps.
I think I've rambled on enough but this is just off the top of my head. I've read a bunch more features too. Plus there are a bunch of security features under the covers too. Wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_new_to_Windows_Vista

Should be familiar if you've taken a security class.

Anyways there's much more beyond what the media portrays so go out there and explorer the information.

You're right; there is much more behind all the less-than-enthusiastic reception Vista has gotten from the media. Go out and explore all the different ways Vista is borken, and don't forget to bring your credit card.

Extensive, cheap, no unruly neighbours, no traffic problems, great views, unpolluted...

I'm the vendor you believe me, don't you?

OK so it's on Mars...

. . .my previous post,I will now appease all you grumblers. Please keep in mind that computer technology is still an evolving mechanism and probably always be. What I meant was for you all to just have fun with it and don't take it so seriopusly, as all of it still has many flaws, but we are further ahead than 1997 and it can do many amazing things in spite of its shortcomings. Alternatives to Windows Vista are not limited to "Linux" (also vastly improved) but include whatever version of Windows or Mac that works best for you. Good bye, I'm outta here.

I'm glad you told me that, I wouldn't have figured it out myself.

After MPE/XL, CP/M , DOS, HP_UX, VMS, Unix ...

Thanks for the heads up.

1997 was 10 years after I started commercially, I started as a hobbyist in 1978...

nuff said eh.

Obscure fact and major PIA .. Does anyone know that Vista now tries to out think installation programs by not allowing setup files to run other setup files? This happens pretty often in all kinds of published software, and MS claims to do this for security. The user doesn't get a prompt asking if he wants the second, third, whatever setup program to run, MS just doesn't allow it to run. It actually more restrictive than even this .. go to Installshield forums or some other installation software forums to learn more.

I believe this was incorporated to sell more software upgrades.

And User rights management .. what a massive PIA. And when you disable it Vista constantly reminds you that it's disabled. Thanks for that. Maybe I need to poke the registry to find a way to turn that anoyance off too. Just what I want to do ..

Bottom line though, it doesn't matter what MS publishes .. it'll become the new standard in a bout 18 months and there is no looking back.

I do see Vista as a big mistake for MS .. the user experience gap between Windows and Macs is a big chasm now .. users likely to benefit from Vista are those poor idiots who still use IE and Outlook to interact with the web. Thiose who live in a MS only software world. If you're that security lax, then "upgrade" so you can be "protected" in the MS way. Oh, and corporates will love the User Rights so they can turn your "rights" off. IT gets to cripple users in a new better way! Yeah!

Much of the "new" features in Vista are already available as free add ons to XP .. Google desktop search, lots of sidebar programs, Firefox and Thunderbird, etc.

...that they committed suicide years ago with their rights management.

Newsflash: Apple has the same default user rights scheme. That's right, you have to approve administrator access for major system functions too. Hell, you have to put your password in.

But by all means, act like this is a new thing that no one has ever seen before.

Problem is it's either on or off. No adjustablility

You seem to confuse User Authentication (what OSX does) with User Approval (what Vista does).

Vista asks you if you meant to do what you just did. (And it asks *a lot*.) This is no different than the XP way of confirmation dialogs, they've just added about 20 times as many dialogs.

Mac OS X (and Linux) actually ask you to *prove* who you are before doing something sensitive to the computer.

If you think those two things are equivalent, you *deserve* Windows-grade security.

Just as an example: Joe walks away from his PC for a minute. Ed, his arch-nemisis, sees him leave and goes to install some spyware on his box so he can sabotage Joe's competing project. The result?

Vista helpfully asks Ed if he's *really sure* he wants to do this. Of course he does!

OS X helpfully asks Ed to prove that he's Joe. Oops, no luck there.

Please do some research and/or use a product before you comment on it.

The new UAC feature in MS Vista does indeed ask for the admin password if the user is trying to do something that would normally require admin privileges and that user isn't an admin.

You are assuming in your comments that the user (Joe) is an admin. And even then some admin specific tasks are still flagged by the UAC as well even if you are an admin.

Let me ask you this. If you're using Linux and you log in as the admin, just how good is the UAC equivalent feature in Linux?

Just as good as the Vista feature if you're logged in as an admin. Don't assume that your fictional character Joe is an admin without disclosing that in your comments.

linux requiers a "Super user do" AKA."sudo" for just about everything you do to change the confiurations in it. so perhaps you need to heed your own advice before you critisize others. lummox

Open a terminal window, SU ( switch user ) to root. Run commands that need root access from that terminal window. No sudo required.

If you don't what to log in as root, or enter the root password when prompted, then you can use sudo to let your normal user account run commands that usually require root access. Its configurable so that you can be as permissive or restrive with these as you like.

" Yay BSOD goes bye bye!" -- nope, I bsod'd this one -- granted not from a print driver though
"Power options that let you configure and tweak your system exactly the way you want."
this is in XP, new is the interface

"Everything from PCI express power to Wireless power." If you are talking HW, then it is not Vista, if you are talking SW, PCIe works fine in XP.

"Sleep that keeps programs in memory but shuts down rest of computer to super conserve energy but still jump back in a matter of seconds. Not to mention it protects your session by transfering memory into hard disk too." -- this has been around for a long, long time. Maybe it was improved, but it is not new at all.

"Automatic volume shadow copy is a very nifty technology that gives you snapshots of files in time but is very efficient with disk space since it only stores changes in the data."
available in XP pro, set it up and used it a few times too. also available in svr03.

The BSOD went away in Vista. It's red now.

Wireless power?! Wow, I'm impressed. Vista supports a technology that doesn't even exist yet.

Does Vista also run on DNA and quantum computers, too? Will it automatically reset the clock in my De Lorean time machine when I come back from 1955?