Discussions

I've bought ms press books from Waterstones in Birmingham. They have a good selection that are not tagged as being imported.

Why so interested in ms press books specifically? A lot of ms people write some very good books that are published by other companies, Addison Wesley for example.

You can also do the same thing in the registry. Copy the following in to a .reg file to import it.



Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\cmd]
@="Open Command Prompt Here"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\cmd\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"cd %L\""

If you RTFA you will notice that the BBC are cutting back on their web sites because they are outside of the corporations current remit for its web portal.

The BBC is funded mainly by television tax from the British television owning population and therefore the corporation has a responsibility to the public when spending their money.

The sites being closed down are duplicating information found on other sites. The fact that the BBCs sites may be 'better' than the other sites is irrelevant.

The primary goal is to provide information, education and current affairs news, without political bias, to the masses.
 
The BBC do produce language courses, but you have to pay for them - you get free education at school If you want education after the age of 18 then more often than not you are going to have to pay for it and unfortunately, providing free learning courses to the public is just outside the remit of the BBC web sites as the PureSoap info site for fans of EastEnders and Neighbours.

Shining Arcanine wrote:

Richard Acton wrote: Shining Arcanine wrote: Personally, I'd like to see Windows Update scan the system for all Microsoft software and search for updates for them as well. Windows Update version 5 goes some way to achieving this.

When I used version 5, I don't recall it updating anything more than what version 4 updates. Anyway, when I say all software, I mean Encarta, Zoo Tycoon, Office, and everything else Microsoft makes. It would make keeping computers up to date much easier.

I believe it will include updates for Office, but you're right.. it would be cool if windowsupdate would also install the latest Halo patch for me as well.

Shining Arcanine wrote:

Personally, I'd like to see Windows Update scan the system for all Microsoft software and search for updates for them as well.

Windows Update version 5 goes some way to achieving this.

Keskos wrote:

Ok, but not every average joe is like that. XP Pro comes with IIS but you have to install it yourself. There are more XP Pro users than XP Home users as far as I know. You are right that IIS will cause more security headaches, but what I want from Microsoft is to make IIS as secure as possible and then put it into next Windows and make the IIS updates part of the Windows update.

IIS is updated with Windows Update, but that isn't the problem. The initial configuration of IIS is what causes the headaches; open SMTP relays being the best example. IIS 6 is much more secure, but this isn't technology that you would want most none-IT literate people responsible for. Most IT illiterate people (and some people with plenty of IT experience) still don't run Windows Update.. Even though the task tray icon is blinking at them telling them new updates are ready to install! (The so called Risk Manager where I work is a good example of this!!! He has 30+ outstanding Win2k updates on his laptop waiting to be installed)

If your a user and you think you might want to use IIS, then you should be clever enough to realise that you need to buy the Pro version, for Professionals.

Keskos wrote:

Part of the problem now is that you can't even have people to use IIS, not that they can't use it or patch it but because they don't have access to it.

IIS is a server based application. If you want your users to run applications based on asp.net then install the application on a server and give them an IP address to connect to. Local installations of IIS should be restricted for development usage, hense the single web site limit, hense the 10 concurrent user limit.

Keskos wrote:

IIS, even in XP Pro is not a big priviledge. There is a limitation on the number of connections to the server, thus it is not like windows server 2003. It is useful and helpful though. So I disagree that you have to pay for that extra priviledge.

At the end of the day, XP Home is packaged and marketted towards home users, your average Joe who has no intention of doing anything more than writing letters, maybe sending emails and playing games. These guys don't open Control Panel because they are scared they might screw up their system, and those curious enough to try reconfiguring the page file to free up more hard disk space will more often than not find their PC won't boot in the morning. That is the skill level XP Home has to cater for.


XP Pro, for professionals will always provide the more advanced functionality. And I believe Internet services (that should really be running on a Server anyway) should stay in the hands of those who can be responsible for using them.

Well your average Joe who uses their computer for nothing more than writing letters and sending emails will most likey have their PC connected to the Internet without any firewall and in a lot of cases, no antivirus.

Imagine how much worse virii the likes of Nimda would have been if all these unprotected XP home machines were running IIS. You could argue IIS should have been packaged with XP Home but disabled as default, but these same home users wouldn't know how to enable and then patch their web server even if you were to start deploying asp.net based apps to them.

When I was running XP home I would have liked the option to install IIS from the CD, but as Manip says, you have to pay the extra for that privilege and rightly so IMHO.

I wouldn't want an additional menu item to convert unix text files, but rather an option in the 'Files of Type' list of the Open/Save file dialog window.

While we're on the topic of simple applications, please bring back Terminal from Windows 3.x . Trying to use HyperTerminal just isn't the same when playing with RS232 stuff.

Also, a new feature for notepad would I would like to see would be the ability to show line numbers, but not have this as a menu item, but keep it as a keyboard shortcut toggle.

Newsgator at home, the Outlook integration is tidy, especially the 'flags' feature to mark posts for reading later on.

Sharpreader at work (no Outlook here). I tried RSSBandit and a couple of others but i'm too used to using Sharpreader now that it would take something pretty revolutionary to change. With a gig of ram you don't miss the massive amount of memory sharpreader eats.

I haven't found a nice rss reader for the smartphone yet, so i'm writing my own. If you're interested in beta testing please get in touch

damieng wrote:

It's a parody.

As it states at the bottom of the page.

Ah beaten to it.

Just finished reading the site and noticed it in tiny grey writing.

I did wonder why Steve would have Ads by Google in the middle of his blog when I saw it this morning.