Mandrake was a very easy to use and user friendly release of RedHat Linux, similar to how Ubuntu is an easier and more friendly version of Debian. Mandrake had a good following back in the day and I remember it being very easy to use.

I think that it would be best if they do their own thing and see what they come up with, not only because their base distros are completely different but because they could bring in new ideas. I'm hoping Mageia will be able to come up with a fresh user friendly Linux that can be offered as an alternative to Ubuntu, for the people who don't like Ubuntu (for whatever the reason). For example, non-techie people sometimes get word about sound and wireless problems with Ubuntu, well hey now you can offer Mageia.

Why should I be impressed when a company the size of Microsoft takes 9 versions and 15 years to achieve acceptable performance?

During the days of IE4 and IE5, IE would smoke every competitor (except for Opera) in rendering pages and overall performance. Performance was so fast that they they could use web page code for the content of every window in Explorer (and have the IE engine render each one) on the processors of the day (like origional Pentiums or Pentium II's). So no, it wasn't 15 years and 9 versions. They just got lazy after IE6 which allowed their competition to overtake them, and have been playing catchup for three versions. Chrome is the totally new player right now and is ahead just like Opera and FireFox back in the day, when it becomes as ancient as IE we'll see how it performs.

NTFS does avoid fragmentation in the same ways that ext3, HFS+ any any other modern filesystem try to do. It will naturally write files to sequential blocks when they are available. To completely avoid fragmentation the system would have to find or organize a large enough number of sequential free blocks every time it tried to do a write. If you changed a file so that it requires another free block the whole thing would have to be moved to a sequential area of free space. Imagine how things like the swap file would be impacted by that kind of thing.

As for pissing the file system I don't know what you could be doing because the design of NTFS is pretty robust. The MFT is mirrorred on completely different areas of the disk and structured in a binary tree (instead of chains like FAT). The filesystem itself is journalled and uses bitmaps, as well as supporting things like file snapshots. I've never seen NTFS "piss itself" unless there was a hardware failure somewhere.

If you stop unplugging your drives before they can flush the write cache (hint: Safely Remove Hardware) your NTFS pissing problems will probably go away.

Actually the reporting process on Microsoft Connect is relatively active and you do participate with the developers and others in discussion. I have submitted other product feedback for the Windows Live suite which are just submitted via web and you are only contacted if the developers need to get ahold of you...but the issues always get fixed in the next version which is fine for me.

OSS projects needs to understand that the end user doesn't give a shit about participating in developer discussion or following it every step of the way...they just want their problem fixed.

As for the speed of Mozilla bugfixes, FireFox 3.x still can crash and lose your bookmarks and profile data which is an age old bug which has greatly frusterated many FireFox users for as long as I can remember. I don't care about the bug reporting experience when I'm rebuilding my lost shit, and it's never made me less pissed off when it happens.

IIRC the hosts file fell out of favor in Windows because the system would manually process the entire hosts file before performing any DNS lookup (even ones cached by the DNS Service). If you had a large hosts file this would cause adverse performance issues as it would read through each entry every time. The hosts file also does not support wildcard blocking so you have to manually add each individual server for a domain, which could possibly lead to the large hosts file issue above.

In the limited category of speed, perhaps. It's only starting to catch up with firefox in terms of adblock support.

Give me a break. FF users praise AdBlock like it invented ad blocking. Long before FireFox (in the days of Netscape Navigator) there was a free addon I used for IE which did exactly what AdBlock does now (but with a less slick GUI). I can't remember the name of it now but it used to be a standard thing for many IE power users...the newer versions required paying for it (and the free one broke under Vista) so it died off. There are also many other IE AdBlock plugins like the one included in the IE7Pro addin.

I also remember Opera having add blocking support ages ago when I used it...but there was no GUI at the time for adding entries into the block list file. I wrote one in VB and it worked just fine, but I'm sure Opera has a GUI for it now.

AdBlock for FireFox simply provides a better interface than the IE and Opera versions, and was completely free when others were not. No one is benchmarking how well browsers can run the AdBlock plugin (which was written for FireFox in the first place). Please stop using it to compare them and Google search for how to block ads in other browser if you need to.

Damn right, anyone could author an ActiveX control using "VB5 Control Creation Edition" and package it on their web site, just because you choose to install it doesn't mean Internet Explorer or ActiveX is insecure. An ActiveX control is the same as installing any other software component, and you have to be prepared to accept that it might be vulnerable to exploits. This means you have to keep it up to date, or not use it at all if it's not required. Newer versions of IE with protected mode and running in Vista or higher Windows also have significant security improvements which can prevent most ActiveX exploits from affecting the system.

Java was a huge hole for many malwares and no one stopped using FireFox because the Java plugin could be exploited...

And the solution is to make the router not work until its password has been set. No networking, no configuration, no anything except a "Set password" screen, itself only accessible from a computer connected directly to one of the downstream ports.

Except for the fact that sixpack Joe resets his Linksys router to defaults all the time to fix internet connection issues...but never connects to the web interface or does any router configuration.

The default password is only usable from the local network interface anyway by default. If someone's already cracked into the local network he's pretty much screwed already. What would stop a worm on the local network from just sniffing the password, or brute forcing the web or telnet interface?

Yeah I thought the same thing when setting the "Write Protect" switch on the 3 1/2" floppies that you used for the installation of Windows 95. Even with the switch on, the owner and company name I used for the first installation were written to the disks and were automatically set when the disks were used again. True story...I still have no idea how Microsoft did it.

Needless to say, I've never trusted microsoft security ever since :P

Windows Server never trusts the client to do any validation because the client could be running Windows 95, MS-DOS or even OS/2 which aren't even aware of NT security ACL's. If you're logged into a domain, even opening a local folder on your system causes the client to validate the permissions with the domain controller. Windows Server will straight out deny access at the file system level if those permissions are set correctly.

The problem is that Windows permissions are not well understood by many people. Check out this article for some examples of how ACE/ACL read order affects the end interpretation of an object's permissions.

I'd guess your issue was caused by a mismatch between the share level permissions and the actual file/folder permissions, which is actually a pretty common issue. You can set the access permissions for a share to deny a user but forget to set file/folder permissions and allow him full access. The result being that the share won't open for him but he can still open the folder if he accesses it locally or navigates to it from another share which contains the folder. There are some policies which set object access and they actually do depend on the client for security validation (I've seen systems where "C:\Windows" was denied by policy settings when double clicking the icon in explorer, but you could access the folder by opening it with "explorer.exe /n,".

Windows security is complex and can be a hell of a mess sometimes but it is solid when it's done right. It's no different than the issues people have with UGO style permissions on Linux servers. Many people will just chmod 777 and set the owner/group of a file to something from a forum to avoid an error message in WS_FTP or whatever PHP page gives them errors.

Yeah maybe that happened in the 80's but this is 2010. In my area (of s major Canadian city) theives don't ever bother with such elaborate plans involving magnetic decals or finding when people are out. It's pretty common for them just kick in the door. If anyone is home they hold them at gunpoint or lock them in a room. Then they just take what they want from the house and load it into a stolen truck. It seriously happens more than you'd believe.

Yes but Apple's products always depreciate rapidly in usefulness over time and require complete replacement. I have a pile of old Macs that can no longer run the current versions of OS X and other software. A Mac that's over three or four years old can't run current versions of FireFox or Office. Amazingly I can install Windows XP on a (well over decade old) Pentium 233 and it will run the current FireFox version and even Office 2007 (slow as hell though)! Apple products work but they are only useful as long as Apple wants them to be, and I don't respect them for that.

It's impossible for all MS employees to be current on all MS technologies at all time. There are many different departments and projects which are moving independantly of each other. The number of products Microsoft produces is so vast that it's impossible for them to keep in sync with each other.

There's a good chance the designer hadn't learned SilverLight so he just did it up in Flash. Microsoft probably purchased quite a few Flash licenses in the time before they created SilverLight, so they may as well get their money's worth out of them.

When I worked for IBM we had similar products for many popular Microsoft tools. That didn't mean that we would use OS/2 Warp and Lotus SmartSuite when Windows XP and Office 2003 were cleary superior tools for what we were doing. I'm sure accounting would be pissed if they were told they had to use Symphony instead of Excel for making spreadsheets. Of course we would use our own products where we could (especially since the licenses are free).

If the competitor's tool does a job significantly better or the people in the department are more familiar with it (and if the cost warrants it) then there's no shame in using it. It's just pride getting in the way of production.

There are many advantages to 64-bit and muck more than just calculation:

The additional address space. A 32-bit x86 without PAE has a maximum address space of 4GB. When you boot a 32-bit Windows system like XP it has to split the address space between hardware, kernel and application address space. Windows usually splits it so that hardware/system and application each get 2GB of address space. That means that any application cannot address and use over 2GB of memory (virtual and physical combined).

Some services which cache a large amount of data like MSSQL and Active Directory can actually run into this limitation which is why you can boot Windows with the /3G switch (which gives 3GB application and 1GB hardware/kernel address space instead). The application can then use 3GB of memory while the kernel reduces it's own caches and memory usage to fit into the 1GB along with the hardware addressing.

Under 64-bit you have a virtual address space of something like 16 terrabytes which is so large Windows actually caps it's addressible memory at a set limit like 2TB. Obviously there's plenty of addressible space for hardware, kernel and application addressing to fit without any of the hard limitations and juggling in 32-bit.

The x64 instruction set is also much cleaner and has a newer design while x86 is very old and has a lot of legacy elements that origionate from the origional 8086 and through all of the subsequent generations.

IIRC AMD-64 also adds a bunch of general purpose and floating point registers. With more of them available you can do things like store all of a functions local variables in the additional registers instead of memory which speeds up code execution.

If you like the OS you use, it can be fixed/secured with vendor updates or even security solutions/utilities, there is absolutely no reason to "upgrade".

Except for the changes to things like the kernel and API's which you can't just "patch in" to the previous OS without breaking many things on running customer system. It's not like you can simply copy a few Windows 7 DLL's to Vista and you magically have all of the features of 7 working on Vista. There are things under the hood which you might think should be in a service pack but really cannot be implemented properly and easily into the old system..

There were many security and driver model improvements in Vista that will never work in XP, and there are countless API changes in Windows 7 that don't exist in Vista. This is because you cannot just drop in things like a replacement driver model or ASLR without breaking and having to replace countless things in the existing OS. NT 4's service packs would overhaul massive portions of the system and would break things all over the place. People would be forced to stick with a specific service pack version on each machine (like specifically running SP3 or SP4 instead of SP6a) depending on the combination of software they needed to run and which service packs would break it. Service packs on new systems only fix or add features and tend to avoid massive overhauls to the system archeticture.

At least with all the hype behind it, I would expect some pretty major changes under the hood of Windows 7 when compared to Windows Mobile 6.5.