Microsoft VISTA

[El_Phil]

Well we've never stayed on topic before. I don't see why we should start now.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

No, no, no, that's the corner of the post border.

[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.

[Thermodyne]

El_Phil said:

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.

Do you have any idea of the money that was spent to develop TCP/IP? Or how many people worked on it? Only the US or USSR could have done it during that period in time. There are very few people in the world that know everything about what it can do and how it does it. Most people don’t have a clue. How many of you know what is taking place at each of the layers, or what the layers are? I’m not trying to say that Americans are smarter than the rest of the world, and I’m sure that there were foreign nationals that contributed to the project. What I’m saying is the US had the technical foresight and the economic strength to develop it even though the original use was just to connect dissimilar DOD systems on a RWAN, and to insure reliable data transmission. As to having the same idea at the same time, smartest and best funded person usually wins the race. There are 100’s of network protocols, but none have been able to displace TCP/IP. It has just been too robust, too adaptable, and too deployed for any one to give it any kind of a challenge.

[El_Phil]

Sure we wouldn't be where we are today without the money chucked at it (of course as a defence project it could have been done far cheaper by almost anyone else. This isn't a dig at US defence contractors, it's a dig at the Worlds defence projects. ))

I would definetly dispute the technical foresight part. It was a task specific job, nobody involved was planning for any big public use. Oh sure maybe the odd one or two lower down, but I'd bet none of the money men.

A final point, the best technical system regularly loses. Everything from Betamax and Minidisc through to hardware standards and fighter jets (TSR-2 **sob**). Marketing and politics normally determines it.

In this case as TCP/IP was used by the millitary and universites it had an unmatchable deployed base and couldn't lose.

Much like Windows actually. It doesn't matter what the future versions are like, the installed base is so high developers only work on the MS version (others if they have time, which they normally don't) and it's up to bodges and fixes to get programmes to work on other platforms.

[Thermodyne]

TSR-2, been a while since I heard anyone mention that plane. With the advantage of hind sight, it’d probably best that it wasn’t built. By the time it would have entered service, speed was no longer a viable defense, and it was slow by the standards of the day. Lots of countries were caught in more or less the same position at that time. Here, the B58’s were much more advanced, but found to be too expensive to maintain. They were pulled from service after a very short service life. And the B70 was probably 2 generations more advanced, but never saw production partly because of survivability and cost of operation issues. The plane that did fit the specs came a little later, but was not well received. The US fielded a few F111’s and Australia bought a few. England had already purchased F4’s by then, and screwed that up by replacing the engines with units of lower performance. And if ever there was a plane that needed all of the raw power it could get, it was the Phantom II. Then SAC bought a few FB111’s, longer range higher bomb load F111’s, as a stopgap until the B1 rolled out. But then we screwed that up by first delaying the B1 and then scrapping the high speed low altitude intake system which castrated the engine performance.

Another plane that fit the specs and was flying at the time was the A5 Vigilante, but the Navy also found the cost of operation to be more that they could stand. I guess it’s a good thing that Boeing and Avro built some damn good bombers, since their designs have both out lived several generations of replacements. The plane that the TSR-2 was going to replace also lived on for quite a few years. The US built high altitude versions of the Canberra were almost the state of the art for high altitude recon work, second only the U2’s and a hell of a lot easier to fly.