OT: Which is better: XP or 2000? > Another Piracy Discussion

[se5a]

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
When I said "Piarcy is NOT 'Stealing', it's much worse." I obvoiusly failed to convey my feelings.

to use an analogy,.. to Steal = wet, to Pirate = Tidal Wave. Yes, to make everybody happy I must concur that a tidal wave is indeed wet. But it's so much more than 'just wet' calling it 'wet' does not do it justice.

see what I mean? no? ok then for the sake of not wanting to step on anyones toes, Piracy = Stealing. Further, stealing is a crime and all crimes should be punishable by death. (after all there is no 'degree' of crime, no 'gray area', you either do/did or don't/didn't where stealing is concerned. It makes perfect sense to have just one punishment for all crimes.)

If only life were that simple, there would be no need for lawyers.

babble, babble, boy I can sure babble.

no grey area?
himnnn
ok what about abandon ware.
stuff that is still copywrigted but you cant buy it anywhere, is no longer being published, etc. etc. but coppying it is still (by law) ilegal.

[David E. Gervais]

Stolen ideas, yeah I know something about that. When I was 12 years old I had an idea for a card game. I created a mock-up prototype and wrote down the rules etc. I called it "Plumber's Pipes" and sent it to Parker Brothers asking if they would be interested in marketing a game like this. They sent me a response (but kept my prototype) saying that they could not market such a game, they said they specialized in board games, not card games. Exactly 4 months later a new Parker Brother's game hit the store shelves. It was a card game called 'Waterworks' It was Exactly the same as the card game prototype I sent them but instead of a 'repair-card' they used a silly little metal wrench to indicate repairs. Boy was I one upset 12 year old, but there was nothing I could do. Later in life when I was into computers I decided to go back to this 'Plumber's pipes' idea and make a computer Version of the game. (this time I didn't send it to anyone, I just showed to my friends.) At about the same time that I finished my computer Version of 'Plumber's Pipes, a small company called LucasArts released a game called 'Pipedreams'. This time I couldn't blame anyone for stealing my idea, since it came out at virtually the same time as mine (about 2 weeks after actually) and making the game obviously took longer than that. Oh well, live and learn.

But I'm still not sure what lession I was supposed to learn? Such is life.

Can I babble or what? LOL

Cheers!

[JayBdey]

Your just making a copy of something. Stealing deprives the owner of use of the stolen goods, you can't "copy" a car. That is how they are different.

[ November 28, 2003, 19:51: Message edited by: JayBdey ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:

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...I don't like the proposed contract "you can install it on one machine only".

That is how software has always been though... very few software packages are sold on a license that allows you to run them on multiple computers at once.

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Almost always such restrictions have been empty power grabs by contract lawyers which have been ignored in practice, however. Humane companies would not cause a stink, for instance, if you want to install, say, a game both on your desktop and your laptop, etc. XP goes one step further and actually tries to sabotage itself by analyzing your machine, using your Internet connection to phone home to the M$ Mother Ship, etc. That's not a practice I care to support by paying someone hundreds of dollars for XP. No way, Jose.

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The Search is still crap (annoying, clunky and doesn't always work, even once you kill the animated characters)

It has always worked perfectly for me. I have never had it fail to find a file I was searching for before (unless that file didn't exist, of course). And, it is hardly clunky...

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It always amazes me when someone uses "I never noticed a problem" as a counter-argument to "it didn't work for me". Trust us Fryon, there are cases, who knows why, when it just fails to find files that are there. I've tested and had XP search and find nothing, followed by another search program running the same search, which finds files.

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Sorting files by date backwards - any way to fix that?

Click the sort button for date again, and it reverses the order it sorts them.

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Of course you can have it re-sort manually. That's not a fix, though, it's a known work-around.

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There is weird stuff going on with the "My ..." folders

Get the power toys and you can disable ALL of those folders; just set them to whatever folder you want (even on other drives!) and it stops using them altogether.

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Good to know.

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The "you have some unused icons on your desktop" wizards.

I don't recall ever seeing that. Can you elaborate?

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Sure. You must've turned it off, but by default, every few days or weeks, XP decides to launch a wizard in the user's face, perhaps with a hateful cartoon character and cutesy "speach bubble", saying something like, "Hey, XP has noticed you haven't used some of your desktop icons in a while. Would you like to stop what you're doing, and go through a wizard that asks you about all of them, and gives an option to delete them?" Yeah, there's a way to turn it off, but it's just an example of the many annoying goofball innovations of XP.

[quote]

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The annoying features I haven't figured out yet how to exorcise from the new "Start Christmas tree".

Just use the "Classic" start menu, and it is identical to the start menu in 2000 (and I think it is the same as in 98, but with the control panel stuff added, which is a good thing ).

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I do that on my own XP box at work, but there is still some crud left over that is not on 2K or 98. And the extra 2K stuff isn't particularly useful, except for disabling as many as possible of the unwanted default processes that launch and waste resources and CPU.

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some accessibility wizards opened by pressing five times the caps key for example

That is because you chose to set up the accessibility wizards when you installed the OS. Just remove them and that will stop.

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Or that were set up by default. The one that keeps happening to me, even on systems where I've told it to stop, is the "Hey, you've been holding down Control for more than five seconds - would you like to enter Accessibility mode?" wizard which attacks and messes up what I was doing at the moment. I suppose it reoccurs because of the frequent "updates" which sometimes reset default system options, such as the existance and IE association of MS Outhouse Express.

... Or make a Win98 partition to run those old DOS games. Very simply fix.

Best idea yet. (Though it's incredible that you'd write "Very simple fix" when referring to installing a second OS as a "solution" to a problem with the other OS.) In fact, that's what I have at home: one Win98SE partition, and zero XP. Works perfectly.

PvK

[JayBdey]

I've yet to find a problem with XP that I couldn't fix. I've never run into any of the problems mentioned. The search has always worked, I've never been bothered with the desktop cleanup wizard, and the "My" folders have always worked. And I have never had a major problem that caused real harm.

Why don't you guys like the new XP GUI? I think it's much better than the cold gray 9x GUI. I also like the new start menu.

[Fyron]

Originally posted by JayBdey:
Your just making a copy of something. Stealing deprives the owner of use of the stolen goods, you can't "copy" a car. That is how they are different.

Sigh... you can steal ideas just as you can steal goods. It is a slightly different form of stealing, but it is still stealing.

[JayBdey]

If someone has two cars and I steal one of them, then the owner now only has one car. If I make a copy of a song, the original still exists and is still usable.

Yes, they are different. It's just as illegal as stealing but it is a separate and different crime.