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CharlotteTheHarlot

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Everything posted by CharlotteTheHarlot

  1. Vista and 7 both are distributed with all various editions included on the disc ( in the WIM's ) so any genuine distribution disc for Vista will work, except ... it is differentiated by 32-bit or 64-bit ... and also by service pack ... but NOT by edition. Just get any real Vista disc, borrow one or if you are careful go to digital river and locate correct bit size and correct service pack ISO and burn it. Select the Home Premium Edition and use your genuine key.
  2. Short Takes: December 6, 2013 ( Thurrott 2013-12-06 ) And the SeeSaw continues. Up and down and up and down and Microsoft Strikes Back at Spying, Will Encrypt All Cloud Activities ( Thurrott 2013-12-05 ) Well that sure sounds like a big fat chunk of nothing. As soon as they said "these new steps strike the right balance" it negated everything else IMHO. What are they even trying to say there? Does that mean they will encrypt some of the internal traffic, something short of 100%? Even with total 100% internal security that would only prevent employees of Microsoft and external trespassers from using the stored data. It does nothing for the endpoints, the input and output valves in the Microverse which is exactly where the spooks probably place their taps. There are more holes in this alleged plan than swiss cheese. One thing is for sure though, the Snowden spy leaks are taking a toll on the cloudy plans that Big Data had mapped out for us. And to that I say Thank You. Paul's only commenter on this thread said this ... For real? That's all it takes to convince you? Jeez Louise. Let's hope this guy doesn't screen applicants, say for a school bus driver or a babysitter job, "Do you drink, do drugs, been convicted of a crime or did unspeakable acts to a child?" And gets the response: "Ummm sir, I believe I have struck a good balance between good and evil in my life. Trust me!". Someones reportedly hijacking vast amounts of government and financial data through a US internet security hole ( TechSpot 2013-12-06 ) So what's this now? Part of the Internet itself is being re-routed? Two obvious possibilities ... {1} A huge criminal operation unmatched in scale previously, {2} Elaborate government spook operation where they say to he!! with court orders, siphons, vacuums, taps, and spigots, and just re-arrange the pipes so the data pours into their tanks directly. I'm not sure which is worse actually. In the former case they will use this as carte blanche for further inroads into our lives and to which our elected protectors will write them even bigger blank checks ( is that even possible? ). With everything we know so far from the leaks, I would bet on the latter at this point.
  3. Microsoft warns against using fake Xbox One backwards compatibility "trick" ( NeoWin 2013-12-06 ) Ouch. Sounds like a pretty clever case of social sabotage, the bait being a desirable feature that Microsoft purposely obsolesced from the new Xbox. The devious perps ( Sony fanboys? ) see this opening, design a fake fix for the Xbox to restore backwards compatibility and voilà ... Xbrick! Clever and devious. The NeoKids spend all their time blabbing how backward compatibility is impossible yada yada yada. No kidding, it would not be easy, but it is not impossible by any means. Microsoft could have accomplished it in at least three ways, one by adding a separate PowerPC chip or a new clone IC, they could have integrated a PowerPC core into the AMD CPU die making a compound multi-architecture processor, or they could have developed a software emulator. There are a few more ways combining elements of each but personally I would like to see the smashing of the CPU prison we are living in and movement to compound processors, and of course appropriate operating systems. Imagine selecting a CPU that has 12 cores, eight x86, one ARM, one PPC, one 68xxx, one Alpha, or some other combination. The OS feeds the code using simple flags ( hey CPU, here comes an x86 image, here comes an ARM image ) and the processor does its job. The only reason we are stuck in this prison is because of IP nonsense in both hardware and software. The patenting system produces one thing - monopolies that exist to wring every drop of cash from each and every idea. It has not only resulted in the segregation of all these families, but even within an architecture such as x86 there are backward compatibility issues from planned obsolescence. Microsoft's Newest Scroogled Ad is Another Misfire ( Maximum PC 2013-12-06 ) Another criticism of another Scroogle campaign ad. Does anyone really like this idea? I doubt it. Microsoft hired a politician from our District of Criminals and apparently he is the driving force behind these attacks. And he's not an elected politician, but worse, a sleazeball contract smear merchant, a hitman for hire. Google and Apple also have politicos on their boards but I don't think either have stooped this low ( unless I'm forgetting something ). Regardless, Scroogle has even more detractors than Windows 8, and that is really saying something.
  4. BREAKING NEWS ... Microsoft's Android royalties in danger as German court invalidates FAT patent ( NeoWin 2013-12-07 ) Well this could be friggin' huge! And it is righteous. Not because they don't technically have "rights" to FAT, they in fact created it but that was over 35 years ago. By continually changing it they have managed to extend the patent essentially forever, and this is a clear abuse of the concept of patents in the first place, at least if you are an objective person. I've said it before, the file systems are a critical function for computer interoperability and are a perfect candidate for public domain "good" and I have used the example of Benjamin Franklin as a benevolent forward thinker with his lightning rod. But Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are no Benjamin Franklins ( Bill Gates has clearly spent his free time reading up on Carnegie and reputation management on how to buy a legacy, rather than Franklin ) not by a long shot. Instead, had they invented the lightning rod ( which saved untold lives and entire cities from fire ) they would have not only patented it for personal gain ( unlike Franklin ) but they would have modified it every few years to keep it out of the hands of non-paying customers. What they do now is clearly extortion by "convincing" these Android producers to pay their Sopranos extortion, and then the agreement is somehow kept confidential. How the he!! has it gone on this long! Yay for this court ruling. May it precede many more. I still think this war should be fought on multiple fronts. Let a new consortium of companies commit to a cleanroom bit and API compatible clone of FAT and NTFS that maintains perfect backward compatibility and interoperability, done the old way using smart programmers and then release it as public domain. Microsoft should respect the concept of cleanroom cloning, after all, it was what helped propel them to the heights they reached once all those other companies besides IBM built computers with a compatible BIOS allowing use of the exact same operating system. Things would have been completely different for Microsoft had those other companies never been born, or if they had been born but instead went elsewhere for their OS. That would be Karma and my name is Earl ( not really ). Microsoft No Longer Selling Windows 7 to Retailers ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-07 ) If there was ever a perfect use of the phrase 'in with a bang, out with a whimper' well, this is it. It surely must be one of the greatest acts of suicide we have yet witnessed for a company, and one of the oddest acts of premeditated murder of a product that literally took the world by storm but was sentenced to execution immediately after. The article continues ... Oh yeah? I don't think so. They are telling us to drop trow and bend over, and 'accept our planned obsolescence'. Wouldn't they just love for that to happen, using their monopoly for personal gain because the victims have nowhere else to go. Break these scoundrels up, split off the x86 operating system away from the monopolists in Redmond, or force it into the public domain. They are worse than drug dealers who get kids addicted and then jack up the prices. You cannot let your technology come to run over 90% of the world's technological infrastructure and then later decide to play games with that unique position of responsibility, altering, obsoleting and breaking the thing. Even with governments failing proper oversight of monopolistic actions they still may have miscalculated badly here. The sum total of all these machinations with Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows XP are getting well understood by more people than ever before thanks to the blogosphere and web, and it just might completely backfire with an exodus. Microsoft had better pray that Google or Apple or someone else doesn't have something up their sleeve. If Google was secretly working on a useful desktop version of Android, or a cleanroom replacement x86 operating system, or is Apple decides to let an OS X variant go out in retail ( that's an x86 operating system today ), they could lose everything practically overnight. Microsoft is really sticking its neck out waiting for someone to chop it clean off. EDIT: typos
  5. Sorry, I'm not fully understanding you. Also, please specify which of those two systems mentioned in the top post we are now talking about. HKCR is shorthand for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT which itself is shorthand ( a link actually ) to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes. So HKCR\.htm actually means [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.htm] Likewise HKCR\.html actually means [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.html] Traditionally all of these types of settings were in the HKLM hives ( HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE system wide machine settings affecting all users ) as opposed to one of the user hives you just mentioned HKCU ( aka HKEY_CURRENT_USER ), but since you mentioned it, there is the possibility that there are settings in your HKCU hive which will override the HKLM hives, which they are quite capable of doing. Best thing to do is list everything from these keys ... [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.htm] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.html] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.htm] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html] After that we'll be able to see exactly which class handlers are being called. Please also mention which system this is, which browser is being used, which icons you see for webpages, and which icon you would like to see. EDIT: typo
  6. NSA tracks cellphone locations worldwide to map relationships between owners ( TechSpot 2013-12-05 ) ( mentioned by Jorge ) TechSpot article with a pretty good overview of the goals of metadata siphoning. The spooks are truly vacuuming up every possible thing they can and tossing it into storage that gets scanned for patterns and relationships. This is the absolute best case post-9/11 scenario that was sold to the politicians and the people, it's the one where everyone has privacy between themselves and only the government protectors have the ability to intrude by carefully analyzing the metadata. Unfortunately that best case scenario came and went once we learned from the leaks that they have access to everything, not just metadata. If you believe that best case scenario is all that they care about then I've got a bridge for sale. This article only touches on cellphones and the thoroughly compromised system they operate under. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the same plan is underway for everything else, every plane ticket, every thing you buy, nearly every thing you do. If it has a traceable handle it is fed into the mother of all computer systems and tucked away for later recall by algorithms we are to trust. In theory something like this would be necessary to prevent a loose tactical nuke from detonating in a city because they would be able to trace the chatter back to the source. Perhaps that extreme best case scenario with its massive tradeoff of letting them do anything and everything in the name of security makes sense? Maybe, but they wouldn't tell us if they did stop a nuke, let alone prove it beyond any doubt, they would just say 'we prevented a bunch of attacks but cannot get more specific'. So we are left with doubts, bigtime doubts. Unfortunately that tradeoff also means that they have the same ability to stop rogue nukes as the ability to thwart a legitimate government overthrow, righteous insurrection against a rogue government. That means something to a lot of us over here. Speaking for myself, I'll live with the nuke threat if it means the government is kept safely in a box without the ability to shut down dissent in the interest of its self-preservation. The linchpin holding the current big brother scenario together lies in our sheeple that are still sleeping unfortunately. One wonders what it will take to wake them up. ( And, while they snooze, are they actually counting sheep? ). D-Link Finally Shuts Firmware Backdoor in Routers ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-04 ) Thought people would like to know. See this page for the list of router models and links to new firmware for each to kill this bug. Microsoft Research's new tool guesses your password ( TechSpot 2013-12-06 ) ( Yes, by all means, enter your actual passwords into this safe website! Image Source: Screencap ) Microsoft has a webpage that uses an algorithm to rate character selection relationships within your passwords. Mathematically interesting I guess, but like all sites that rate passwords there is that irony of trusting them with your password examples as that actual screencap I made shows: "What information does Telepathwords collect and why?". My working assumption is that all online password testers are funneling every tested sample into a real world crowd-sourced dictionary of passwords because that would be a very salable commodity. When sold to the highest bidder, and we can easily guess who that might be, such a collection would be worth its weight in bitcoins. Apparently no commenters have considered this at all, in fact they all seemed to have tried their own: "Looks like my password system performs as expected". Really? You entered those passwords on a Microsoft site, the government's first and primary PRISM partner? This is a job for OFFLINE computers, one that has no network access and no Ethernet cable attached, no modem, no WI-FI, no Internet. This is why some of us are always looking for specialty applications, DOS or Windows to do these tasks, despite the grand push to the cloud returning us to client-server dumb terminals connected to walled-gardens.
  7. Hotfile to shutdown, pay $80 million to settle MPAA lawsuit ( NeoWin 2013-12-04 ) And the Hollywood Mafia strikes again. It doesn't matter if there were any users storing perfectly legitimate data, what matters is that they think there were some pirated movies, so they kill it with fire. This begs the question, if someone stores pirated material on Microsoft SpyDrive will they kill that? No they won't. Microsoft can afford the extortion payment, others cannot. So exactly how are copyright pirates like the RIAA and MPAA any different than the Sopranos? It's all about fiefdoms operated by well-heeled special interests lobbying their way to monopoly status, and protecting them at all costs. I wonder if any of these sites ever considered just posting a no-trespassing EULA that users click on stating that "use of our computers by MPAA or RIAA or government agents is expressly forbidden and violators hereby agree to pay a penalty of 100 million dollars for each infraction". Make it look exactly like the FBI warning on DVDs and vocalize it using Dr. Evil's voice UK politicians call on shoppers to boycott 'tax-avoiding' Amazon ( NeoWin 2013-12-06 ) Leaving politics completely out of this, we have many of the same types of comments from our own bureaucrats. As they run out of arguments they invariably pull out the last ditch strategy of calling them disloyal traitors. However, there is one large point which makes them patriots IMHO. If governments manage to get all the taxes they are demanding then they will have succeeded in making "online" merchants into agents of the state, as unpaid employee tax collectors. That is what is really at stake here. This is quite a marked upgrade from the state tax collectors of yore. Not only do they tax the peasants now but to really rub it in they force them to do the dirty work to themselves! This also fails because in reality there are no "online" merchants, no "online" buyers or sellers for that matter. Buyers and sellers live in the real world, not in a state of electricity! Prior to the web they did this by telephone. Or by snail mail. No new laws are needed to say that someone living in a certain place needs to pay a tax or tariff or duty on something. They are already covered. What they are doing is using the Internet as a foil by describing it as a "thing" rather than a "means". Of course we know the real reason that politicians talk like this is because the peasants lack the expected voluntary compliance to file their taxes and willingly admit they bought something from some other place that legally requires a tax. Hence the move here to make merchants into agents of the state. All these ideas should be resisted at every opportunity because after they get the infrastructure into place then they will continually adjust tax rates to achieve outcomes which opens another can of worms because they will set about taxing certain groups into oblivion while helping along others whom they favor, or worse, others who purchased their favors by lobbying them. It always leads back to fiefdoms, favoritism and feudalism. New USB connector inbound, set to be smaller and reversible ( TechSpot 2013-12-04 ) Finally! New USB Standard Will Feature Reversible Connector ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-04 ) USB to Become Quicker, Smaller and Flippable ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-04 ) New USB connector standard won't matter which way you plug it ( NeoWin 2013-12-04 ) Finally, USB 3.1 Will Feature Reversible Connectors ( Maximum PC 2013-12-04 ) No-one can argue with that idea, because everyone has this problem at one time or another. However, to experience this problem you must first be able to see the friggin USB receptacle in the first place. Besides being either upside down or flipped horizontally, the biggest problem is that almost every one is invisible on the device because the the little keying insert is almost always the same color as the device. Furthermore, the USB geniuses came up with a cute little icon for themselves rather than using 3 simple letters U-S-B. Try to describe that ridiculous little icon to a n00b user over the telephone, I dare you! Of course it's not just them, it's everyone really, including the device manufacturers who have never met a hardware or software GUI that they couldn't manage to screw up. Black on black? Check. Tiny icons? no problem. Connectors all jammed together? Of course. I've been working some graphics with examples of hardware fails, here's part of one ... ( Image Sources: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 ) So is this a welcome idea? Certainly. But how much you wanna bet that they will continue to use invisible receptacles, labels, icons and everything else?
  8. Hundreds of complaints swarm Xbox One feedback site and Reddit ( NeoWin 2013-12-04 ) And this mightily displeases the NeoKids. 'Call of Duty' and PlayStation 4 Are Gaming's Most Wanted ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-06 ) Some more early reports of possible Sony success ( contrary to that earlier NeoWin article ), this time from Nielsen. Valve becomes latest investor in The Linux Foundation ( TechSpot 2013-12-04 ) Valve Software Joins the Linux Foundation ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-04 ) Valve joins Linux Foundation as part of its SteamOS push ( NeoWin 2013-12-04 ) Valve joins Linux Foundation ( PC Gamer 2013-12-05 ) Who would have thought even a year or two ago that the guy who would give Linux a shot in the arm would be the gaming CEO of Valve. No matter where this whole thing winds up, Gabe Newell has at least put consumer Linux back on the radar. I just love how the NeoKids keep saying Gabe is scared of the Microsoft Store though. In their minds Windows is competing with a spontaneous product called Steam. In truth though, Steam is a result of Windows strategy, a solution to planned obsolescence of PC gaming by Microsoft and all her devious tricks. Without Microsoft trying to hurt PC gaming there would be no Steam which is nothing but a seamless solution for moderate gamers to painlessly play games on their computer without the headaches of micromanaging every possible setting. It exists because of Microsoft. If they didn't buy off game makers into a walled garden and actively block PC releases and use Direct-X as an OS upgrade tool, Steam simply would not exist. The NeoKids seem to think that Microsoft still cares about PC gaming, sorry no . They might care a little about MetroTard gaming if that will draw sheeple into their walled garden, but even this is a non-starter. Steam is here to fill a void, and they seem to do it well enough for most moderate gamers. What Microsoft had in mind was something else entirely, and those NeoKids, as few as they are in number are prima facie evidence of their goal. But thanks anyway for playing. EDIT: typos
  9. Surprise! Apple devices are the most sought after this holiday season ( TechSpot 2013-12-06 ) You mean that Microsoft Tiles hasn't convinced AppleTards to throw out their iStuff and join the Playskool walled-garden? How is this possible? For all of 2013 we have been told that the failed 2012 launch of MetroToys was because of lackluster products from those villainous OEM's not producing great products worthy of the mighty Windows 8 operating system. A full year later and countless releases of new products and the near extinction of Windows 7 and earlier options and they still are at square one? Say it ain't so. Could it be that they blew it from the start? Could it be that Microsoft lost this war years ago and that sacrificing their core Windows product was a mistake? Yes it was. Everyone saw this coming since Microsoft Tiles was first revealed. Everyone warned them. Only the fanboys kept cheering them on. Just wait til they see Q1 reporting for the 2013 holiday season. Here's How You Can Snag a Dell Venue 8 Pro for $99 ( Maximum PC 2013-12-06 ) Microsoft Stores to sell Dell Venue 8 Pro for $99 on Monday ( NeoWin 2013-12-06 ) Okay, it's not quite a firesale yet, but it sure looks a lot like something from a couple of years ago ... ( Image Sources: 1,2 ) The main difference being that many people actually loved that WebOS operating system while many people loath the other one. Yes there are other hardware differences, mostly attributable to RAM and storage prices and CPU advancement during the intervening time. There are two lessons here that I see ... {1} HP is truly incompetent for letting WebOS go because that thing equipped with updated hardware specs would be an excellent product today ... {2} Microsoft is quite possibly the most incompetent bunch of all by making the operating system so ugly and overbearing that it dominates every single device it is installed on and becomes all that you can see ... ( Originals: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ) Once the inevitable tide turns away from the trendy anti-skeuomorphic craziness with a clueless interface with flat depth-less crap icons running on amazing hardware that is capable of so much more, Microsoft is going to look awfully silly with this phone interface on everything. It is already becoming the kiss of death for everything it touches, once that embeds itself into mainstream thought and people who see Microsoft Tiles automatically associate it with failure, then it is game over and just as fast as WebOS disappeared so will this monstrosity. Well, that is depending on who sits in the CEO chair and who still reports to him. EDIT: fixed misplaced tags from this ridiculously buggy IPB editor
  10. China wants Microsoft to extend Windows XP support past April 8th ( NeoWin 2013-12-04 ) Yep, another day another FUDfest from the MetroTard fanboys. Here's a comment from one of NeoWin's short bus riders ... Yes MetroTard, please urge them to do this! Make a martyr out of Windows XP and watch what would happen! Not to mention the fact that it would instantly be the world's largest case of computer crime ( hacking/tampering/sabotage ), disabling more systems than all other bad guys combined. Please, make it so! ( In fairness, most of the other NeoKids disagree with him ). Microsoft's getting aggressive and it's about time ( NeoWin 2013-12-06 ) Phewww! Waiter, I'll have what he's having. Microsoft, the nearly trust busted convicted monopolist, is like an Angel you see, put upon by those twin devils Google and Apple. Oh whatever floats your boat. Everybody's entitled to an opinion regardless of how fictional it might be. Even Brad Sams. But since this is from Brad Sams ( who is a contender for MicroZealot-in-chief at NeoWin and it wouldn't surprise anyone if "Dot Matrix" is a sock puppet for him ), and his "editorial" does not come with a disclaimer attached it requires some sort of public service announcement so that folks understand him and what he is likely doing. Brad became famous here back around September 2012 in Post #961 where we noted that he set the new standard for fanboyism and the upcoming Windows 8 launch by stating: "The next person who says that Windows 8 is the next Vista deserves to be shot, twice." Then he stealth edited that comment away leaving obvious holes in the thread commentary leading right back to his edit, a kind of Streisand Effect. Other threads came along ( see here at #963 ) and enough people had saw what he originally wrote before he edited it away down the memory hold so he came clean by briefly mentioning it in a forum discussion in this completely different thread about the controversy and coyly admitted it but still never updated the article to mention the stealth edit. His explanation was that 'he did in fact mention the edit on Twitter though' ( wtf? ) because 'that's where the outrage was centered' which compounded the problem because he didn't post his original "The next person who says that Windows 8 is the next Vista deserves to be shot, twice" comment on Twitter at all, he posted it right at the top of the original editorial thread at NeoWin, and that is where the mea culpa and explanation belonged ( 'Hey I apologized over there where no-one saw it!' ) . Even to this day that original thread is left hanging with holes and he avoided coming clean about it. The moderators circled the wagons and owner Steven 'NeoBond' Parker played dumb and away the story went, or at least they wish it did. While not quite as effective as Stalin's airbrush method of erasure, it appears to have worked on the typical NeoKid as seen in some of the comments. Anyway, this is Brad Sams here from a YouTube video talking about his company 'Tracour' and other things including his age, which I believe is about the same as Windows 2.0, which certainly qualifies him as an expert on Microsoft's Angelic history. With that out of the way I believe this editorial is just an exercise in fire suppression since Brad seems to have a knack for setting the tone over there among the rabid FanDogs even if Steven cannot see this. The 2012 editorial described above ( "should be shot" ) tried to dampen the growing feeling during the fall of 2012 that Windows 8 would be stillborn in the coming launch after already undergoing two full years of criticism and the RTM didn't make anybody change that opinion. So today, the latest editorial is necessary because even among NeoKids there is a lot of criticism of Microsoft for the Scroogle nonsense. Yes, it's true. There isn't the knee-jerk sycophantic cheering in the Scroogle stories. It is very safe to say that way more MetroTards dislike the campaign than dislike Windows 8 hence he simply may feel the need to rally the troops again. Once again, no question he is entitled to his opinion, and I'm certainly not saying anything about censoring him, now or then. Heck no, these little incidents help to put a face on NeoWin, and I'd say his face matches exactly what one imagines for the average NeoKid! I'm not sure what Brad's little company does, but I wonder if it has anything to do with reputation management.
  11. Silicon Valley Wants Tony Bates in Microsoft's CEO Seat ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-04 ) Ford throws cold water on reports that its CEO is leaving for Microsoft ( NeoWin 2013-12-05 ) Microsoft Shares Drop With Talk of Mulally Staying with Ford ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-06 ) Seriously, I think they're trying to wear us down enough to throw up our hands and beg they keep Ballmer instead. BitLocker Bug Is Locking Out Some Surface 2 Owners ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-04 ) Another problem, apparently confined just to the Windows ReTard Edition devices ( "Surface 2" being the nom de guerre, or maybe that should be nom du jour instead? ). Bitlocker is full disk encryption, which itself is a risky proposition because you are trusting the programmer to be absolutely perfect in their authentication routine where one slip up means that the system will now believe you are not the owner but instead a trespasser and locks you out accordingly. The fact that it is encryption brought to you by Microsoft, the government spooks' primary PRISM parter ( and whatever else we don't know about ) and is also the company that added a known government spook compromised RNG ( and whatever else we don't know about ) to Windows Vista ( and whatever else we don't know about ), well, that's a little more than I would be willing to gamble on these days. It is the single most likely part of Windows that the compromised RNG would impact IMHO. Using Bitlocker or anything today that doesn't explicitly disavow use of compromised Microsoft technology is absurd. However, when you add in the fact that this is so far only occurring on "Windows on ARM", it now smells like a bad port from x86 to RISC, possibly from a rush job to market, or possibly signaling their utter lack of expertise in this family at least at the consumer level ( they actually do have lots of experience in ARM and other architectures over their entire history and I've pointed this out here before, but that doesn't mean that this historical knowledge has anything to do now with the recent consumer grade disaster called Windows 8 and its extension to consumer ARM ). Time will tell what's really going on here.
  12. Can you show the entries for the webpage extensions? I mean the registry entries for HKCR\.htm and HKCR\.html keys?
  13. Agreed. The taskbar is not a shell object, it appears to me to be the shell itself, hence it's context menu is a function stored in a core file, maybe EXPLORER.EXE, and that function does not seem to look at any registry key for supplemental code. I could be totally wrong though, this is just an educated guess from tinkering all these years. Someone could scour Raymond Chen's blogsite for clues, or request him to answer the question in a post. Or ask someone who actually works on shell replacements.
  14. I didn't take time to read all the comments, but some were interesting. The article can be found here: http://www.zdnet.com/pc-shipments-to-decline-further-no-significant-recovery-expected-7000023851/ I have to confess that I am part of the problem. I have my old hardware and replacement parts and fully intend to keep on using it and my old OSes with my old software. One might wonder what would happen if IDC or Gartner or any analyst were alive to monitor the holocaust. Could they or would they distinguish between the Jewish people fleeing Nazi Europe secretly to freedom and those being "helped" out of the countries on custom cattle cars. There are many of the billion seven ( or whatever ) using PC's that never needed one in the first place. They always needed a tablet or just a phone but never had one to select from. Now they do and they are getting them even though they are still spending the same or more money for less functionality and less actual physical material. Apparently they are okay with it. The danger is that these analysts become enablers who steer the trend rather than report on it. Then we get more cattle cars than anything else, and a genuine self-fulfilling prophecy. Rest assured that in the 1970's there were analysts saying the big car is dead. There are too many times this has happened already, it just so happens that the most stupid of all people that humans can produce find their way into jobs as analysts. Also sportswriters. Lemmings, sheeple, whatever description one prefers, these customers will pour their hard-earned cash into inferior equipment with a stunted walled-garden ecosystem controlled by Big Data companies like Microsoft and Apple who take a piece of the sale of software they don't even own. It's quite an amazing achievement to pull this one over on the customers considering where we were but a decade ago. Even the original late-1800's snake-oil salesman would be tipping their hats to this scam.
  15. Amazon reveals plans to deliver packages using autonomous drones ( TechSpot 2013-12-01 ) Amazon Prime Air Aims to Deliver Your Package by Flying Drones in 2015 ( Maximum PC 2013-12-02 ) Amazon to Use Drones to Deliver Packages in 30 Minutes ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-02 ) Amazon wants to deliver packages via octocopter drones ( NeoWin 2013-12-02 ) Well I'm sure everyone has seen something about this story by now. Pretty interesting and do-able in the right climate and location. One problem is that the value of a octocopter ( which likely exceeds all those quadrocopters ) will be more than most packages it carries. Lots of comments about jamming but I imagine this wouldn't be operated via telemetry with a remote pilot because that would defeat the purpose by still requiring a "delivery man" in the chain. They would ideally be pre-programmed and perhaps maintain a telemetry stream for status updates. My favorite comments so far ...
  16. Xbox One can play DVD-Rs but not recordable Blu-Ray discs ( NeoWin 2013-12-01 ) Xbox Video on Xbox One lacks downloading capabilities ( NeoWin 2013-12-02 ) It's astonishing really, to read the comments of those enablers that defend every single thing that comes along. Astonishing and sad at the same time. Report: PS4 outsells Xbox One in UK with 250,000 units sold in first 48 hours ( NeoWin 2013-12-02 ) Still unofficial numbers, but this one already contradicts that one from yesterday, same author too: Early data shows Xbox One leading PS4 in Black Friday U.S. sales ( NeoWin 2013-12-01 )
  17. Following Blue, Threshold' is the next wave of Windows updates ( NeoWin 2013-12-02 ) Well that would be a year and a half between updates, and I highly doubt they can wait that long. One more year and a half of getting hammered for their tone-deafness and then the inevitable "Threshold" that does nothing to address the criticism will be close to the end of the road for the Microsoft Windows brand. This name "Threshold" would be fairly appropriate if they mean taking it to the brink of oblivion. I'll propose "Precipice". Windows 8 growth slows down in November, despite 8.1's arrival ( TechSpot 2013-12-02 ) Windows 8.1 Still Not Enough to Convert Windows 7 Users ( Maximum PC 2013-12-02 ) A few more views on the numbers posted yesterday ( see above ). It is rather unfortunate that people are adding together Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Blew to get a grand total of Playskool marketshare. It is patently obvious that many of the exact same computers must appear in both counts and that is a statistical no-no. There is double counting going on and not one single person, including Net Applications has figured this out. But at least they have all noticed the obvious flattened uptake. There is no denying it anymore, Microsoft has found a way to make the Vista debacle look like roses.
  18. I have a backup that also concludes with that post by TELVM. The one by FF is new today, so if anyone else had one in between there it appears lost. At first I thought this was another cannonball against filesharing, but -- "State aggression." Hmm... So, who protects Frenchmen from this newest aggression by the French state? Maybe they're too busy faisant l'amour to care about being numbered and tracked. The zoo society keeps marching Forward. The absolute most important thing IMHO, is that all the governments of the world are making their moves for control and regulation of the citizen independent communication channel called the Internet. It is about power and preservation of that power. And things are accelerating as precedents come and go and they get a feel for what they can get away with. To any government, legitimate or not, fascist or not, democratic ( small "d" ) or not, republic ( small "r" ) or not, corrupt or not, free or not, totalitarian or not, they all have one thing in common - institutionalized momentum. It matters not who is sitting in the seats because the one thing that does travel through time is their core function - self-preservation. This means that it doesn't really matter what those bureaucrats sitting in those seats has to say because it will be superseded by later seat-sitters. And nothing cries for more scrutiny than a vehicle that allows peasants to communicate amongst themselves and without being spied upon. The Internet and all it's p2p derivatives are a bigger threat than the earlier plain old telephone system, which itself was thoroughly penetrated. No-one who was conscious during the early USENET years before the web can possibly believe how far it has already gone. Even those around during the baby step Clipper chip and Carnivore years would not believe it has gone this far now. Yet here we are, sitting in the middle of an uber-novel jointly penned by a dream team of Orwell, Huxley and Ayn Rand. And they ain't through, not by a long-shot. All those mentioned, widely varying types of government who can agree on nothing will in fact agree on one thing - the Internet must be controlled. They will cooperate here in ways no-one will believe. And it is already happening most likely. Our spooks and Chinese spooks might be painted as being mortal enemies, but I expect either or both to supply the other with critical info when requested, perhaps under the guise of terrorists. Tiananmen Square, 9/11 hijackers, whatever, they all appear the same to human bureaucrats, and certainly carry no differences to timeless institutionalized momentum. This is why people and sheeple should not give an inch on anything, even something as controversial and perhaps petty as "sales taxes". The goal isn't so much the tax or to protect brick and mortar ( humans are running both and they do in fact live somewhere covered by existing laws ) the goal is building the infrastructure into the "Internet" and having it become as familiar as the tree beside the road that you stop noticing as the days go on. Frankly, we're gonna need a new Internet now. This one is screwed. EDIT: typos, clarity
  19. I have wondered the same thing. Here's a possible explanation (see posts 2, 3, and 8) that jibes with what I've read before. It sounds plausible, but then I'm no physicist. --JorgeA Yep, cooling, that's their main excuse. It begs the question of why everything must be shrunk though. For example, shrink the lithography and features but keep the die the same and more can be fit onboard including explicit cooling zones that can be better mated to the heat sink. I remember when we got standardized AT boards from various vendors instead of just IBM, and for quite a while it worked out well, then ATX arrived and the continual shrinking not just of the components mounted on a motherboard, but the board itself. It's as if the decided years ago to build tablets and phones and nothing was going to stop them. Note, I'm not saying AT was best, I like full ATX better actually but the point is that I was dumbfounded why they didn't stick to a large board while shrinking everything else allowing many more things to be installed on the same size board as the tech shrunk. The way it worked out was that we never gained anything except empty space. CPU's are a microcosm of that phenomenon. A larger CPU die with shrinking features would allow more features on that CPU product, be it larger caches ( yes please! ), bigtime graphics, but perhaps most important, carefully designed onboard plumbing exposed for attachment to heat sinks or fluid coolers. They will eventually get to this ( it was already done on mainframe and supercomputer processors ). They'll likely re-arrange the geography, build in a special fluid in sealed channels, terminating at the surface of a large die assembly ( or maybe Pentium II and III type modular packages ) that increases cooling capacity several orders of magnitude. Either that or they'll reserve this stuff for the governments maintaining that the citizen peasants don't need more powerful processing capability.
  20. Yeah, it was exactly NYC that I was picturing in my head when I wrote that. What's the name of that street where all the vendors gather? I think it's near the Village. (Been a long time.) Anyway, I agree with you on the Gucci knockoffs. If they slap Gucci logos on them then there is a case to make that it's fraud, selling them as something they're not. It gets murkier if the guy is giving them away: some people who took them would believe they were getting the real thing for free, but then one could argue that they really oughta know better and "you get what you pay for." And yes (and this is for @jaclaz too -- loved that spoiler graphic!), it's not an exact analogy to software piracy, despite the IP (intellectual property) angle involving the logo. Also, patents do go on for far too long, and the way patent law is working out (not) it seems to work mainly to muck things up and slow down advancement. How many billions have been spent (or imposed in fines or spent in settlements) as a result of litigation involving Apple, Samsung, and/or Microsoft? And let's not forget patent trolls, who do nothing constructive with the patents they buy but go around shaking people down for using them, often without knowing they've violated somebody's patent. I must admit that I'm ambivalent about copyright, though. In principle my view is that so long as you're not pretending to have actually created the thing (book, song, software), then there's nothing to complain about since no fraud is being perpetrated, and in the case of a digital product it's in the nature of the beast that it's easily replicated. On the other hand, one of my customers is a small publishing house and it hurts when we discover that somebody scanned one of our titles and put it up somewhere for downloading. It's easy to picture publishing companies as being gigantic faceless Corporate Entities brimming with cash, but in reality this also happens to little two-man-show publishers. The factor that (so far) saves my position from breaking down is the belief that the sales lost to these scanners are small, comparable to books damaged during shipping to the warehouse. I'm not aware of any hard data on this one way or another (and I totally mistrust the claims of music and film industry spokesmen on this point). --JorgeA Not sure what block you mean, there are so many with vendor overload, some permanent, many are just weekday street events, others are holiday or periodic. My favorite place to creep around was the 8th Street corridor from St. Marks over to both ends of the island really. During the cold war years they had some great street fairs, huge gatherings of Soviet refugees from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine etc. By day it was entire blocks of "vendors" selling anything and everything, by night some of the biggest parties I ever saw stretching from end to end and of course into every bar within the zone. I liked it better down there years ago, even in Times Square which lost more than a little character after it was "cleaned up" by the powers-that-be. Anyway, copyright with music artists is very interesting because it never was an issue until the RIAA began attacking MP3's (***), I feel safe saying that the issue never crossed the lips of any musicians I know during the entire cassette tape era ( which ironically offered better reproduction of a copied source than early MP3 implementations ). It looks like it was drummed up at the bureaucrat level in record labels who feared that they wouldn't get to sell the same music over and over again each generation. There was a huge price to be paid for some artists ( ~cough~ Metallica ) who jumped onboard that bandwagon, and they are still paying it today. Fans are very fickle, it does not take much to insult them and turn them against you. This is a lesson that Big Data is currently still learning. Related story from yesterday ... Research shows removing DRM boosts music sales up to 41 percent ( TechSpot 2013-12-02 ) ADDED: *** Before anyone points it out, perhaps I was overstating it. Copyright was an issue prior to MP3 in a different manner. Famously it was the vehicle used by labels and recording studios and publishers to separate the actual artist from his/her rights. Books and movies have been made to illustrate the many ways that artists became session slaves to producers who suddenly had all or most rights to that artist's hard work, sometimes their lifetime's work. It happened in movies early on with the "studio system" with the actual actors reduced to receiving little or nothing as they appear in perpetuity on the big and little screen. Precedents again. The music world with some major overlap just continued on with the practices. Making slaves again out of pioneering southern black blues musicians, Motown pop, radio payola, all wonderful innovations by the music powers-that-be. It's no wonder when the MP3 crisis came around that many musicians were alert to their hypocrisy of using the artists as their "victim", when all along it was them - Big Music. Humans appear to have a genetic defect that lends themselves to becoming feudal royalty lording over peasant slave workers. Movies, Music, Computers, in all three fields the same type of fiefdoms emerge to manage and profit off the intellectual property of others, their employee servants. The one thing we all have going for us now is that this Internet thing exists to let us state these facts and hopefully educate some of the uneducated.
  21. Icons for webpages can be tricky because of superseding registry keys that override what appears to be the current setting. If you look at this one you might see ... [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\HTMLfile\DefaultIcon] @="C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\Iexplore.exe,1" ... believing that MSIE should be the icon for webpages. But that key would only be controlling it if that key was "called" from here ... [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.html] @="HTMLfile" ... in other words a file is first looked up by it's extension and then the program or shell code that needs to use it follows the registry to whatever is in that "@" default value. In the above case it goes to the old HTMLfile class handler and proceeds accordingly using MSIE entries. However, that key will not be controlling it anymore if something like this exists above at the extension level ... [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.html] @="Opera.HTML" ... now the program or shell code instead follows it down to the class called "Opera.HTML" where this subkey would be in control ... [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Opera.HTML\DefaultIcon] @="C:\\Winapps\\Opera\\Common\\Icons\\Opera_05_06_07_08_09.ico" ... note that is my own ICO file, it could just as well be "Opera.exe" instead. Someone might prefer to yank MSIE completely out of the picture by grabbing all the associations like so ... [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.htm] @="Opera.HTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.html] @="Opera.HTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.mht] @="Opera.MHTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.mhtm] @="Opera.MHTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.mhtml] @="Opera.MHTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.url] @="Opera.HTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.eml] @="Opera.MHTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.php] @="Opera.HTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.php3] @="Opera.HTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.shtm] @="Opera.HTML" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.shtml] @="Opera.HTML" ... or other tricks to display custom icons and have their own preferred programs execute instead. Note that Opera.HTML just happens to be their traditional class name. It could also be a completely custom handmade key instead. There is a nice element of security in this method. Because that ancient structure of Internet Explorer entries might be tampered with by spyware or adware or hijackers. If you instead hook into the system early ( at the file extension level ) and redirect to your own keys then spyware can mess around with Internet Explorer keys all day long and not affect you at all. After you get the structure set according to your own preference, then it is a good idea to save that subset of keys into a REG file to import every so often just in case some malware does manage to alter those file extension associations.
  22. Nah, Microsoft wasn't listening. That right-click menu is just another kick in the teeth to Windows veterans. MetroTards often point to it as a solution, but it is a hodgepodge of links crammed together to shut everybody up ... ( Image Source: here ) It actually resembles the earliest Win95 menu in appearance. Picture from here ... Windows 8.1 Start Button Menu Fails Again P.S. Nice scoop there. I haven't read those links yet that you just mentioned, but if the rumors are true then there possibly is a paradigm shift underway, as there should be considering those marketshare numbers. They're gonna need medication over at NeoWin and The Verge!
  23. Kinda figured you did. I was thinking of the others not so well versed. No offense meant! Nicko always plays without a net ( Image Source: here )
  24. Early data shows Xbox One leading PS4 in Black Friday U.S. sales ( NeoWin 2013-12-01 ) Yeah right. Bookmark that article for when the real numbers come in. Peer pressure is truly a strange beast. This poor NeoWin author is the one that the rabid fanboys love to slam, accusing him ( and NeoWin! ) daily of hating Microsoft! So he comes back with articles like this from time to time to counter that pressure. He will never learn. The Future of Gaming is Android, Says Nvidia ( Tom's Hardware 2013-12-01 ) Nvidia Calls PC "Far Superior" to Video Game Consoles ( Maximum PC 2013-11-30 ) Anyone else getting the distinct impression that nVidia is really unhappy about losing the latest console generation to AMD? Well if they want to get even, then concentrate on PC's in a big way. Get the price for top-tier GPU's down, cut them in half and they will fly off the shelves. Also, keep making drivers for older PC operating systems, DO NOT drop Windows XP as Microsoft would like to see. They also might consider another nForce PC chipset that handles all the latest motherboard developments AND produce drivers for all Windows operating systems. Finally, stay onboard Linux, Android and SteamOS. The competition is necessary. There is a lot they can do. Talk is cheap though.
  25. Windows XP remains nearly flat; Windows 8/8.1 up slightly in November's OS data ( NeoWin 2013-12-01 ) Ya think? And yes, another Windows XP FUDfest is under way: "Kill it with fire!" and "XP is friggin 13 years old." Hey NeoKid, how old is Skype? How old is Outlook? Yes it's a trick question. Our friendly neighborhood Dot MetroTard also makes an appearance and makes a fool out of himself again, as usual. Whatever. Even though the article gives the NeoKids an important fact, they still manage to miss it ... Let's look closer, shall we? First, here is all their publicly available data ... Let's zoom in to the painful part for the fanboys ... The "classic" Windows versions actually gained more marketshare than the MetroTard versions. What should scare them the most is the fact that this reporting period now includes the Windows 8.1 Blew official October re-launch with all those wonderful devices that were missing last year and blamed for the miserable original launch. This period also includes general availability of the Windows 8.1 Blew service pack that RTM'd a few months ago. October and November have come and gone, the Metro operating systems are NOT moving and unsurprisingly the NeoKids are reduced to rabid babbling about "killing XP with fire". Billions have now been spent on advertising this dog and the people still hate it and even the easily fooled sheeple are avoiding it. One day the bean counters will total up the advertising budget and stick it into an Excel spreadsheet column next to another column called "revenues" and one called "profit" and then the sh!t will really hit the fan. Great job Ballmer! And Sinofsky. And Julie. And Panos. And Jensen Harris. And Sam Moreau. What a team! You guys are really good at this Windows thing. ADDED: Almost forgot something. People should note that in those combined Windows 8.x numbers that I totalled there is definite overlap because some people updated during this timeframe, and that makes the actual number a bit lower. There is no way that Net Applications can remove a user from the Windows 8 column when they also appear in the Windows 8.1 column. Also note the irony of Windows 8 now showing 6.66 percent. The Number Of The Beast!
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