Ok, KnightDragon, i'll try to be fair as much as i can. Sorry if i inflamed the discussion.
Speedo said:
Apparently people don't care as much as you seem to think, since windows makes up what, 98% of the OS's on home PCs?
The amount is little less than 90%, not 98%. Apart from that, Padma's post is a sufficient reply to this. The reason why 9 people out of 10 buy XP is not exactly customer satisfaction.
Unless you buy the components and assemble on your own, or you're lucky enough to find a pc bundled with linux, you can't avoid paying the M$ tax, even when the windoze license has no use for you.
You're missing my main point too- what's worthless extra junk to you and me is a great feature to other people. I'd rather have a few extra MB HDD space "wasted" than be stuck without any options for configuring the way windows looks and works.
You may like it. Others do not. The problem is always the same: the customer has no choice.
No, but it explains why I've never seen it. Since I don't use IE, I have completely locked down. No cookies in IE = no WMP phone home, according to those links.
Good point for you. However, more that 80% of the net surfers worldwide still use internet exploder. It's a damn lot of phone calls!
Honestly it's irrelevant to me.
It should not be. If not for other reasons, they're basically doing a marketing research (that would have cost millions!) for free and at your expense.
There are other reasons to worry about it. You don't send your name etc... via the WMP phone calls, but you do send a unique ID, that, depending on the connection you're using, can be easily linked with a unique IP address or, in the best case, with a limited range of IP addresses... it's a joke to identify the ISP and to send a subpoena to it asking to hand over customer's personal data (and this if we want to limit ourselves to the legal stuff). It has been done before, and the service providers usually abide to avoid legal threats.
Obviously i'm talking in general sense. There are way to stop this threat (i simply shun WMP, winamp (audio) and VLC (video) are perfect substitutes). But the
luser doesn't even know that there's a potential breach in its privacy and security.
If M$ really wants to know what movies I'm watching, I'll set up a script to give them all the details- I don't care.
You may be un-worried by your privacy potentially being violated. It's your privilege. But others may not agree with you. And WMP doesn't ask for the user's permission before phoning home.
The only thing I really fault them for is not saying up front that it's phoning home, which they've corrected.
Only after their bad behaviour has been exposed. Do you honestly think that, if no one had ever noticed, M$ would have come with a statement like "our WMP phones the mothership every time you see a DVD on it" ?!?
Sorry, I just get tired of the condescending arrogance that most "power users" seem to have towards the rest of the world.
No problem, i concede this point. But let me rant a little.
I've been working in user's help from some time, and quit the job in disgust. I wanted something better than being compelled to repair the operating system of today's cretin.
You know what's the worst thing? Not that they're for the most part computer illiterates that think of themselves as competent. Not that they are for the most part brainless monkeys that need to be repeated over and over always the same things and still not catching them... no. The worst thing in absolute, the thing that truly made me desire to grasp their head and bang it on the monitor, is that
they lie.
Yes, they lie. "I did nothing!". "It's not my fault!". "It's the computer!" They thinks of themselves as smart people, while you, the technicians, are the dumb guy that can be fooled by their BS.
Now, i'm not here to judge your habits or your morality. I'm here to
make the damn thing work. Who cares if you surfed net porn? Who cares if you opened an attachment in a mail with the suject "Pamela Anderson Nude Pics" or BS like that? Who cares if you downloaded what looked like a crack for your beloved game that you downloaded illegally at home and got a virus instead? I could be interesting in those things only in the measure in which they allow me to isolate the problem and resolve it. Nothing else. I couldn't care less of the rest.
And those idiots, instead of understanding this obvious point and giving you the necessary info to have the problem solved quickly and easily, those sorry excuse for an intelligent being prefer to save their useless face and tell you BS, so you have to waste valuable time (and patience) to understand why the damn thing doesn't work.
Obviously, not everyone is like that. I'm not referring to the honest luser that, although it's a computer illiterate anyway, it has at least the decency to not pretend to be smart enough to fool you.
For the rest, the mass of sheeps, arrogance is simply what they deserve. At least until they grow a little.
Let's go back with the debate.
Now, unless you somehow believe that 98 is an OS without holes or vulnerabilities (I'm talking about within the OS itself, not things like a firewall or AV) -and I honestly wouldn't believe you if you said that it was- there is no one fixing those holes, and none of those holes have been fixed since M$ stopped supporting 98 at the end of 2003.
I wasn't suggesting that. Good that we agree on this point.
That's my whole point. With every day that goes by there are more threats coming out, and sometimes things have to be fixed at the OS level to truly give protection. You're not getting that with 98.
The holes in the OS are relevant only if you allow the attack to arrive at your OS level. If the enemy is outside the range, it cannot hit you.
The 1st, and most important, security measure is to stop a potential attack before it gets to your PC. That involves a firewall, and not the M$ joke, of course: i'm talking about a linux pc (with a good packet filtering thing working!) that stands between your pc and the wild. If this measure is enough, it doesn't matter what OS you're running on your pc.
Yes, if the attacks goes past, a windoze 98 box is more prone to being compromised / frozen / rebooted / owned or what else... or not?
It depends. The obsolescense of windoze 98 is progressively becoming a
strong point. The kernels of 98 and XP are different - ok, the 98 one is not even a kernel, it's more a confused mass of things - but the result is that, sometimes, holes are different: the c:\con\con link that SNAFU a windoze 98 box is harmless on an XP. And what can own an XP box can result harmless on a good old 98 box! Example: the UPNP thing.
Being the majority of people surfing the net with an XP box, it's less likely to find scum coders interested in exploiting the hole of an ancient 98. Why should they bother?
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is foolish sitting there wide open.
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counter of time remaining, and the speed at which the file is being moved.
