Why do you still use Windows XP?

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:24:19 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Char Jackson wrote in
:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:33:35 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Char Jackson wrote in
:

Got a Linksys thinger (wireless access point, but it can do other stuff
too), and NAT in the BT hub. Both recent devices. I still like LnS
better.

If by LnS you mean this place, http://www.looknstop.com, then I'll
pass. The vague marketing claims disguised as "features", the lack of
technical details, the broken English, and just the fact that it runs
on the host you're trying to protect all lead me to the same
conclusion: no thanks. If you mean something else, let me know and
I'll be glad to take a look.



You know I meant that one,

No, I didn't know you meant that one, but it seemed like the most
logical choice. Even a blind squirrel gets lucky sometimes.

you just want to kick it, for whatever reason. The
guy's french, give him a break.

Sorry, I don't give breaks for silly things like that. The whole site
looks like it was put up overnight by a kid. It's quite unprofessional
and lacking any technical details. It might be a great product, but I
don't know and have no plans to find out. I was mostly just commenting
on the very poor quality of the site, all of which gives me absolutely
no confidence in the product. If he's that sloppy with web
development, is he equally sloppy with his software development?

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:47:23 -0700, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

Well, but the point is, does it really matter what specifically it is
attributed to?
The bottom line is: it is "bloat". An OS is supposed to be just that: an
*operating system*, and that's all. Whiz bang effects, or eye candy, or a
so called "Media Center", don't count. :-) Just like XP was more bloated
(as an OS) than W98 was, and W98 is compared to W95, and, even more
dramatically, W95 is to Win 3.1. And finally, DOS. :-) And again, look
at their respective footprints (both in disk space AND resident memory
requirements. And what the extra bloat or fluff is attributed to is, (to
me), irrelevant, in this context.

I see your point, but to me the reason for the increased size of the
footprint is the more important question. If the bigger size is
legitimate, (how would a person measure that?), then I don't see it as
bloat. A thing can be bigger than another thing without being bloated.

Char Jackson wrote in
:

If he's that sloppy with web
development, is he equally sloppy with his software development?


I suspect he's an engineer, not a marketer. Better than than the other way
round!

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:18:36 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Char Jackson wrote in
:

If he's that sloppy with web
development, is he equally sloppy with his software development?


I suspect he's an engineer, not a marketer. Better than than the other way
round!

Agreed, but in the meantime, it's not very confidence inspiring.

Char Jackson wrote in
news
On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:18:36 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Char Jackson wrote in
m:

If he's that sloppy with web
development, is he equally sloppy with his software development?


I suspect he's an engineer, not a marketer. Better than than the other way
round!

Agreed, but in the meantime, it's not very confidence inspiring.



Maybe he'd prefer to see people try it and find a deeper reason for it.
Personally, my only beef with that presentation is the indugence in the
shiny-white-box culture of software sales. If I thought he was being
satirical I might like it better. Fortunately the actual software really IS
good. Die-hard proponents in the past, of things like Outpost and AtGuard
would probably like it. Some of those purits might want to separate the
'anti-trojan' bit from the firewall, but I wouldn't. One of its strengths is
detecting some program, and enabling filtering for that program, only when
the program is loaded and needing it. It's a clever and efficient use of
directed switching that keeps things fast, optimised to whatever is running.
When LnS started out, the main alternative was Zone Alarm. *shudders*

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:27:41 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Char Jackson wrote in
news
On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:18:36 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Char Jackson wrote in
:

If he's that sloppy with web
development, is he equally sloppy with his software development?


I suspect he's an engineer, not a marketer. Better than than the other way
round!

Agreed, but in the meantime, it's not very confidence inspiring.



Maybe he'd prefer to see people try it and find a deeper reason for it.
Personally, my only beef with that presentation is the indugence in the
shiny-white-box culture of software sales. If I thought he was being
satirical I might like it better. Fortunately the actual software really IS
good. Die-hard proponents in the past, of things like Outpost and AtGuard
would probably like it. Some of those purits might want to separate the
'anti-trojan' bit from the firewall, but I wouldn't. One of its strengths is
detecting some program, and enabling filtering for that program, only when
the program is loaded and needing it. It's a clever and efficient use of
directed switching that keeps things fast, optimised to whatever is running.
When LnS started out, the main alternative was Zone Alarm. *shudders*

I've never been a fan of software firewalls, so I have no experience
with Zone Alarm, AtGuard, Outpost, Kerio, or any of the others. I used
a Netscreen 5GT for a few years, but only because the local Netscreen
vendor was giving them away. In recent years, I just use the Windows
firewall. Yes, I'm aware of its limitations and I'm ok with it.

Char Jackson wrote in
:

I've never been a fan of software firewalls, so I have no experience
with Zone Alarm, AtGuard, Outpost, Kerio, or any of the others. I used
a Netscreen 5GT for a few years, but only because the local Netscreen
vendor was giving them away. In recent years, I just use the Windows
firewall. Yes, I'm aware of its limitations and I'm ok with it.



If it's a basic packet filter, it's probably ok. Better to do a small thing
well, than do too much badly.

The thing about external firewalls (and I really did want that at the start
of my interest in using the net), is they're only safer than internal
software if they are controlled by external means too. The moment people want
control from in their computers, either for convenience, or for switching
filters based on program launch or net access detection, then two main isues
arise, popularity, and stability. Each conspires against the other. Good
stability aids reliability, but popularity gets attackers interested in
thwarting that. All fairly obvious but often overlooked. Any security
organisation knows that a little covert action goes a long way, too much
publicity courts trouble. It's likely why Frederic, coder of LnS, isn't
agonising over his public image. But any time someone finds a flaw, he's
on it like stink on cheese. So long as the software is stable, does not offer
badly constrained buffers to stuff executabel code into, etc, it can be as
stable as the hardware it runs on. OpenBSD's use of pf is a case in point.
Although now, with microcontrollers, more stability of hardware can be gaines
cheaply, with negligible power consumption, etc... That was always my dream
of an ideal firewall, but once I realised I had far more frequent cases of
stuff trying to get out, not in, I decided that software running locally,
with some smart ways to handle that, was what I wanted more. Many other tools
handled that badly, choking up the system in failed signalling, but LnS
seemed to handle it as effortlessly as if all it was doing was a basic packet
filter. So it stayed. There may be others, better, but I never needed to find
one.

Char Jackson wrote:
On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:47:23 -0700, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

Well, but the point is, does it really matter what specifically it is
attributed to?
The bottom line is: it is "bloat". An OS is supposed to be just that: an
*operating system*, and that's all. Whiz bang effects, or eye candy, or
a
so called "Media Center", don't count. :-) Just like XP was more
bloated
(as an OS) than W98 was, and W98 is compared to W95, and, even more
dramatically, W95 is to Win 3.1. And finally, DOS. :-) And again,
look
at their respective footprints (both in disk space AND resident memory
requirements. And what the extra bloat or fluff is attributed to is,
(to
me), irrelevant, in this context.

I see your point, but to me the reason for the increased size of the
footprint is the more important question. If the bigger size is
legitimate, (how would a person measure that?), then I don't see it as
bloat. A thing can be bigger than another thing without being bloated.

The bigger size might be "legitimate" or acceptable if someone really NEEDED
the extra stufff that was added. But who really does? Adding USB made
sense. Eliminating the 64k heap resource problem made sense. Ditto on long
file names. But building in a Media Center, or adding more hand holding and
cosmetics like Aero, or whatever, sure doesn't (to me).. :-)

98 Guy wrote:
Bill in Co wrote:

I found 512 MB of RAM more than sufficient for everything
(in Win98SE). Granted, I wasn't running 10 apps at once,
however. But who would?? Especially with that darn system
resource heap problem, which could often turn up at the most
unexpected moments.

Bill, you and I have discussed these win-98 heap issues several times in
the past.

Here is how I answered you back in May 2011:

=================

Bill in Co wrote:

You mean like running out of resources due to the 64K heaps? :-)

The 32-bit User Window, User Menu, and User GDI heaps are 2 mb each, not
64 kb. It's only the 16-bit User heap and 16-bit GDI heaps that are 64
kb.

The fact that you continuously refer to these heaps as a bottleneck
indicates that your experience with Win-98 is probably with older
software that made more use of 16-bit code which might have been more
common 10 years ago. Or your experience is based on "buggy" software
circa 10 years ago (that maybe you still use) that suffers from GDI
leaks.

Yup, although I don't know if I would classify all of them as "buggy". And
usually the problem was precisely with those 16 bit, 64K heaps.

How many new apps do you see written that 1) can still run (much less be
installed!) on Win98, and 2) have NO heap problem, whatsover? So for me,
it was a significant problem. A lot of good software for Win98 was - and
is - old, and had never been rewritten to get around the 64K heap problem,
since, by then, everyone had moved on to newer OS's.

Lostgallifreyan wrote:
"Bill in Co" wrote in
m:

Actually, there is no relationship between the amount of RAM installed
and that lousy system resource problem (64K heaps are insignificant in
terms of size). IOW, I don't care if you've got 500 MB or 1 GB of RAM
or whatever: it doesn't help that system resource limitation, which is
ever and always present, and can't ever be eliminated. There is no
relationship between the amount of RAM you've installed, and the system
resource problem. And you should know that.


W9X can support up to 32768 window handles. There are other limits
(numbers
of 'device contexts' for drawing operations, etc, but unless I get deeper
into the API and C coding I'll likely not know what they all are.

Before anyone says that NT kernel OS's are 'better',

They sure seem to be. :-) At least they don't EVER suffer from the 64K
heap issue.

the problem is the same:
waste of available capacity. If programs waste resources by displaying too
many tiny controls at once, spawning them in unconstrained loops, or even
just not letting them go when they've finished with them, the resources
get
used up. Bad code is a problem for both types of Windows, good code is a
problem for neither.

IF the writers of the software had rewritten their code to not poorly use
(and thus have an issue with) the 64K heaps in Win9x. But by then,
everyone had "moved on" to newer OSs, so there would be no market. Ditto on
good USB support. And support for SATA2, etc.

All that said, I still have a special place in my heart for Win98SE and DOS.
:-) And it's on my backup computer. :-)