I thought you were dissing the Speccy, not the 'leccy.

Ooooh...

"On Tuesday the UK's electricity network was shaken by the failure of two major power stations within minutes of each other and a further seven succumbed as the day went on."

Abstract = organization, collusion, fear, power, money. I think that sums it up.

That is unless all these "power problems" everywhere, are a coincidence (if there such a thing, "coincidence")?

"Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates this week defended Windows Vista and made noises about the next Microsoft OS, Windows 7. The much-maligned Vista is "not a failure and it's not a mistake.", says Steve."

I think the clear point here is that if you used a closed source OS, you can expect to be forced to upgrade each version as the vendor say - or pay the price. They will stop the security updates, end the life of the project, make new software so you can only run it with the new OS, etc. If you want freedom with OS management, you have to go open source or manage it yourself. I could be wrong, but who is still running 1000x machines with win95?

The US military seems to have begun a secret programme to develop a superior stealth bomber.

I fail to understand how this would at all qualify as "a secret programme" if everyone knows about it. It is funny that we have 12yr old kids who already have the schematics to these "secret" programs, and others are on a web board discussing something they have little to no information on. Ask your children. Talk about "stealth", if it cannot hide from my 12yr old son, it fails the stealth test.

Not content with outlawing our extreme porn, the government is proposing to ban drawings and computer-generated images of child abuse.

I seem to be confused here, is our goal media control - or tracking down child molesters?

It is very simple really = No child molesters = no more child porn produced.

And to think, here our teacher(s) are having sex with our student(s), but we are worried about a cartoon.

And the helicopter because the thing was flying over my hut.

<--Takes out spear.

Where, precisely, are you getting your information on nuclear power from? They need to be told they're peddling a pack of worthless lies and misinsinformation.

Also, can Microsoft please explain how Windows Server 2008 produces superior performance from the NT6 kernel when compared to Vista?

"someone will have to pay to maintain the plant even when it no longer produces leccy, and they will have to keep paying to maintain the plant for fifty to one hundred thousand years. That is longer then human beings have been recognisably human.

Still think they are a good idea?"

Yup. The other options are more stupid.

Humans are pretty clever. Clever enough that I'd be surprised if they didn't figure out something useful to do with that waste long before the 50-100K years it would take to decay on it's own.

What I really like to see are some counter-proposals from the groups who are so dead-set against things like this. Not fuzzy-headed ones that won't scale or aren't proven yet. Ones that can produce in the multi-gigawatt range, and can be on line in a few years. We don't need pilot programs. We need to break ground on something that will work, and we need to do it soon.

"Rememmber how people ranted at Win95 ? Sure, it wasn't very good, and sure, it waas only a DOS with some bad graphical interface, but that's what Linux is today,"

I am aware that lack of basic knowledge of the subject in hand seems to be no barrier to many of those who post comments, but even the terminally retarded should have worked out by now that Linux does not run on DOS.

I use Vista for work and home... No fancy hardware.... We get on fine....

Didn't notice an leccy problems cept my oven blew up...

Bring on th bombers...

Operate on the peadoes...

Sack the government...

You all have a loverly Monday....

I've been forced to use vista at work and can't describe how much I hate it's desire to tell me how I should be using it. Explorer has become unusable. I want the columns you get in XP, name, size, type, date modified, however if there's a picture in a directory I get the picture columns, if there's an mp3 I get big icons music columns, it downloads the cover art and then goes through the mp3s screwing up the tags.

I then have to spend time putting the columns I want to see back into the folder view. No matter how many times I "Apply to all folders" my preferences they're ignored.

Conversely the folder on my desktop of shortcuts constantly reverts to the detail view no matter how many times I change that to icons.

And if anyone know's how to remove the pointless "stack by name" dropdown at the right hand side of the column header I'll be eternally grateful. Stack by name...I mean why, when I can have a view of the contents that *tells* me something would I want to view things split up in alphabetical order. I'm over the age of 6 I know when the files beginning with "A" stop and the files beginning with "B" start. WhyOWhyOWhyOWhyOWhyOWhyOWhyOWhyOWhy.....

[breathe]

<quote>"Rememmber how people ranted at Win95 ? Sure, it wasn't very good, and sure, it waas only a DOS with some bad graphical interface, but that's what Linux is today,"

I am aware that lack of basic knowledge of the subject in hand seems to be no barrier to many of those who post comments, but even the terminally retarded should have worked out by now that Linux does not run on DOS.</quote>

shall I call you the ambulance then since you are obviously the terminally retarded one? Frank was making the point that any graphical interface running under Unix still runs on top of a command line shell of some description even if you don't see it (and that includes Mac OSX).

Frank specifically said 'a DOS' (Disk Operating System), not MSDOS or PCDOS) and the analogy still holds.

"...any graphical interface running under Unix still runs on top of a command line shell of some description even if you don't see it (and that includes Mac OSX)."

That's just plain wrong.

Unix (& Unix-a-like) installations will generally have both a graphical interface and a command line interface (in fact quite often you'll have a choice of several of each!) but to say that the graphical interface runs on top of the CLI interface is just silly, they exist alongside each other and make use of the same set of supporting utility programs, kernel APIs, etc, etc, etc to Get Stuff Done. Some operations are easier with the GUI or easier with the CLI, some programs only have a GUI, some programs may only have a CLI interface, quite a lot have both. Some operations may require use of the CLI (or modification of a configuration file with your text editor of choice but the GUI emphatically does not "sit on top of" a CLI shell any more than (say) WinXPs GUI "sits on top of" the Windows command prompt application...

--

JG

You started off well, but then went down hill. talking about programs running under a GUI is not what we are talking about.

You cannot have a Unix GUI interface (ignoring single purpose built GUI implementations like GRUB or installer's which are another different ball game entirely) without the CLI interface underneath. The ability to use whichever CLI you want to use (bash, tcsh, ksh etc) is immaterial I agree as is the flavour of Window Manager and GUI interface (Xdm running KDE or Slim running Xfce)

But the truth is still the truth, X windows or whichever Window manager GUI combination you run on Unix is a program that runs on top of a Unix subsystem, even if you never see it. Fact.

this is how Windows 95 used to work. it is not how any Windows from the NT stable has worked, although every other "home" version 3.x, 95,98, & ME worked in exactly this way.

/me pours more oil on the flames

Actually you're both wrong.

UNIX GUIs are just applications that run on top of UNIX (mostly XWindows based), they are often launched from a shell, either during startup (the init/rc scripts) or interractively from the console, this is similar to launching windows from the DOS prompt. Note, the GUI may not have a display attached initially but it's still a "Graphical User Interface", this GUI may even end up connected to a display on a different machine (desktop UNIX typically have local displays and servers, if they have one at all will typically have remote displays).

The UNIX GUI will (almost) never communicate with the shell it was launched from, instead it will run commands either using threads or new processes, so for all the similarities, UNIX GUIs don't run "on top".

At the end of the day it's semantics, the closeness of the windows GUI to the windows kernel makes it snappy but means that the GUI can suck up the resources, the modular nature of the UNIX GUI make it slower but less likely to stuff the OS.

The question is, is a bad thing? well, what are Microsoft developing now? a GUI-less server with a Vista/2008 core, maybe it's not such a bad idea, maybe separation of OS and GUI is a good thing, anyone who accidentially left a cool 3d screensaver running on their NT server will know what an on overhead GUIs can be.

A: Win XP (Whatever your flavour), damn; my explorer's frozen!

(server's gone t*tsup or whatever, it's not the cause, it's the effect I'm demonstrating)

* Get Task Manager open (by whatever means takes your fancy)

* Kill explorer.exe, you know that process id 3292 that's taking 100% of your quad cpu and nearly 2gig of ram for good measure

* Restart explorer.exe

* All is well with the world

B: Vista (Whatever you poison), dam; my pc's frozen! (I looked at it the wrong way)

* Get Task Manager open (blue-tack, word's to someone upstairs, etc)

* Kill explorer.exe, you know the one thats ..... <insert your own stats here> .....

* WTF! My machine has just out-right restarted!? No-BSOD, no - "I can't do that!"

* Ok fine, wait patiently after the bios screen passes, right Windows Vista will load in minute or two....

*....

* Black Screen

*....

*............?

*..............................?

* Still Black Screen

* <Click> Ctrl+Alt+Del (Someone told me that might do something)

* Still Black Screen

.?!

*....................................?

Hold power button (Executive Shutdown!!)

* Power up again.

Repeat Black Screen

* ?

* Exec Shutdown number x

* Boot from Linux Hot CD

* Format hd:0

* Install Windows XP

* All is well with the world

*