Patrick Elliott wrote:
> 
> And, if they where doing something more than just sticking the "shell"
> of this:
> 
>
http://www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?s=technology&c=news&l=on&pic=080324-aptera-car-02.jpg&cap=The+electric+hybrid+Aptera+(greek+for+%22wingless+flight%22)+is+a+3-wheeled+motorcycle+registered+with+DOT+and+the+California+DMV.+The+production+model+will+go+85+mph+and+get+300+mpg%2C+the+company+states.+Credit%3A+Aptera.com&title=
> 
> 
> on this:
> 
> http://www.omnieye.com/mc/ad-pics/22140345.jpg
> 
> I might be a bit more impressed. ;) lol
> 

Yes, but that's you and me. Most people just take what comes with the
computer and those people mostly see the visual difference. IIRC OTOH
Darren has found some positive development from Vista comparing to XP.

-Aero

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Darren New wrote:
>>
>> Home, yeah. But.. You don't want to do this "before" you install some
>> things, or they break (and yeah, yeah, they don't follow spec, blah,
>> blah.. But geeze...), and somehow I doubt that it moved "everything",
>> not just the documents.
> 

Since 2k Windows has supported mounting partitions to directories. It
doesn't come up on the normal installation, but wouldn't it be possible
to just mount another partition to C:\Documents and settings or
C:\Users? Of course using both styles makes it more complicated to
think, but I don't see why it wouldn't work just like mounting another
partition to /home in Linux.

> They don't optimize program access? It's been doing that since like Win
> 3.1 or so. What's "the other" you're talking about?

Running defragger on Windows 3.1 sounds somewhat frightening.
Multitasking still sucked on Win3.1 (it existed, but it was veeeery slow
comparing to another implementations) and it certainly locked amount of
files while running. Running the defragger from DOS sounds more familiar
and sane.

-Aero

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Darren New wrote:
> 
> What, watching for changes without polling?  There have been multiple
> ways to do that sort of thing for years and years. I think Win95 had it,
> and more recently with NTFS you have the USN journal, so your program
> doesn't even need to be running to watch for changes.

No, snapshotting, which you answered on the another message.

>> I'll shout "Finally" rather than croon. One thing I've been missing on
>> Windows since the 90's.
> 
> Well, there's a bunch of add-on packages that do a decent job of it.
> 

I've found one (don't remember the name tho - that was 10 years ago),
but honestly I haven't checked in couple of years. It not so bothering
anymore, while I'm having almost enough desktop at work (2*24" LCD,
total being 2400x1920 pixels), but when running on laptop, it would ease
up a lot.

-Aero

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Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> and I don't actually *care* any more. I know I'm right, 
> 
> Excellent!  Glad to hear it. It's a stupid thing to argue about anyway. :-)

Mmm, let's all go render spheres. 8-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
>> However we did pay 10 thousand pounds for some CAD software, and that 
>> crashes occasionally (which is infinitly more often than the OS!).
> 
> OK, that's pretty lame. I'd ask why you don't go use a better package 
> instead, but I suspect the answer is going to be some combination of
> 
> - There aren't any better products to choose from.
> - Our clients use this product and we need to be compatible.
> - We've bought it now so we can't get our money back anyway.

Scott's answer was on the nose, but there's another thing worth 
mentioning - if it's very high-end industrial software, the number of 
people using it is going to be relatively sparse. Maybe only a few 
thousand users. This means it will take longer to find the bugs in the 
first place - MS, by comparison, have a hundred million testers and an 
automatic bug-reporting system.

The upside to this sort of software is it's possible to have a much 
closer relationship with the developer - bugs can be acted upon faster 
and you might even get to suggest/influence new features.

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> Scott's answer was on the nose, but there's another thing worth 
> mentioning - if it's very high-end industrial software, the number of 
> people using it is going to be relatively sparse. Maybe only a few 
> thousand users. This means it will take longer to find the bugs in the 
> first place - MS, by comparison, have a hundred million testers and an 
> automatic bug-reporting system.
> 
> The upside to this sort of software is it's possible to have a much 
> closer relationship with the developer - bugs can be acted upon faster 
> and you might even get to suggest/influence new features.

IME, there are two kinds of high-end software:

- The software that costs the Earth and doesn't actually work very well, 
but the developers don't give a damn.

- The software that costs the Earth, but as you say, the people work on 
it take you seriously.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Mmm, let's all go render spheres. 8-)

I've been learning Blender, myself. Or at least going thru the noob 
tutorials trying to get a feel for it.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Word seems to "suck" more on the easy part 

Yeah. It's gotten to the point where if your dashed-off note isn't justified 
with boldface headings, it's not acceptable. What ever happened to a plain 
old typed letter. Can you imagine giving someone a resume that looks like it 
came out of a typewriter?

Do kids doing grade-school book reports these days have to have all kinds of 
fancy fonts and styles to make it acceptable, I wonder?

> Excel is one of the very few graphical programs that I've actually had
> help from the help system - because it's help documentation is freaking
> good.

I never had something I needed to do with Lotus 1-2-3 that wasn't in the 
first page or two of documentation after asking for context-sensitive help. 
I'm convinced that's what killed Jazz more then Excel did - the help for 
Jazz was the generic useless "enter a formula here" instead of stuff telling 
you what formulas start with the two letters you just entered.

>> Somewhat. Much of that is due to people not installing patches or people
>> not using the system as designed.
> 
> And another much is just the users, which break the security of any
> system :).\

That would be the "people not using the system as designed."  Like, always 
being logged in as administrator.

> I think mostly because the developers haven't seen those features
> necessary (at least yet) and not enough users have asked for them.

I was being rhetorical there. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Since 2k Windows has supported mounting partitions to directories. It
> doesn't come up on the normal installation, but wouldn't it be possible
> to just mount another partition to C:\Documents and settings or
> C:\Users? 

It should, yes.

What I did is just copy the entire \users\public to my other drive, then 
told Vista that public's home directory was m:\public

I've had zero problems with that.

 > Of course using both styles makes it more complicated to
> think, but I don't see why it wouldn't work just like mounting another
> partition to /home in Linux.

The only problems I can see are
1) making the change. I.e., you'd have to actually manage to delete \users 
before you could mount another partition as \users. However, Vista now has 
symlink-style reparse points, so you could probably use them.

2) if something tries to access \users in the boot process before it 
finishes mounting all the drives, you could have a problem.

> Running defragger on Windows 3.1 sounds somewhat frightening.

IIRC, defraggers for the 16-bit OSes all ran under DOS, not Windows. But 
some of them used the usage stats from Win95 to put common programs near the 
front of the drive, and the ones for Win3 would put files in the same 
directory next to each other if you told it to.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> I've found one (don't remember the name tho - that was 10 years ago),

"Shock 4 Way 3D" works nicely (at least under Vista) as does QTTaskbar. 
(QTTaskbar isn't, IIRC, a virtual desktop, but something else that gives 
nice window management.)

Did a bunch of research into it when I was first setting up Vista here, 
since it was easy to say "Gee, that piece of freeware hosed my whole 
machine, but no biggie." :-)  Avoid "Start++", as it doesn't uninstall 
completely if you don't want it, and thus continues to try to do automatic 
type-ahead completion and stuff then invokes code you've removed from the 
machine.  Bleh.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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