[time-nuts] OT - Feynman lecture series on Physics hosted by Microsoft

Mike Monett xde-l2g3 at myamail.com
Sat Jul 18 20:09:09 UTC 2009


Robert Darlington <rdarlington at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Are you sure it uses Silverlight?  I had no problem viewing the videos with
>FireFox (under XP Pro).   Then again, maybe they have a Silverlight plugin
>for FireFox that I didn't realize I was running.
>
>-Bob

Hi Bob, 

Yes, if you don't have Silverlight installed, the only thing you see is a
message to install it. 

You didn't notice it being installed since you probably have Automatic
Updates turned on. You will find it in your \Program Files\Microsoft
Silverlight\ folder, where it puts about 14 MB of new DLL's. It also adds
four language files:

  mscorlib.resourc
  system.resources
  mscorrc.dll
  Microsoft.Visual

in the following folders:

  \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40624.0\de
  \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40624.0\es
  \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40624.0\fr
  \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40624.0\it
  \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40624.0\ja
  \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40624.0\ko
  \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40624.0\zh-Hans
  \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40624.0\zh-Hant

These take about 40k for each folder. These will probably never be used, so
it might be possible to erase them and save ~300KB.

No files were added to any other folder in my version.

Now I really have to say this. I distrust Microsoft intensely. I have
wasted years of my life fighting problems caused by their sloppy
programming. I run Win98 as my main os since it is the snappiest of all the
operating systems I can find, and after years of work, I have finally
solved all the problems with registry corruption that require a complete
reinstall.

Since WINE is such a joke, I really need XP to run engineering software
that is simply not available in Linux. But until I could lock XP down, it
was silly to start using these programs and risk losing everything
downstream when XP started going unstable.

To solve this problem, I run WinXP in VirtualBox in Ubuntu 9.04. VirtualBox
has a severe snapshot corruption problem that eventually destroys the
entire installation. There is a simple solution: don't use snapshots.
Instead, make new folders in your Home directory named .VB01, .VB02, etc.
Then copy the entire contents of .VirtualBox to the appropriate folder when
you want to make a backup. Now you can revert to any previous installation
whenever you need to. This works like a charm.

For WinXP, I turn off Automatic Updates since it completely corrupted one
installation and I had to reinstall everything. I turn off Restore Point on
each drive, and turn off the firewall since I use a NAT router. I disable
the antivirus warning, and erase Outlook, MSN, Messenger, NetMeeting, the
games folder, and any other programs or folders that are not needed. Where
needed, I replace these with other programs that often outperform the
Microsoft versions, and do not suffer from the same vulnerabilities.

I use the System File Checker from Win98 to verify the file integrity. It
has the same name as another program in XP, but they are completely
different programs. The version in XP is crippled and useless. Now I can
tell exactly what files have been added or changed, and can completely
restore the system after some program has dug itself deeply into the os. I
also use ERUNT to archive the registry:

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

Along with good backups, I now feel I can recover from any disaster that
Microsoft can inflict. 

But after wasting weeks on Microsoft Virtual PC, I swore I would never
again install any Microsoft program. So I was extremely reluctant to
install SilverLight, since I felt it would be just another example of
sloppy Microsoft programming that would end up making me sorry for the
wasted time.

But I do have to say that Silverlight appears to be completely different
than most Microsoft crud. It is fast, smooth, displays very high quality
images, and it seems to outperform Adobe Flash by a wide margin.

It appears that Bill Gates has completely outsmarted me. The only way he
could get me to try Silverlight would be to offer the complete Feynman
lectures in Silverlight format. Nothing else would have been compelling
enough. Now that I am hooked, I will search for other technical articles in
this format. It is very good!

Best,

Mike



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