Microsoft VISTA

[Puke]

i see that you are trying to be sarcastic, but you are more correct than you would like to think. in the old USSR, it did take ages to get any public works projects done. roads ran up to a river, and continued on the other side - with no bridge!

In the middle east, railroads pass from oil wells to refineries, going through cities but not stopping in them. because they are wells and refineries that belong to the western world, and theres no use in spending money trying to develop the third world. you poke fun at the idea, but who the hell is going to fund a subway system in the Sudan? its not worth the time or money, and it would just be destroyed in a civil war anyway.

The world would stand to benefit from a standardized public transit system, and the US did pioneer alot of it. do you know how many different railroad gauges there are in the UK? you cant move a train from one track to another!

The computing world needs standards too. but free commerce dictates that the only standards we will have will be of the defacto sort. and our rails will never be standardized. and in the US, are rails will never be fully utilized because of the oil, tire, and highway industries that keep mass transit suppressed.

So there are lots of things that SHOULD be done, that never will.

[parabolize]

i see that you are trying to be sarcastic, but you are more correct than you would like to think. in the old USSR, it did take ages to get any public works projects done. roads ran up to a river, and continued on the other side - with no bridge!

All countries have transportation problems. Open a map for Colorado Springs. We let the real estate agents make are roads!

In the middle east, railroads pass from oil wells to refineries, going through cities but not stopping in them. because they are wells and refineries that belong to the western world, and theres no use in spending money trying to develop the third world. you poke fun at the idea, but who the hell is going to fund a subway system in the Sudan? its not worth the time or money, and it would just be destroyed in a civil war anyway.

Iran and Turkey have many railroads that were made even before oil was being refined. Oil is often moved by pipe line.

The world would stand to benefit from a standardized public transit system, and the US did pioneer alot of it. do you know how many different railroad gauges there are in the UK? you cant move a train from one track to another!

And USA railroads have always been standardized?

The computing world needs standards too. but free commerce dictates that the only standards we will have will be of the defacto sort. and our rails will never be standardized. and in the US, are rails will never be fully utilized because of the oil, tire, and highway industries that keep mass transit suppressed.

The GNU community IS making GUI standards. They ARE working with Mac and Solaris. KDE and Mac have been handing code back and forth for a long time now; they are both using khtml. Everybody is complying with the w3c BUT IE. As Thermodyne pointed out IPv6 is coming (slowly though).

[El_Phil]

Well for starters the UKs had a 'Standard Gauge' act since the 1840s, with only the Great Western any different. And even that was changed over 1892 (Overnight. As in literally one nights work! Amazing what you can do with no H&S to slow you down). So actually all UK railtracks are the same gauge and have been for over a centuty. (The things you learn playing Railtoad Tycoon hey. )

The US didn't pioneer standard gauge, the NE US used standard (copied off the Brits I might add ) and the rest used random sizes, anywhere between 4ft and 6ft in fact. This was a problem when railroads started to meet up, so eventually late 1880s they went for standard gauge for all US rail, spending the next few years doing all the conversions. So in fact US rails have been standardised, again for about a century.

This doesn't bode well for you arguments Puke, if I'm honest.

Especially as computer hardware has standards, rock solid ones. You can buy any hardware from any company and it will work in your machine as long as both are on the same standard. How many other industries can say that?

Software is shakier, mainly as MS changes standards to make them more propietry. Internet Explorer is not standard compliant off the top of my head.


Finally I think Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CERN would have something to say about inventing the internet as we know it. Quite alot actually.

[Thermodyne]

El_Phil said:


Finally I think Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CERN would have something to say about inventing the internet as we know it. Quite alot actually.

Sir Tim was responsible for the www. That we love so much, not the redundant WAN. DARPA and a few universities sitting on a bunch of fed funded supercomputing developed the RWAN. Public side of it was to insure communications if the cold war went hot in a limited exchange. Private side and the reason that the Air force poured money into it was to influence the Soviet target list. When it went on line in 66 IIRC, most of the nodes were located in out of the way low target value areas. Data transmission was coded teletype. Later, the same wires carried the first binary data. Security was pressurized conduit. But soon after, the CIA/Navy developed a way to tap pressurized conduit, but that’s another story some of you may have heard parts of.

As for CERN, they have added a lot of functionality to the net, but they to came late to the game, building on DOD technology. Also of note would be that TCP/IP came from the DOD. If they had chosen to sit on it, we would probably started the WWW with IDP/SPP or DECnet, which was the high power network of the early 80’s DEC Pathworks was how Apple, DOS and Windows connected to it. And of late, the NIX community has started to use it again.

[Sivran]

Security.

Take a 9x machine.
Install TCP.
Connect to Net.

Take a XP SP1 machine.
Install TCP.
Connect to Net.

Which box gets rooted?
That's right--the XP box.

Why?
Exploitable services exposed to the net.

Now put the two in the soft and gooey interior of a LAN. They'll both get 0wned. Why? File sharing was installed, of course, and being on the "protected" interior of the LAN, they don't have any workstation-level protection installed and thus fall to the next worm that gets through the LAN's eggshell exterior.

But Sivran, Microsoft issued a patch!
Ah, but patches, after the arduous Microsoft testing cycle, must also face the corporate testing cycle, delaying implementation perhaps long enough for the network to get 0wned.

Games.

Take an old game. Let's say Descent, or Descent II. Install on 98. Game runs. Joystick may be a hassle depending on model, but game runs. Install on XP. Game does not run. Compatability mode isn't.

"Up"grading.

In all seriousness, why should someone downgrade from 98SE to XP? What benefits do they get, that they cannot also get from 2k if they seriously need it?

They will still face the same spyware threats. They will still face the same browser exploit threats. They will still face email-borne virus threats.

They will not face the worm-without-user-intervention threats--9x is not susceptible at all unless file and print sharing is exposed. XP is susceptible, even if file and print sharing isn't even there.

Software still runs on 9x. 9x can be quite stable--the trick, I find, is simply not using IE, and avoiding memory and resource-leaking programs like some ancient versions of ZoneAlarm.

Multimedia still plays on 9x. Just need the codecs.

Everything is still in a familiar place, same as it was in 95. No silly rearranged menus or control panels.

You don't have to rent 98 like you rent XP.

Erm. Where's the advantage of XP again?

[Suicide Junkie]

Another "great" comparison based on observations tonight:
SJ's laptop:
166Mhz, 48 megs of ram, win 98.

SJ's sister's laptop:
1.5 Ghz, 512megs of ram, winXP.

---

Q) Which runs faster?
A) Neither. It was a trick question: they both have about the same speed and responsiveness.

[El_Phil]

I only went up to XP because some programmes flatly refused to run on 98/ME, or ran awfully. I got Dawn of War which had a developer admited 'feature' that it ran awfully on 98/ME as the memory management was optimised for XP.

That aside I wouldn't of bothered, I'm still not convinced myself.

Oh and Thermy that's a bad argument, as you well know. Different people can invent the same thing, I agree it happened slightly faster because DoD released it but something similar (or perhaps better ) with a couple of years. Lots of people were working in the field, inventors do exist outside of the US you know.

[Thermodyne]

Sivran said:
Security.

Take a 9x machine.
Install TCP.
Connect to Net.

Take a XP SP1 machine.
Install TCP.
Connect to Net.

Which box gets rooted?
That's right--the XP box.

Why?
Exploitable services exposed to the net.

Now put the two in the soft and gooey interior of a LAN. They'll both get 0wned. Why? File sharing was installed, of course, and being on the "protected" interior of the LAN, they don't have any workstation-level protection installed and thus fall to the next worm that gets through the LAN's eggshell exterior.

But Sivran, Microsoft issued a patch!
Ah, but patches, after the arduous Microsoft testing cycle, must also face the corporate testing cycle, delaying implementation perhaps long enough for the network to get 0wned.

Games.

Take an old game. Let's say Descent, or Descent II. Install on 98. Game runs. Joystick may be a hassle depending on model, but game runs. Install on XP. Game does not run. Compatability mode isn't.

"Up"grading.

In all seriousness, why should someone downgrade from 98SE to XP? What benefits do they get, that they cannot also get from 2k if they seriously need it?

They will still face the same spyware threats. They will still face the same browser exploit threats. They will still face email-borne virus threats.

They will not face the worm-without-user-intervention threats--9x is not susceptible at all unless file and print sharing is exposed. XP is susceptible, even if file and print sharing isn't even there.

Software still runs on 9x. 9x can be quite stable--the trick, I find, is simply not using IE, and avoiding memory and resource-leaking programs like some ancient versions of ZoneAlarm.

Multimedia still plays on 9x. Just need the codecs.

Everything is still in a familiar place, same as it was in 95. No silly rearranged menus or control panels.

You don't have to rent 98 like you rent XP.

Erm. Where's the advantage of XP again?

Hey Sirvan, see post above, Buy a book, take a class, hire a pro. Because you don’t have a clue. First off, 9x can be exploited by anyone who can touch the machine. And any second year computer tech student that can touch it on the net. Second you should be securing XP before you expose it to the net. Third, you should have a hardware firewall between you and any high speed WAN. Fourth, LAN systems are secured with GP and are tightly locked down, unless the LAN manager needs to see post above also. Fifth, you get what you pay for. If you buy a single stand alone license, you can install XP on any single system you want, one at a time just like 98. The copy that comes preinstalled on the Compaq from CompUSA is a discounted OEM install, and not transferable. Read the fine print before you buy! Sixth, as to the 9X games you love, ever hear of dual booting?


PS: Here’s your sign.

[Fyron]

Thermodyne, please do not quote huge posts in the future. Ellipses work miracles.

[Sivran]

Rudeness does nothing to support your point.

Physical access leads to an exploited machine full stop. Operating system does not enter into it. Remotely, a patched 9x system might could be crashed, but you'll not be seeing it get rooted by the kiddies and worms running around. Anything more and again OS does not enter into it: the attacker was determined and, as any second year tech will tell you, a determined attacker is going to get in.

I do not advocate that businesses keep 98, much less choose 9x over 2000, however if they have existing 9x machines in low-risk areas performing tasks that won't be done any better on a newer OS, why should they bother with a newer OS? Don't fix what isn't broke, right?

As for end-users they probably have even more reason to stick with 9x if it is doing the job for them. Why should they bother with the hassle of switching? Again, they'll face the same dangers either way, assuming those dangers even apply, and 9x does the job. For what I do with my machines, 2000 does the job better and so that is what I use. 98SE however did the job quite respectably and crashed or required reboot almost as rarely as 2000 Server. The last 98 box in the house--tasked with playing movies to the TV in the living room on the weekends--suffers on rare occasions not because of the OS it's running, but because of the ancient video card. It doesn't crash, as most people seem to believe 98 is wont to do at the drop of a hat. It just sits there, providing internet access to that end of the house and providing entertainment (who needs media center? ). It couldn't possibly do its job any better if it were running XP or 2000. In fact, given the hardware in it, it'd most likely perform worse.

Insulting and talking down to those who still use 9x--hell my granddad still uses ME and has no problems--only shows your own arrogance and ignorance.

Use the right OS for the right job. 9x is just fine, even superior, in some situations. There are those situations where it doesn't matter, and in still others, yes it is inferior. That's a choice for the user to make. I'm sorry you can't seem to accept that.

As to dual-booting, why have two operating systems when one does most or everything a user needs equally well or with negligible difference?