How to make your Windows machine more stable and secure

[skyman8081]

I am laughing because my post got completly ingored in this thread, heh.

[muzzy]

I am laughing because my post got completly ingored in this thread, heh.

It didn't. I just didn't have anything to say about it. It's similar to my 2.6.x experiences, and I addressed that already. Thanks for the post, though, it feels nice to have someone else in the forums to confirm that issues with 2.6 indeed exist. Perhaps this will help people see I'm not just blindly ranting.

[Orethrius]

You know what crosses my mind, and the reason why most people haven't responded yet?  So there was a deviation from a standard by the community that established it.  Big deal, it's nothing that Microsoft hasn't done a few hundred times.  Oh wait, those would be regulated standards...

[WMD]

I am laughing because my post got completly ingored in this thread, heh.

Ok.  I'm sure 2.4.0 worked (didn't work) just as well as 2.6.0.

And look what 2.4 is now.

[skyman8081]

why they decided to rename the driver for my NIC to the chipset, instead of the card, is beyond me...

All it did was make it a pain in the ASS to compile for me.

and why did it mysteriously stop booting, when the root partition's filesystem was installed, and not a module?

the very fact that compiling the karnel requires something like make xconfig/menuconfig is a testament to its own feature-bloat.

and we all know that the bread and butter linux apps, are not bloated.

right?

[Orethrius]

I wouldn't know, I've been using Fluxbox for everything.  :p

[muzzy]

Heh at your examples of bloated apps. Time for some trivia, hands up how many of you guys know what Gnome does with an ORB, and why

[Orethrius]

Just don't confuse "distributed" with "clustered" kay?  

[jtpenrod]

the very fact that compiling the karnel requires something like make xconfig/menuconfig is a testament to its own feature-bloat.

Actually, it doesn't. Menuconfig is a convenience, as you could hand hack the #defines, which I have done. The fact remains that the Linux "karnel" is a very complex bit of soft, that includes a wide variety of ways to compile it. Blame that on the wide variety of processors, mo-bo's, the various disk drives, etc. that are out there. So it's going to be a bit harder than compiling your average "Hello World" app.

and we all know that the bread and butter linux apps, are not bloated.

First off, I don't consider EMACS to be "bloated". Not when you consider that you have a complete development IDE right there. I do all my programming from EMACS, and never have to leave it.

As for KDE and GNOME, well, KDE is pretty bad so far as bloat is concerned.  GNOME is better in that regard, but it's still getting up there. There's a reason for that:

Konqueror Browser
Konqueror is KDE's next-generation web browser, file manager and document viewer. Widely heralded as a technological break-through for the GNU/Linux desktop, the standards-compliant Konqueror has a component-based architecture which combines the features and functionality of Internet Explorer/Netscape Communicator and Windows Explorer.
http://www.kde.org/info

This goes to the biggest mistake that the Linux community is making: trying too hard to copy Windows, and everything that's bad about that. For KDE and GNOME, it's all about adding the same sort of mindless eye-candy that burns up resources for no good reason. This is why I prefer Enlightenment. The Enlightenment "tarball" is 1791137 bytes. My Enlightenment Desktop looks perfectly fine. Sure, it doesn't work like Win-d'ohs, as there's no "Start" button, or "tray", or a bazillion icons blotting out the wallpaper, or any of the rest of that bullshit. Linux isn't Win-Doesn't, and it shouldn't try to be. I installed some excellent apps for doing what I need to get done: the Emelfm file manager doesn't work like "Explorer": it's considerably better, if but just a bit less capable than the command line file manager: Midnight Commander. For a good, general purpose text editor, there's JEdit. The GIMP replaces at least three different KDE apps, as you can use it for editing icons, and taking screen shots in addition to a drawing program.

Linux doesn't need to follow Winderz. Not realizing this is the community's biggest mistake.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Linux doesn't need to follow Winderz. Not realizing this is the community's biggest mistake.

I can see your point but Linux needs to copy Windows to win over Windows users. They had to make it's interface similar to Windows, so they made KDE and they need to allow ex-Windows users to continue to use their clasic Windows software so the came up with Wine.

This all makes perfect sense as Linux will never win a decent market share until it's at least 99.9% compatable with Misrosoft Windows.

[Calum]

First off, I don't consider EMACS to be "bloated". Not when you consider that you have a complete development IDE right there. I do all my programming from EMACS, and never have to leave it.

i don't know about that, it certainly is "feature rich" for a text editor, but again, it depends what you want it for. it reminds me of this quote:

"Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX." - Tom Christiansen

As for KDE and GNOME, well, KDE is pretty bad so far as bloat is concerned.  GNOME is better in that regard, but it's still getting up there.

you go on to explain this very well, i might just add that what muzzy continues to do, even though i have mentioned this more than once, is to criticise applications, and blame their shortcomings (real or perceived) on a particular operating system. It is perfectly easy to have a linux system with a wide selection of desktop environments for users to choose from, and not have kde or gnome installed. you can install mandrake really easily, and have icewm, windowmaker and enlightenment, and no gnome or kde, if you like. and i remember one linux i used that was totally enlightenment based, and another that used a combination of dfm and icewm as the default environment. if it were me, my distro would include xfce4, windowmaker, icewm and rox. whatever, the point is that criticising kde or gnome does not have anything to do with the operating system they run on. in particular the fact that the GUI is seperate from the OS, unlike some systems, is a distinct advantage, for this very reason.

Linux doesn't need to follow Winderz. Not realizing this is the community's biggest mistake.

hear hear, if people want to use windows, then they should.
 i just don't want to hear them bleating about adware, viruses, slow systems and whatever else they moan about.

[Calum]

Fine, we seem to be having some communication problems here.

If my words are misunderstood, you still say I should stick to my words? Do you mean I should stick to the meaning you understood, or to what I was saying in the first place? It would make more sense to stick for the latter.

fair enough. how about, if you realise you didn't mean what you said, say so, so people know what you really mean, instead of just ignoring the fact and then denying you said it later.

Regarding the trust to linux releases, if the kernel version number says "this is stable" and then it isn't, you obviously can't trust it. You said they can't be expected to be bugfree, I agree. But I'd like to know some effort has been made to guarantee that what is called "stable" is actually tested, just like it used to be. It's just like it is with random numbers, it doesn't matter one bit what you have if you don't know it came from a good source.

fair enough again, i suppose. this would appear to suggest iresponsibility on the part of the developers with regard to their numbering conventions.

Regarding your logic in the XP hater thing, here's how it goes. "Most windows haters don't know how it works" is same as: For all windows haters, most don't understand how it works. Now, based on this statement, you cannot make any assumptions about any single windows hater, it's about statistics. Need an example? Let's say "most flying animals are birds", and "bat is a flying animal". Irregardless of correctness of these assumptions, you cannot use them to conclude that bat is a bird. This is because "most" is not same as "all".

touche! but this logic is as good as the logic i used, and so if you still stand by your comments about how my logic made no sense, then neither does yours! ;-)

actually, fair enough, and well explained, the word "most" saved the day in this case. but this still leaves the issue that you are saying you are a person who hates windows XP, even though you *do* know how it works, so i still don't see how this is a good platform to defend the current crop of windows OSs from.

Also on topic of quick stabs, you again get stuck on the words. Perhaps these posts have become too long to be used for a meaningful conversation. I don't object to short responses, I object to responses on single words alone that miss the meaning of them. I stated your logic was incorrect and gave examples of why I thought so. If you didn't understand what I was saying, you could've asked for a clarification. I tried to say something, you know.

ok, sometimes if i misunderstand somebody i am not aware that i am doing so (because it seems to me that they are saying something, while it seems to them that they are saying something else).

I have to admit that as someone into mathematics and programming, I see things and language in a slightly different way than most people seem to see them. I don't think this needs to be a problem, though, as long as you understand that I'm here to talk about THINGS, not about WORDS. Please try to understand what I'm saying, and tell me when you think I don't understand what you're saying. It serves no good to engage in a verbal swordfight for the sake of arguing alone.

i agree, although i don't agree that this is what i am doing, i am simply trying to get the ambiguity out of what you are saying, since what you say is often controversial, in the setting of these forums.

[Calum]

I am laughing because my post got completly ingored in this thread, heh.

i didn't think there was anything new there that muzzy hadn't already brought up (generally speaking), so in this case, i didn't directly respond to your post.

[muzzy]

fair enough. how about, if you realise you didn't mean what you said, say so, so people know what you really mean, instead of just ignoring the fact and then denying you said it later.

We seem to have some differing views about very nature of communication. You see, what I said still means the same thing from my point of view. However, different people interpret same words in different ways. Please read this text about Wiio's Laws to understand what I mean, I think it explains it pretty well.

[jtpenrod]

i don't know about that, it certainly is "feature rich" for a text editor, but again, it depends what you want it for. it reminds me of this quote: "Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX." - Tom Christiansen

One would expect that a text editor would grow up to become a word processor. In the case of EMACS, the text editor became the first windowing system. That does require a certain amount of what would be considered "bloat" when you have a graphical desktop with multiple work spaces. EMACS isn't strictly necessary anymore since you could do programming through an IDE such as Anjuta, or use a plain-jane text editor like GEdit or JEdit with your compiler and debugger running in a second desktop. I still like it for development, and with the right plug-ins, you can even launch the compiler/debugger/interpreter right from EMACS itself.

you go on to explain this very well, i might just add that what muzzy continues to do, even though i have mentioned this more than once, is to criticise applications, and blame their shortcomings (real or perceived) on a particular operating system.

I wouldn't be too hard on muzzy. After all, he is a Win-d'ohs guy with a Win-centric way of thinking. It's hard to adjust to a new paradigm when you've been dealing with an op-sys that continually blurs the distinction between an application and the OS itself. It takes a crowbar and a case of dynamite to pry Inter-nut Expl-Horror from Win-Doesn't; to ditch Mozilla/Galeon/Firefox from Linux takes an uninstall. It's no surprise that he doesn't get this.

...and i remember one linux i used that was totally enlightenment based, and another that used a combination of dfm and icewm as the default environment.

I just did an install of Slackware 10.1, and that's how I rigged it: as an Enlightenment-based distro. I did install IceWM to see if I had X configured correctly, and for GUI-convenience while compiling and installing Enlightenment (doesn't come with Slack, as Slack's still KDE/GNOME-centric) still, you do have that freedom to make it what you will. (Try that with Winderz    )