Why is SP2 so big? It doesn't do much

Dave C. wrote:

Considering the number of bugs fixed I would hardly call it worthless.
The 200Mb includes all the bugs, not just one, so I'd rather have them
all fixed than wait until I come across one.

If their was a chance the brakes on your car could fail, youd be
pretty keen to have then fixed! ...Or would you not bother, as youve
never had them fail before !?




Have you ever heard anybody say if it ain't broke, don't fix it??? There's
a reason they say that.

Yes, there is. But that presumes it really "ain't broke" and his point of
it being broke, really, is still valid.

If I happen to run into one of the bugs that SP2
addresses, it will be a minor inconvenience, at worst. Probably take me all
of a few minutes to figure out a convenient workaround. But to avoid that
possibility, you would have me fix hundreds of problems that don't exist,
and risk creating many new problems in the process??? No, I stand by my
opinion that SP2 is ~200MB of worthless software. -Dave

Harry wrote:

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 11:54:18 -0400, "Dave C." wrote:


Considering the number of bugs fixed I would hardly call it worthless.
The 200Mb includes all the bugs, not just one, so I'd rather have them
all fixed than wait until I come across one.

If their was a chance the brakes on your car could fail, youd be
pretty keen to have then fixed! ...Or would you not bother, as youve
never had them fail before !?



Have you ever heard anybody say if it ain't broke, don't fix it??? There's
a reason they say that. If I happen to run into one of the bugs that SP2
addresses, it will be a minor inconvenience, at worst. Probably take me all
of a few minutes to figure out a convenient workaround. But to avoid that
possibility, you would have me fix hundreds of problems that don't exist,
and risk creating many new problems in the process??? No, I stand by my
opinion that SP2 is ~200MB of worthless software. -Dave


But the problems do exist. Albeit not on your PC, but they do exist.

Just browsing the list I can see that their are issues affecting CPU
performance; registry keys being indvertantly deleted; system lockups;
and hard disk corruption.

Lets hope you really dont come across one of these minor
inconveniences.

Dont come whinging to us when your PC starts playing up.

Well, let's not get carried away here. Someone not installing SP2 is in no
worse shape than they were a month ago.

David Maynard writes:
Dave C. wrote:
"Don Taylor" wrote in message
One likely not representative data point.
Have an XP box with all my expensive licensed (math) software running
on it. A person I was working with suggested I try out Linux. That
seemed reasonable, I earned my money a couple of decades ago writing
code sitting inside of BSD Unix, I even did a bit of system
administration before the world went Windows and networking crazy.

So I built a little Linux box, stuck a Knoppix CD in it, and because
this was strictly a trial to see how things would go and because
some of the licensed software on the XP box doesn't want to be
disturbed, I thought I would try out this new-fangled Internet
Connection Sharing, using the XP box to connect to the net and let
the Linux box borrow access to the net through the XP box,
(snip)
Yikes. I'm experienced with both operating systems, and that sounds like a
real nightmare. It's not always easy to get two Windows XP boxes to
cooperate for ICS, so I can imagine the headaches caused by one of the boxes
running linux.

Tell me about it, or, perhaps not

'Technically' there's no difference: the ICS machine does NAT and you point
the client machines to it as the router. From the user's standpoint,
though, with Windows you make a client disk that automatically sets up the
client machines but you have to do it manually with Linux.

That's what I mean about Windows being more tightly integrated.

It sounded like it should have worked, or I wouldn't have tried.

I haven't tried ICS on linux. My experience with broadband
and linux is that linux will configure itself for Internet access if it is
connected directly to the Internet or through a hardware router.

Almost any network aware O.S. will automatically accept DHCP configuration
as default (frankly, I don't know of any that won't but there's probably
SOME exception so I say almost). The trick, of course, is having DHCP set
up somewhere, or you have to do it manually.

Tried DHCP, no joy. So I fell back on static addressing since I would
never need more than 9 ip addresses in 192.168.(0..8) or would ever
need to have them change. Still no joy.

Since he could ping the ICS box, but not get internet access, I'd guess
that he had a valid IP but didn't have the ICS machine's IP set as the
default gateway on the Linux box. Second problem is that the Linux
hosts.allow and hosts.deny configuration files default to blocking all
hosts/IPs.

I thought I had the gateway address set correctly.
I thought I had checked hosts.* to allow this,
but then I tend to not swear I'm positive about
most things just so I don't ignore the right answer.

But it could never reach a name server, and when I
fell back on using numeric ip addresses, and forcing
it to not first try name resolution on them, it would
not reach the outside destination either.

To do windows file and printer sharing he'd then have to set up Samba,
which is a whole 'nother matter.

I guaranteed that I would never need either of those, once I figured out
the advice that I had to make Samba work was only necessary in those two
cases.

And it still didn't work.

But I had volunteers to come over and urinate on the competitors products


However, at this point it really doesn't matter, I swore off the whole
mess and now say "I'm net-not-working" if anyone asks. Floppies will
do and I'll just leave it at that. The math is getting done now and
that is good enough, I get paid for the work.

But it would be an interesting challenge to see if anyone could make
either product friendly enough that the "average user" could accomplish
something like this in, say 5 minutes, and not leave any gaping security
holes open. It doesn't really seem like this should be rocket science.

"Dave C." wrote:
"Toad" wrote:
Dave C. wrote:

It's called Mozilla. -Dave

or Crazy Browser, GreenBrowser, MyIE2, DeepNet which are all free
front-ends to IE with tabbed interfaces and include pop-up blockers too.


To borrow a line from a recent movie I saw on Showtime . . .

Sometimes you have to tear something down to rebuild it.

Which is my way of saying the easiest way to fix something as broken as IE
is to replace it with something decent. -Dave

I've tried a few of the other browsers, but I have found them to be buggy as hell, and
with "features" that I consider absolute rubbish (like tabbed browsing). While there
are a couple of things that I find annoying with IE, as far as I am concerned it's
still far and away the best product out there.

Jon

"Harry" wrote:
(Aquila Deus) wrote:

Windows Update service.
Anonymous logging of downloads from Microsofts site. Its the same as a
website cookie. It does not log key strokes. It does not popup ads.

And its not compulsory. Updates can be downloaded without using this
service.

Actually, from my experience I had to set "Automatic Updates" to "Automatic" to even
be able to do manual downloads of updates. I turn it off after I'm done looking for
any available updates.

Jon

Mixxy wrote:
Serious question - why is SP2 so big?

It's about (80 to 100 MB for users fully up to date with XP patches and is
200 plus MB for those who haven't been applying patches.

Let's say it is a average minimum of 90 MB. That is very big. Why is it so
large?


Top 10 reasons why SP2 is sooooo Big.

10. 80 MB of future backdoors.
9. Big Brother friendly.
8. 100 MB of encryption.
7. Append Append Append.
6. "This CD has so much free space", microsoft developers.
5. Bill Gates about to buy Hard-drive company.
4. Linux software in hidden easter-egg.
3. Backstreet Boy's video used as test mpg.
2. OJ's selling steroids.
1. Viagra.

Don Taylor wrote:

David Maynard writes:

Dave C. wrote:

"Don Taylor" wrote in message

One likely not representative data point.
Have an XP box with all my expensive licensed (math) software running
on it. A person I was working with suggested I try out Linux. That
seemed reasonable, I earned my money a couple of decades ago writing
code sitting inside of BSD Unix, I even did a bit of system
administration before the world went Windows and networking crazy.

So I built a little Linux box, stuck a Knoppix CD in it, and because
this was strictly a trial to see how things would go and because
some of the licensed software on the XP box doesn't want to be
disturbed, I thought I would try out this new-fangled Internet
Connection Sharing, using the XP box to connect to the net and let
the Linux box borrow access to the net through the XP box,

(snip)
Yikes. I'm experienced with both operating systems, and that sounds like a
real nightmare. It's not always easy to get two Windows XP boxes to
cooperate for ICS, so I can imagine the headaches caused by one of the boxes
running linux.


Tell me about it, or, perhaps not


'Technically' there's no difference: the ICS machine does NAT and you point
the client machines to it as the router. From the user's standpoint,
though, with Windows you make a client disk that automatically sets up the
client machines but you have to do it manually with Linux.


That's what I mean about Windows being more tightly integrated.


It sounded like it should have worked, or I wouldn't have tried.

Yes, well, normally it does. (Don't you just hate people who say that? hehe)

I'd have to set up a machine specifically for the 'built in ICS'
configuration because I'm using Win2K server with Routing and Remote Access
NAT (and, of course, DHCP, WINS, and DNS) but Linux seamlessly comes up
under that configuration, well, except for Samba, which takes a bit of work
to sort out. And I've been playing with DSL Linux, plus a couple of others,
which are Knoppix remasters and those all simply boot and, poof, internet,
so I was a bit surprised to hear your problems with it.

ICS *should* have worked pretty much the same as my 'manually' configured
'full blown' setup, but apparently not.


I haven't tried ICS on linux. My experience with broadband
and linux is that linux will configure itself for Internet access if it is
connected directly to the Internet or through a hardware router.


Almost any network aware O.S. will automatically accept DHCP configuration
as default (frankly, I don't know of any that won't but there's probably
SOME exception so I say almost). The trick, of course, is having DHCP set
up somewhere, or you have to do it manually.


Tried DHCP, no joy. So I fell back on static addressing since I would
never need more than 9 ip addresses in 192.168.(0..8) or would ever
need to have them change. Still no joy.

Well, you can't use 0 (nor 255) and 1 is the ICS router IP.

Plus, your subnet mask should be 255.255.255.0 (for the simple, non
segmented, net you were doing)


Since he could ping the ICS box, but not get internet access, I'd guess
that he had a valid IP but didn't have the ICS machine's IP set as the
default gateway on the Linux box. Second problem is that the Linux
hosts.allow and hosts.deny configuration files default to blocking all
hosts/IPs.


I thought I had the gateway address set correctly.
I thought I had checked hosts.* to allow this,
but then I tend to not swear I'm positive about
most things just so I don't ignore the right answer.

But it could never reach a name server, and when I
fell back on using numeric ip addresses, and forcing
it to not first try name resolution on them, it would
not reach the outside destination either.

DNS should be set to the ICS host, e.g. 192.168.0.1. It then makes the
external DNS request and hands the response back to the client.

Here's the MS article on static configuring an ICS client. It's the same
regardless of what O.S. it is.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309642

Here's an A to Z tutorial on ICS.

http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp_ics/



To do windows file and printer sharing he'd then have to set up Samba,
which is a whole 'nother matter.


I guaranteed that I would never need either of those, once I figured out
the advice that I had to make Samba work was only necessary in those two
cases.

And it still didn't work.

But I had volunteers to come over and urinate on the competitors products


Hehe. Yeah, I noticed the 'helpful' urinators.


However, at this point it really doesn't matter, I swore off the whole
mess and now say "I'm net-not-working" if anyone asks. Floppies will
do and I'll just leave it at that. The math is getting done now and
that is good enough, I get paid for the work.

But it would be an interesting challenge to see if anyone could make
either product friendly enough that the "average user" could accomplish
something like this in, say 5 minutes, and not leave any gaping security
holes open. It doesn't really seem like this should be rocket science.

Well, 'windows to windows' should pretty much come out that way because of
the wizards and client setup disks; gaping security holes being another matter.

David Maynard writes:
Don Taylor wrote:
David Maynard writes:
Dave C. wrote:
"Don Taylor" wrote in message

One likely not representative data point.
Have an XP box with all my expensive licensed (math) software running
on it. A person I was working with suggested I try out Linux. That
seemed reasonable, I earned my money a couple of decades ago writing
code sitting inside of BSD Unix, I even did a bit of system
administration before the world went Windows and networking crazy.

So I built a little Linux box, stuck a Knoppix CD in it, and because
this was strictly a trial to see how things would go and because
some of the licensed software on the XP box doesn't want to be
disturbed, I thought I would try out this new-fangled Internet
Connection Sharing, using the XP box to connect to the net and let
the Linux box borrow access to the net through the XP box,
....
That's what I mean about Windows being more tightly integrated.
It sounded like it should have worked, or I wouldn't have tried.

Yes, well, normally it does. (Don't you just hate people who say that? hehe)

Naaa, I have other buttons to push

I'd have to set up a machine specifically for the 'built in ICS'
configuration because I'm using Win2K server with Routing and Remote Access
NAT (and, of course, DHCP, WINS, and DNS) but Linux seamlessly comes up
under that configuration, well, except for Samba, which takes a bit of work
to sort out. And I've been playing with DSL Linux, plus a couple of others,
which are Knoppix remasters and those all simply boot and, poof, internet,
so I was a bit surprised to hear your problems with it.

I tend to guess now that either Windows or Linux would be pretty seamless
BUT ONLY as long as they don't have to play well with anyone else.

ICS *should* have worked pretty much the same as my 'manually' configured
'full blown' setup, but apparently not.

Tried DHCP, no joy. So I fell back on static addressing since I would
never need more than 9 ip addresses in 192.168.(0..8) or would ever
need to have them change. Still no joy.

Well, you can't use 0 (nor 255) and 1 is the ICS router IP.

Oops, my typo, it was 1..9, not 0..8

Plus, your subnet mask should be 255.255.255.0 (for the simple, non
segmented, net you were doing)

Did that

But it could never reach a name server, and when I
fell back on using numeric ip addresses, and forcing
it to not first try name resolution on them, it would
not reach the outside destination either.

DNS should be set to the ICS host, e.g. 192.168.0.1. It then makes the
external DNS request and hands the response back to the client.

Did that

Here's the MS article on static configuring an ICS client. It's the same
regardless of what O.S. it is.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309642

Here's an A to Z tutorial on ICS.
http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp_ics/

I read a lot of web pages, a lot of books, who knows.

And it still didn't work.

But I had volunteers to come over and urinate on the competitors products


Hehe. Yeah, I noticed the 'helpful' urinators.

Yup

But it would be an interesting challenge to see if anyone could make
either product friendly enough that the "average user" could accomplish
something like this in, say 5 minutes, and not leave any gaping security
holes open. It doesn't really seem like this should be rocket science.

Well, 'windows to windows' should pretty much come out that way because of
the wizards and client setup disks; gaping security holes being another matter.

As I said above, as long as they don't have to "play well with others..."
But that is just my guess.

And the reason I went out of my way to ask various folks for help was
because I didn't want to leave holes for some net vandal to exploit.

But, as I said, doesn't matter any more, let the zealots kill each other.

JAD wrote:
dave likes to talk....allot

al·lot 1. To parcel out; distribute or apportion. 2. To assign as a portion;
allocate.

Perchance you mean "a lot" ?

Dont come whinging to us when your PC starts playing up.

Well, let's not get carried away here. Someone not installing SP2 is in no
worse shape than they were a month ago.


Thank You! -Dave

"Dave C." wrote


Dont come whinging to us when your PC starts playing up.

Well, let's not get carried away here. Someone not installing SP2 is in
no
worse shape than they were a month ago.

LOL!

Alias


Thank You! -Dave

"Jon Danniken" wrote in message ...
"Dave C." wrote:
"Toad" wrote:
Dave C. wrote:

It's called Mozilla. -Dave

or Crazy Browser, GreenBrowser, MyIE2, DeepNet which are all free
front-ends to IE with tabbed interfaces and include pop-up blockers too.


To borrow a line from a recent movie I saw on Showtime . . .

Sometimes you have to tear something down to rebuild it.

Which is my way of saying the easiest way to fix something as broken as IE
is to replace it with something decent. -Dave

I've tried a few of the other browsers, but I have found them to be buggy as hell, and
with "features" that I consider absolute rubbish (like tabbed browsing).

Try GreenBrowser. It has tabbed-browsing, and the prevention of
duplicated web-pages, and popup-block and ad-filter.

While there
are a couple of things that I find annoying with IE, as far as I am concerned it's
still far and away the best product out there.

Then you need my css file to speed up IE, especially if you use
ClearType

search for "Speed Up IE!" in alt.os.windows-xp, by d2004xx

--
me = d2004xx = d2003xx = d2002xx

"Aquila Deus" wrote:
"Jon Danniken" wrote:
"Dave C." wrote:
"Toad" wrote:
Dave C. wrote:

It's called Mozilla. -Dave

or Crazy Browser, GreenBrowser, MyIE2, DeepNet which are all free
front-ends to IE with tabbed interfaces and include pop-up blockers too.


To borrow a line from a recent movie I saw on Showtime . . .

Sometimes you have to tear something down to rebuild it.

Which is my way of saying the easiest way to fix something as broken as IE
is to replace it with something decent. -Dave

I've tried a few of the other browsers, but I have found them to be buggy as hell,
and
with "features" that I consider absolute rubbish (like tabbed browsing).

Try GreenBrowser. It has tabbed-browsing, and the prevention of
duplicated web-pages, and popup-block and ad-filter.

I don't use "tabbed browsing", and my hosts file gets rid of about every ad; Zone
Alarm (that I need anyway) takes care of popups.

While there
are a couple of things that I find annoying with IE, as far as I am concerned it's
still far and away the best product out there.

Then you need my css file to speed up IE, especially if you use
ClearType

search for "Speed Up IE!" in alt.os.windows-xp, by d2004xx

I don't find IE to be too slow, but I will look into "Speed Up IE!" anyway just for
the halibut; thanks for the tip.

Jon

"Jon Danniken" wrote in message ...
"Aquila Deus" wrote:
"Jon Danniken" wrote:
"Dave C." wrote:
"Toad" wrote:
Dave C. wrote:

It's called Mozilla. -Dave

or Crazy Browser, GreenBrowser, MyIE2, DeepNet which are all free
front-ends to IE with tabbed interfaces and include pop-up blockers too.


To borrow a line from a recent movie I saw on Showtime . . .

Sometimes you have to tear something down to rebuild it.

Which is my way of saying the easiest way to fix something as broken as IE
is to replace it with something decent. -Dave

I've tried a few of the other browsers, but I have found them to be buggy as hell,
and
with "features" that I consider absolute rubbish (like tabbed browsing).

Try GreenBrowser. It has tabbed-browsing, and the prevention of
duplicated web-pages, and popup-block and ad-filter.

I don't use "tabbed browsing", and my hosts file gets rid of about every ad; Zone
Alarm (that I need anyway) takes care of popups.

I use host file too But ad-filter lets you use wildcard like http://*/ads/*.


While there
are a couple of things that I find annoying with IE, as far as I am concerned it's
still far and away the best product out there.

Then you need my css file to speed up IE, especially if you use
ClearType

search for "Speed Up IE!" in alt.os.windows-xp, by d2004xx

I don't find IE to be too slow, but I will look into "Speed Up IE!" anyway just for
the halibut; thanks for the tip.

PS: The tip enables offscreen rendering in IE

"Aquila Deus" wrote:
"Jon Danniken" wrote:
"Aquila Deus" wrote:
Then you need my css file to speed up IE, especially if you use
ClearType

search for "Speed Up IE!" in alt.os.windows-xp, by d2004xx

I don't find IE to be too slow, but I will look into "Speed Up IE!" anyway just
for
the halibut; thanks for the tip.

PS: The tip enables offscreen rendering in IE

I've heard of this in 3D apps, but how would it apply to a browser window?

Jon