venta | When someone comes to eat me alive, well I like to see their teeth

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When someone comes to eat me alive, well I like to see their teeth

So, here I am just trotting off to bed when I remember that I meant to post some questions here. They're not my questions, but they're questions which have been asked of me recently and I've either not had anything terribly interesting to say, or not known the answer.

What is the difference between the various versions of Windows XP ? What does the Media Center Edition do that the Professional Edition or the Home Edition doesn't ? Or what doesn't it do that they do ? I've found a few pages which are full of marketing fluff and little meaning - can anyone actually define any known concrete differences ?

Has anyone ever used M$ Works, in particular its spreadsheet program ? Are there any limitations to it (compared to Excel), in particular on the maximum width/height of spreadsheets, or compatibility with Excel files ?

And the other question. Which was important. But I've forgotten it. Bonus points if you can answer it anyway.

The last enquiry isn't so much as a do-you-know-the-answer question as a request for feedback. You, yes you, could be the voice of the younger generation because my mother wants to know what said generation thinks about buying winter clothes.

Apparently some shops (like Next) are saying that the biggest effect anything had on their sales this season was the cold snap in Novemeber. Apparently everyone suddenly thought "shit, it's winter, I'd better buy a jumper" all at once. I certainly remember a conversation with a friend around then in which he expressed a requirement for warm clothes. "I have no memory of throwing out all my warm clothes last year," he said "but it looks like I just have done".

I, being very boring, simply raked the stack of jumpers out the back of the wardrobe. Fashion, you say ? What's that ?

So, did anyone feel compelled to go out and buy winter clothes in November ? Do you chuck away winter clothes at the beginning of spring ? If you know you need a nice new coat for winter do you start looking in Autumn, or do you wait til it gets cold ? Were you forced into purchasing an inferior coat in a hurry because you'd been stuck looking for one you liked, but were outpaced by the weather ? Enquiring minds wish to know.

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I have two drawers full of jumpers. My parents spent a very cold winter in Lincoln before I was born, and told all my relatives that Cambridge was really cold . . . and actually I had a perfectly adequate supply of warm clothes beforehand. So I've been fairly well sorted for that sort of thing recently.

I, being very boring, simply raked the stack of jumpers out the back of the wardrobe. Fashion, you say ? What's that ?

Me too. If you have a big enough stash, it's just like having new clothes.

can anyone actually define any known concrete differences ?
I've had computers with all three installed. Media Center seems to be XP Home with slightly better networking components, easy integration with a variety of multimedia devices, and the ability to easily deal with IR remote controls. Other than that, it seemed like XP Home.

XP Home: Windows ME version 2.0.

XP Professional: The "real" version of XP. At my university, we're required to have XP Pro because (for reasons that seem a bit stupid) Novell's Netware client won't work with XP Home. As a result, anyone with Home can't see our network. (Home doesn't seem to have the resources to deal with professional networking environments.)

But I've forgotten it. Bonus points if you can answer it anyway.

Blue tinsel.

Interesting: I thought that the difference between Home and Professional was in the interface provided to the components, but the componenets themselves were the same.

For example, there we had a conversation over on

cardinalsin's journal before Christmas: both Home and Professional support Access Control Lists, but home doesn't provide any user interface to them. Which can work ok: the users can't create, use, or fall foul of incorrect ACLs. But the API support for them is still there, and if a piece of software sets up an ACL, it's extremely inconvenient to find out what it's done, and manage it.

As a c# developer there is one huge difference between xp home and (xp professional and xp media centre). XP home doesn't have iis (which you need for developing web apps locally) where as the other two do. XP media centre from what I gather off someone who owned it is xp professional with bolt on bits.

As I found out to my disadvantage, if you don't define the admin user name and the guest user name (or something), XP Home automatically sets them to have no password (or something trivial)... but - get this - makes them invisible from the login screen and only accessible to remote users.

This is only a vulnerability in XP Home.

Grumble, moan, whinge, still haven't gone to linux...

XP Pro also
- supports multiple pocessors, Home is SMP only
- can be upgraded for free to 64-bit edition

Both of which are becoming increasingly important as we're moving to dual-core 64-bit processors.

XP Home: Windows ME version 2.0.
Hmm- maybe in terms of intended market it is, but they're quite different in terms of tech- WinME was basically an update of 95/98, and all versions of WinXP use the same kernel (developed from the Win2K line).
From my trusty copy of XP in a Nutshell, it seems that the biggest differences are:

XP Pro is much more flexible about user permissions, and allows users with limited rights to be set up. XP Home just gives all users admin rights.

XP Pro has multiple processer support.

XP Pro knows how to join an NT Domain, Home just supports peer to peer networking.

XP Pro had a load of utilites for various adminy things that XP Home doesn't

Basically, XP Home is a bit of a gimped version of Pro that has a bunch of stuff removed because Microsoft throught they wouldn't be required for home users and might scare them.
I don't know a lot about Media Center edition, but from a bit of grepping around it looks like it's designed for their networked home idea, and might not be available to the general public unless it's pre-installed. Looks like it's mainly got more support for media-type peripherals like remotes, TV cards etc.

Hmm- maybe in terms of intended market it is, but they're quite different in terms of tech

Sorry, I think my meaning was unclear. I understand and appreciate the technical difference. Mine was more of a user-level gripe: ME was an operating system that was buggy, hid necessary controls from the user, and simply wasn't as good as other operating systems out there. It was a horrible annoyance that should never have been inflicted on anyone. XP Home is a different technology, but similarly annoying (if less so). XP Professional is a way of charging $100 more for the software that everyone should have.

Or put another way: different technology, same bad idea.

Sorry, I think my meaning was unclear. I understand and appreciate the technical difference.
I suspected you did :)- I was just elucidating for the benefit of anyone else that wasn't clear. I completely agree on ME being a nasty piece of work- I've got a friend who's PC I occasionally have to fix, and every time I got near it I'm reminded quite how painful it is. I've not had the misfortune to have to do anything on XP Home, mainly because when I was getting an OS I looked at what it didn't do and decided it'd annoy me too much, and no-one goes near it at work. Agree completely (again) that Pro is just a way of charging unmore to ungimp your OS, but IMHO it's worth it (well, as worth it as any other MS product).

I believe MCE is based on XP professional, not home. It can only be bought in an OEM version, though anyone can buy it (so long as you buy some hardward at the same time - a mouse will do).

XP home replaces ME but is _not_ ME version 2 as it is based on NT technology.

IMO, XP Pro is only worth the extra money if you need the domain stuff or things like iis. The average home user does not need it (I include myself here, and my home network has 5 Win XP home machines and 2 debian Linux servers).

See comment above w/r/t the technology issue: the comparison to ME was more aesthetic than technical. (IMO ME was an abomination that should never have been made, and XP Home continues the trend: "Pro" should be the standard XP package bundled with home computers.)

Also in my experience, XP Pro is much more stable, particularly in environments where people will install a lot of software and then remove it. I've seen more screwed up XP Home registries...

My mum used to use Works, and the spreadsheet was incompatible with Excel, and also there was no import filter for it in Excel -- so you had to go out to CSV or whatever to move between them. Also, I seem to remember it was limited to something like 256 * 65536. That was a few years ago though, it might have improved since then...

I'm not sure I've ever brought a jumper -- they tend to be bought for me as presents (maybe because people think I look cold) and then reused every winter. After all, they don't exactly wear out all that easily... I've got a few that are at least 15 years old. I did buy my own winter coats (one overcoat, one smart overcoat, one padded jacket), back in the mists, but similarly they just come out every year. Gosh, that sounds dreadfully sad, reading it back! Maybe I should just hide in a cave all winter instead.

Perhaps your friend put his winter clothes in the loft, and forgot about it? In which case he'll have a nice surprise at some point in the future.

Excel only supports 256 by 65536 as well (although it does suport multiple worksheets in one file, so properly designed files can work around this).

One slightly non-obvious difference between the different versions of XP, is that XP Home is actually due to go out of support at the end of this year. I suspect that Microsoft will have to back down on this (particularly as Vista will only have been out for a few months at best by then), but I'm rather disappointed they haven't yet.

shockingly, I bought a new jumper in November and, even more shockingly, I was vaguely motivated by buying something that looked a bit less black and amorphous than my old jumper (this is part of a whole clothes-buying trend recently that I still haven't quite come to terms with)- I still wear the old jumper, bought in an Edinburgh charity shop on a particularly freezing March visit 7 or 8 years ago, just not every single day . . .

I completely ignore fashions with winter clothes and bring out the same old stuff each time. It doesn't help that I hate wool, so will only wear jumpers made from cotton and man-made fibres.

- My winter coat is the one

kirian made for me and I'll be wearing it until it falls apart (black moleskin, brown silk lining, large siver symbol buttons).
- I've got a huge black cotton jumper which I've owned for fifteen years and still wear (I don't wear jumpers much, so it's still nicely black).
- I also own a black shawl-like thing (it's probably got a fashionable name and I bought it for a fiver in the DP sale last spring) which I can wrap over the top of anything and so is the most worn item in my collection.
- My one and only cardigan is a large purple one that occasionally surfaces (about the only garment of my maternity wear phase that I still like and wear).
- Finally there's the bright red-orange-pink sort of jumper that I like (it belongs to

sumbitch but she left it in Fort Jackson after visiting once), but this last item doesn't come out very often because it's a short jumper and so doesn't hide long tops.

I've got a couple of other jumper-like things, but nothing that I wear more than once a winter.

Having been prompted by this comment to go look for the red-orange-pink one, it seems I no longer have it. :-(

Well, there's a reasonable overview here:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_home_pro.asp

The most recent versions of Works do indeed interoperate with Microsoft Office. But Works itself is poo and you generally don't want to use it. Note that sometimes Microsoft bundle bits of Office software under the Works name. For example, I have a legal copy of MS Word I bought by picking up a £13 bundle entitled "Works Suite" which included it (!). (See also Wikipedia.)

I would never throw out a good jumper. I am on a perpetual quest to buy a good new one and

triskellian and I have a mutual black-jumper-buying pact should we ever find a good one again. (We used to own identical black Moto ones which were perfect - mine literally fell apart after about 10 years.)

I discovered last week that I'd somehow never got around to throwing out that jumper. It looked so sad and threadbare, so I've finally given it a decent throwing away :-(

I've mostly given up on jumpers, but I'm working on a collection of black garments on the cardigan-wrap spectrum, so I just carry on wearing the same clothes I wear all year round, with an extra layer or two of black woolly stuff. But a recent shopping excursion with

sesquipedality led me to the conclusion that the only cardigans for sale at the moment are really dumb shapes, like the bastard offspring of a shrug and a bolero, so I'm trying to work up the enthusiasm to just knit myself one that I know I'll like.

And I spent two years looking for my last winter coat. I knew what I wanted, and it wasn't like it was anything outlandish (black, ankle length, swishy 'skirt', no stupid fiddly bits like fake fur collars), but it took two years. The resulting coat is too big, but it's lovely, and I'm going to wear it forever. So there.

But Works itself is poo
Amen to that. Can't say I've ever used it. If you're looking at something that will interoperate with Office but doesn't have a huge price tag I'd give Openoffice a look. I suspect it'd be better at Excel compatibility than Works, and from my limited use of it, it does the job happily enough

Works Suite is indeed Works + bolt-ons, one of which is Word. I believe the most recent Works Suite still contains Word 2003. If you want Word, the cheapest way of getting it is to pick up a copy of Works Suite 2003 on eBay for about £10.

The rest of Works Suite is (to me) rubbish. If you want Excell compatibility it's no good.

That was me!

I've only just remembered, but I bought 8 jumpers* in November, so it must be All My Fault. It wasn't cold when I bought them though.

*Well, one was a cardigan and one was a poncho.

I did request (and received 2) jumpers for Christmas, and partly because of all the cold doom predictions for this winter (before the cold snap). And 'cos my older jumpers are starting to fall apart, and are mostly cheap (ie not wool)

I sometimes end up buying clothes in winter and summer because last year's don't fit. And I gave away most of my big stuff when I got thin. Ebay and Tesco were my main sources of clothes this year though.

So, did anyone feel compelled to go out and buy winter clothes in November ?

No no no. Buy winter clothes in summer, when the charity shops are full of them because everybody's thrown out their winter wardrobe. :-)

Though I did buy a couple of very cheap smart-ish work-suitable jumpers in Tesco, actually, when I realised that lots of my smart things weren't very smart any more.

I seem to live in sweatshirts rather than jumpers as my extra layer of choice, possibly through a desire to look shapeless since I don't like my current bodyshape and haven't managed to change it yet. Plus I don't like wool, I find that unless it's very soft, it sets my teeth on edge. I have one good full length winter coat that my mother bought for me as a Christmas present about 8 years ago - it's still going strong. Otherwise, I wear an anorak, or a fleecy jacket. A good warm LARGE scarf/shawl is a must for winter warmth.

I feel the cold a lot, so most of my wardrobe chioces this winter have been to go back to wearing vests under tshirts, and tights under jeans as a means of keeping warm, rather than adding extra layers on top. I had to buy a new warm winter skirt on Wednesday, because I needed it for my Grandfather's funeral yeaterday. I was reassured to find that BHS still did ankle length wool skirts with proper lining, and 100 dernier cotton tights to go under it and keep my legs warm.

My clothing choices are based on three things - comfort, warmth and cost. I'm a skinflint and hate spending money on clothes, so I end up shopping at Tescos, and frequently buying their value range of clothing. Basic, serviceable, and provided you buy the right size it looks fine. My exceptions to the 'buy cheap' policy are shoes and long-lasting items such as the aforementioned winter coat. I will happily spend £60 to £80 on a pair of good, comfortable shoes for daily wear. The Vimes Boots Theory holds good, and it works out cheaper in the long run to get a full year's comfort and wear out of a single pair of 'expensive' shoes, rather than buy three pairs of cheaper shoes over the course of the year, shoes which won't be as comfortable or last as long.

Sorry, I apperar to have rambled. I have no opinion on the M$ issues, except that everyone I know seems to get annoyed by M$ Works. Your other question was clearly about scarves vs wooly hats, and I'm falling firmly on the large scarf as shawl side.

I too belong to the haul-them-out-each-year brigade, partly cos I'm miserly, and partly cos when I find a jumper I like it would be foolish to go "Oh No, I'm not wearing black/purple when candyfloss pink polkadots are this season's design!"

Just the one answer

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When someone comes to eat me alive, well I like to see their teeth

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