Slashdot Mirror

It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality', which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to paedophilia.

What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:

• Linus Torvalds is an anagram of slit anus or VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
• Richard M. Stallman, spokespervert for the Gaysex's Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of mans cram thrill ad.
• Alan Cox is barely an anagram of anal cox which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.

I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.

Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'

As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.

And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!

Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:

'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'

Is this why you were touching your penis in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?

We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and co

It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality', which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to paedophilia.

What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:

• Linus Torvalds is an anagram of slit anus or VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
• Richard M. Stallman, spokespervert for the Gaysex's Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of mans cram thrill ad.
• Alan Cox is barely an anagram of anal cox which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.

I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.

Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'

As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.

And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!

Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:

'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'

Is this why you were touching your penis in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?

We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and co

Because BITS is a peer-to-peer protocol:

Peer caching is a new feature of BITS 3.0 that allows peers (computers within the same subnet of a network that have the peer caching feature enabled) to share files. If peer caching is enabled on a computer, the Automatic Update agent instructs BITS to make downloaded files available to that computer's peers as well.

This is actually a really, really useful feature for those of us operating networks (on behalf of the federal government) with significant bandwidth constraints.

And never mind the fact that BitTorrent is great for transferring large data sets over slow and unreliable data links, even if it's just from one computer to another.

This is clearly is bad for the individual geek who makes their living selling simple custom programs that do only what the user wants/needs and nothing that they don't, unlike Microsoft omnibus packages. It's a case of government by large corporation over the individual if this passes.

Microsoft employs 40,000 people around Puget Sound.

It owns about 10 million square feet of office space up that way and leases five million more. Facts About Microsoft

The median family income in Redmond itself was $88,000 in 2008 and the median value of a house or condo $496,000. Redmond, Washington

"All politics is local."

The guy cutting the grass or tending the plants on the Microsoft campus is another vote for maintaining the status quo - and there are thousands and tens of thousands of others like him the geek in his basement will never be able to reach.

The only real answer is to market your product through an organization that can reap the same benefits of size, visibility and financial strength as the big boys.

So in fact it seems Miguel was right all along - right about the need, right about the solution, right that Microsoft would not attempt to "destroy Linux" by leveraging patents. Instead they specifically promised in writing not to do that. Why? Probably because they don't care about Linux anymore. The world has moved on, what once seemed like a threat to their business no longer is.

Right, it's not a threat to their business, and they've been insightful enough to realize that. Which is why they haven't leveraged their patents against Linux in any way. Have you been living in a cave for the last 5 years?

On the other hand, there's no evidence from all of the above saber-rattling that Linux is infringing upon any of their patents. If they really have a credible infringement case, why haven't they sued Canonical, Red Hat, Mandriva, or any other company that hasn't agreed to "build bridges" with them? One also could wonder why they haven't publicly stated which patents are infringed, but the answer is of course that with or without a credible case, publicly stating which patents are infringed upon would allow the FOSS community to fight back with workarounds or invalidations of those patents.

So in fact it seems Miguel was right all along - right about the need, right about the solution, right that Microsoft would not attempt to "destroy Linux" by leveraging patents. Instead they specifically promised in writing not to do that. Why? Probably because they don't care about Linux anymore. The world has moved on, what once seemed like a threat to their business no longer is.

Right, it's not a threat to their business, and they've been insightful enough to realize that. Which is why they haven't leveraged their patents against Linux in any way. Have you been living in a cave for the last 5 years?

On the other hand, there's no evidence from all of the above saber-rattling that Linux is infringing upon any of their patents. If they really have a credible infringement case, why haven't they sued Canonical, Red Hat, Mandriva, or any other company that hasn't agreed to "build bridges" with them? One also could wonder why they haven't publicly stated which patents are infringed, but the answer is of course that with or without a credible case, publicly stating which patents are infringed upon would allow the FOSS community to fight back with workarounds or invalidations of those patents.

So in fact it seems Miguel was right all along - right about the need, right about the solution, right that Microsoft would not attempt to "destroy Linux" by leveraging patents. Instead they specifically promised in writing not to do that. Why? Probably because they don't care about Linux anymore. The world has moved on, what once seemed like a threat to their business no longer is.

Right, it's not a threat to their business, and they've been insightful enough to realize that. Which is why they haven't leveraged their patents against Linux in any way. Have you been living in a cave for the last 5 years?

On the other hand, there's no evidence from all of the above saber-rattling that Linux is infringing upon any of their patents. If they really have a credible infringement case, why haven't they sued Canonical, Red Hat, Mandriva, or any other company that hasn't agreed to "build bridges" with them? One also could wonder why they haven't publicly stated which patents are infringed, but the answer is of course that with or without a credible case, publicly stating which patents are infringed upon would allow the FOSS community to fight back with workarounds or invalidations of those patents.

So in fact it seems Miguel was right all along - right about the need, right about the solution, right that Microsoft would not attempt to "destroy Linux" by leveraging patents. Instead they specifically promised in writing not to do that. Why? Probably because they don't care about Linux anymore. The world has moved on, what once seemed like a threat to their business no longer is.

Right, it's not a threat to their business, and they've been insightful enough to realize that. Which is why they haven't leveraged their patents against Linux in any way. Have you been living in a cave for the last 5 years?

On the other hand, there's no evidence from all of the above saber-rattling that Linux is infringing upon any of their patents. If they really have a credible infringement case, why haven't they sued Canonical, Red Hat, Mandriva, or any other company that hasn't agreed to "build bridges" with them? One also could wonder why they haven't publicly stated which patents are infringed, but the answer is of course that with or without a credible case, publicly stating which patents are infringed upon would allow the FOSS community to fight back with workarounds or invalidations of those patents.

Example: If you take a look at the last major Microsoft conference (MIX10) then you'll see there we no new WPF features added, while a whole bunch of new Silverlight things announced.

That's because the new things in .NET 4 (which includes WPF 4) were announced a long time ago on PDC. There's no point in hashing them over again on MIX in March, when the final version is going to come out in April, and there has been two public betas and RC already, the latter being feature-complete.

Here is the high-level changelog for WPF 4. As you can see, it contains totally minor and irrelevant features typical of a product being deprecated, such as "the WPF text rendering stack has been completely replaced", or "WPF supports data binding to objects that implement IDynamicMetaObjectProvider" (the latter is a DLR interface that objects written in IronPython, IronRuby, and other similar dynamic language implement to expose their metadata - so it means that you can now bind to Python or Ruby models from WPF views).

They aren't implementing WPF for the same reason that Microsoft is not adding anything to WPF. MS considers it a dead technology

Epic flamebait fail.

Oh, and guess what widget toolkit the (yet unreleased) Visual Studio 2010 is using?

and is pushing SilverLight.

Silverlight, as it stands, is not good enough for rich desktop applications. Yes, it has the option to run outside browser in the most recent version, but this isn't intended to replace a proper app.

Now, what is true is that WPF and Silverlight are converging. The way this goes is that Silverlight runtime is more and more like the full .NET runtime. Eventually, I suspect it will just end up being one single runtime.

This change is to allow third party code to come down through Windows Update, in essence adding more package sources.

So in essence, they did what I can do with vi /etc/apt/sources.list? Or they replaced a hardcoded "deb http://http.microsoft.com/windows/ valuable_vista main contrib non-free" with the same information but now in C:\windows\etc\apt\sources.list, and now I (and my programs) can edit it?

It's not new or unique

True, that :)

Join the Microsoft Developer NetWork today!

Seriously.

Or not.

And even that has a free edition. http://msdn.microsoft.com/express

Taken from Google Cache: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:LPFDjfqGMRMJ:www.sdtimes.com/link/34203+Does+Windows+cost+Microsoft+opportunities&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Does Windows cost Microsoft opportunities?
By David Worthington

March 17, 2010 —
The evolution of the .NET Framework has won new users to the platform, and drawn its share of criticism from those who think Microsoft’s stewardship has often been off-target.

Among the critics is Novell vice president Miguel de Icaza, who said .NET's focus on Windows has come at the expense of opportunities for Microsoft, and its desire to guard its intellectual property is an impediment on the platform.

"Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem," he said. "Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java Virtual Machine implementations, the .NET world has suffered by this meme spread by [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] that they would come after people that do not license patents from them."

In practice, the Java community only uses two or three JVMs (IBM's, JRockit, and OpenJDK from Sun), while others are research efforts or smaller-scale open-source projects, said author and consultant Ted Neward. "Virtual machines are not something the open-source community seems to want to experiment with."

Microsoft submitted the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification to ECMA International, which ratified it in 2001. Microsoft built technologies on top of the specification as .NET evolved.

Microsoft has made an open-source CLI implementation codenamed "Rotor" freely available, but it has had little or no uptake, Neward noted.

However, Mono remains the only implementer of the ECMA CLI specification outside of Microsoft, and that is a testament to the legal uncertainty surrounding some aspects of .NET due to Microsoft's statements about open-source software, de Icaza said.

"[Microsoft] would still be the No. 1 stack, but it would have encouraged an ecosystem that would have innovated extensively around their platform," he added.

Facebook, Google, Ruby on Rails and Wikipedia could have been built using .NET, de Icaza claimed. "All of those are failed opportunities. Even if the cross-language story was great, the Web integration fantastic, the architecture was the right one to fit whatever flavor of a platform you wanted, people flocked elsewhere."

"To say that Google could have used .NET is to undervalue both Google and .NET. Google creates value from things like distributed MapReduce and a brand-new system-level programming with concurrent coroutines," said Larry O'Brien, an independent analyst and consultant who writes the Windows & .NET column for SD Times. ".NET creates value from a fantastic IDE, great mainstream languages, and well-executed technologies like Silverlight, LINQ and the DLR [Dynamic Language Runtime]."

Despite the criticisms, customers are "making bets on .NET" all the time, said Brandon Watson, director of product management for Microsoft's development platforms. "The fact that we didn't get Google—I'll cry a little, but not a lot. I'm not certain that Google wouldn't have taken a bet on philosophy, wanting to beat us."

Further, developers can build languages on top of .NET 4.0's dynamic language runtime, which supports both Python and Ruby, Watson said. But it's the addition of new technologies on top of the ECMA specification, such as the DLR, that de Icaza believes impedes the CLI's adoption.

Microsoft's submission to ECMA has remained at a "core level," de Icaza claimed. "I

Microsoft is aware of reports of vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player 6 provided in Windows XP.
The Adobe Flash Player 6 was provided with Windows XP and contains multiple vulnerabilities that could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page.

You were saying?

Here you go.

Although that's a Microsoft site which is richly laced with Silverlight dependencies, there's some usable content there even with good ol' XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

The XP extended support was an aberration because vista flopped. What MS would like to offer for support is 5 years for six-pack Joe, and 5 years more if you're willing to pay extra. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years for everybody, and 2 years more for server packages. Link

PD: CAPCHA: colors

Actually LTS is 3 years, 5 years for server.

OK, found a reference in the MICROSOFT WINDOWS EMBEDDED license.

"d. High Risk Activities. The software is not fault-tolerant and is not designed, manufactured or intended for any use requiring fail-safe performance in which the failure of the software could lead to death, serious personal injury or severe physical and environmental damage (High Risk Activities), such as the operation of aircraft or nuclear facilities. You agree not to use, or license the use of, the software in connection with any High Risk Activities, and shall inform its end users in writing of the foregoing restriction."

http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/c/4/3c46d5a4-b10a-4f09-8594-700cc44a2860/CE%20Spark%20EULA.pdf

This is not quite what I recall, I may be going all the way back to WinNT or Win2K, but today it seems like Sun requires a disclaimer due to Java. It also looks likes the gov't doesn't want people making nuclear, chemical or biological weapons using Windows either.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc976720.aspx

Windows XP doesn't use anything beyond 4G (4096MB)

Windows XP x64 Edition does.

isnt there some clause in the windows EULA that specificly prohibites using it in nuclear installation?

and damn, the MS-shills are out in force today, not a single post with a BSOD joke above the -1 level...

Note on Java Support. The OS Components may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage. Sun Microsystems, Inc. has contractually obligated Microsoft to make this disclaimer.

http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/ieplatform/ie/license.txt

Get the sources of glxgears (in mesa-utils), and look through the code. It's relatively simple, and will help you get started.

Also, when I was looking for an OpenGL example that uses just X11, without Qt/Glut/whatever, the best one I could find was this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd318252(VS.85).aspx (Yes, the irony is overwhelming...)

In addition, you can also use the Plugin Check to make sure you have the most recent versions of plugins to decrease the risk of attack. And don't forget to turn on DEP for all programs and services on Windows.

Actually I would say yours is an almost solved in that the link you had said out of stock and the price was too high. He can get the same rig for $29 at Amazon.

But what I don't get is this: WTF is this doing in an ask slashdot at all? Hell my PC is less than a year old, and not the baddest board by ANY means, yet even my basic motherboard comes with software that lets you assign the input/output to be anything you want including line in, so WTF? What's next? I didn't read TFM so somebody here explain it to me? Even the old AC-97s would let you change inputs, and hell just about every board out there is based on Realtek designs.

If you want something to write about here is something a little more important, at least for all of us running Windows 7 and/or Server 2K8-Apparently Win7/2K8 don't play nice with most KVM switches which means if you don't want to shitcan your KVM you are probably gonna have to shell out for one of these for each PC on your KVM which if you are using a 4 port or better is really gonna take a bite out of your wallet. It only seems to strike, at least for me, with LCD monitors, which is a PITA since I just got a nice 20 inch Dell given to me brand new as a thank you gift from a client. The best I can get thanks to this bug is 1440x900 instead of 1600x900 native! And for those running large server KVMs imagine how much it is gonna suck buying that damned many adapters to run 2K8.

That to me is a better story than "I don't read manuals or bother to even look at feature lists before I buy...help!" which is pretty much what TFA is. Anybody could solve TFA in 30 seconds of Googling, whereas I've spent 2 days so far beating my head against the wall only to be told "buy more hardware dude" with the monitor bug. Man this bites.

The XP extended support was an aberration because vista flopped. What MS would like to offer for support is 5 years for six-pack Joe, and 5 years more if you're willing to pay extra. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years for everybody, and 2 years more for server packages. Link

PD: CAPCHA: colors

1. This update gets installed if you are in the EU and use XP or later.
2. If you have IE as default browser, this site opens at the next login, or when you click on the icon the update puts on your desktop (like this).

Hopefully this will help standards compliant browsers gain some marketshare. (Not that my country needs much help. :P)

Have a look at Software Restriction Policies. They can prevent unauthorized executables from being launched through a web browser, or from a USB drive, etc. Software Restriction Policies are not infallible, but they're far more effective than other preventive measures like antivirus software.

Have you ever actually tried to download all the patches for a particular operating system (especially one that you are not running)? Microsoft doesn't make this easy to accomplish. [...] Go ahead and try to find all the patches for Windows Server 2003 x64 (just to pick a random version). I'll wait.

How about WSUS?

Oh, one more thing. Assuming you are running windows and AD(which is pretty much the plausible assumption when "company" "networks" and "zombified" show up in the same sentence), there is something of a nuclear option...

Software Restriction Policies.

The details are quite complex, Microsoft will have to tell you more; but you can substantially ruin joe script kiddie's day(as well as pissing off users, and making life miserable for your IT minions, which is why so many people don't use them). In a nutshell, you can restrict the locations from which executables will be run, you can restrict which executables will be run(in a number of ways: either SHA hashes of specific binaries, RSA keys of specific trusted vendors that allow all software signed by them to be run, some combination of the above. If you are a real hardass(which can be advisable, given the crazy hijacks that get pulled against browsers, particularly IE) you can enforce the policies against all scripts, .dlls, and BHOs, as well as executables. Your users Will. Fucking. Hate. the fact that your software restriction policy has to be evaluated 350 times just to log in and open an IE window; but their odds of picking up a malicious BHO will drop substantially. Your IT flunkies Will. Fucking. Hate. having to get all their little diagnostics tools and utilities, and any new programs that are being added, cryptographically signed and enrolled into your restriction policy; but such is life.

They will increase your workload, reduce performance, and make your flunkies into sad pandas; but SRPs are pretty much your best bet, in Windows land, to go from reactively attempting to enumerate badness to proactively enumerating goodness. Welcome to hell.

I don't think you understood the point he was trying to make. Windows has had threading since 1993 and a threadpool API since before OS X was released. The point he was making was not that Windows wasn't good enough for multiple cores, it was that the current paradigm about how OSes and apps relate wasn't good enough.

Back when you only had a single core CPU, the OS had to share the CPU with all the apps. Thus arose the kernel/user model where the OS ran in kernel mode and the apps ran in user mode. When an app needed some system service it would stop running, the CPU would switch to kernel mode, perform the server, and go back to user mode so the app could resume. When multiple CPUs and then multiple cores per CPU became available, this model was simply expanded so that the OS ran on every CPU core. This is called the SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) model because every processor core has the same duties as all the others.

I think what he's saying is that having the OS run on every core means that data structures it uses will have to be shared across all the cores in the system, causing problems like contention and false sharing. It sounds like he is considering what would happen if the OS just ran on some cores and apps ran on others. If an app needs a system service it need not stop running, switch into kernel mode, run the OS, etc. Instead it could send a message to one of the cores that the OS is running on and go about its business, hopefully staying more responsive that way. Obviously the app can't have full control of the CPU because it has to share the computer nicely, but it doesn't need a fully-blown kernel either, so the thin supervisor layer is what he related to a hypervisor.

It may be hard to imagine a 256-core computer because Apple doesn't make any, but Windows can already run on 256 cores. Of course those are huge server boxes, but it won't be long before it's common to have desktop boxes with 256 logical CPUs (2 sockets, 32 cores/socket, 4 threads/core), and then you can imagine that a high-end server might have upwards of 2048 cores. At that point does it even make sense to have the OS running on hundreds or thousands of cores simultaneously? Probably not.

I'm not saying that this guy has the right solution, but he has some interesting ideas worth considering.

dom

I don't think you understood the point he was trying to make. Windows has had threading since 1993 and a threadpool API since before OS X was released. The point he was making was not that Windows wasn't good enough for multiple cores, it was that the current paradigm about how OSes and apps relate wasn't good enough.

Back when you only had a single core CPU, the OS had to share the CPU with all the apps. Thus arose the kernel/user model where the OS ran in kernel mode and the apps ran in user mode. When an app needed some system service it would stop running, the CPU would switch to kernel mode, perform the server, and go back to user mode so the app could resume. When multiple CPUs and then multiple cores per CPU became available, this model was simply expanded so that the OS ran on every CPU core. This is called the SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) model because every processor core has the same duties as all the others.

I think what he's saying is that having the OS run on every core means that data structures it uses will have to be shared across all the cores in the system, causing problems like contention and false sharing. It sounds like he is considering what would happen if the OS just ran on some cores and apps ran on others. If an app needs a system service it need not stop running, switch into kernel mode, run the OS, etc. Instead it could send a message to one of the cores that the OS is running on and go about its business, hopefully staying more responsive that way. Obviously the app can't have full control of the CPU because it has to share the computer nicely, but it doesn't need a fully-blown kernel either, so the thin supervisor layer is what he related to a hypervisor.

It may be hard to imagine a 256-core computer because Apple doesn't make any, but Windows can already run on 256 cores. Of course those are huge server boxes, but it won't be long before it's common to have desktop boxes with 256 logical CPUs (2 sockets, 32 cores/socket, 4 threads/core), and then you can imagine that a high-end server might have upwards of 2048 cores. At that point does it even make sense to have the OS running on hundreds or thousands of cores simultaneously? Probably not.

I'm not saying that this guy has the right solution, but he has some interesting ideas worth considering.

dom

The Microsoft Windows equivalent of Grand Central Dispatch is called User-Mode Scheduling, and is included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd627187(VS.85).aspx

Microsoft has also released application libraries on top of UMS to make it easier to use in certain languages. C++, for example, has the Concurrency Runtime. More on that here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd504870(VS.100).aspx

GDC and UMS both let an application developer accomplish pretty much the same thing: move all into a single process with enough pre-assigned threads to cover all the cores on a system, and then work is queued up and performed on those threads. The benefit of here is that GCD and UMS applications don't have to context-switch into and out of the kernel a bazillion times in order to do a set of parallelizable tasks.

GDR and UMS+CCR both whittle down the developer's code-writing commitment to a few lines. It's pretty amazing stuff.

BUT....

Neither of these technologies really addresses the underlying system-wide problem: adding more CPU cores to a system doesn't increase performance on a linear scale like increasing the speed of the CPU. Every time you add a core, more and more time gets spent doing resource management instead of actual work. OS kernels invariably have locks on important resources (memory tables, for example), and while these things don't matter at all on a 2 or 4 core system, they're going to be a huge bottleneck on a 200-core system. No general-purpose operating system on the market today... not Windows, not OS X, not even Linux... can provide a liner or near-linear performance improvement as the number of cores increase beyond 16 or so. Not as long as there is any kind of shared resource between those cores.

By the way.... Dave Probert, who is the Microsoft engineer the Slashdot article is discussing, explained UMS in this Channel 9 video over a year ago:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Dave-Probert-Inside-Windows-7-User-Mode-Scheduler-UMS/

The Microsoft Windows equivalent of Grand Central Dispatch is called User-Mode Scheduling, and is included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd627187(VS.85).aspx

Microsoft has also released application libraries on top of UMS to make it easier to use in certain languages. C++, for example, has the Concurrency Runtime. More on that here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd504870(VS.100).aspx

GDC and UMS both let an application developer accomplish pretty much the same thing: move all into a single process with enough pre-assigned threads to cover all the cores on a system, and then work is queued up and performed on those threads. The benefit of here is that GCD and UMS applications don't have to context-switch into and out of the kernel a bazillion times in order to do a set of parallelizable tasks.

GDR and UMS+CCR both whittle down the developer's code-writing commitment to a few lines. It's pretty amazing stuff.

BUT....

Neither of these technologies really addresses the underlying system-wide problem: adding more CPU cores to a system doesn't increase performance on a linear scale like increasing the speed of the CPU. Every time you add a core, more and more time gets spent doing resource management instead of actual work. OS kernels invariably have locks on important resources (memory tables, for example), and while these things don't matter at all on a 2 or 4 core system, they're going to be a huge bottleneck on a 200-core system. No general-purpose operating system on the market today... not Windows, not OS X, not even Linux... can provide a liner or near-linear performance improvement as the number of cores increase beyond 16 or so. Not as long as there is any kind of shared resource between those cores.

By the way.... Dave Probert, who is the Microsoft engineer the Slashdot article is discussing, explained UMS in this Channel 9 video over a year ago:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Dave-Probert-Inside-Windows-7-User-Mode-Scheduler-UMS/

This has become a huge mess in C/C++, as more attributes ("mutable", "volatile", per-thread storage, etc.) have been bolted on to give some hints to the compiler.

An interesting comment overall, but what relevance does "mutable" have to multi-threaded programming? It is just a way to say that a particular field in a class is never const, even when the object itself is as a whole. There are no optimizations the compiler could possibly derive from that (in fact, if anything, it might make some optimizations non-applicable).

Same goes for "volatile", actually. It forces the code generator to avoid caching values in registers etc, and always do direct memory reads & writes on every access to a given lvalue, but this won't prevent one core from not seeing a write done by another core - you need memory barriers for that, and ISO C++ "volatile" doesn't guarantee any (nor do any existing C++ implementations).

Microsoft Research did some work on "Polyphonic C#" [psu.edu], but nobody seems to use that.

It's a research language, not intended for production use. Microsoft Research does quite a few of those - e.g. Spec# (DbC), or C-omega (this is what Polyphonic C# evolved into), or Axum (the most recent take at concurrency, Erlang-style).

Those projects are used to "cook" some idea to see if it's feasible, what approach is the best, and how it is taken by programmers. Eventually, features from those languages end up integrated into the mainstream ones - C# and VB. For example, X# became LINQ in .NET 3.5, and Spec# became Code Contracts in .NET 4.0. So, give it time.

This has become a huge mess in C/C++, as more attributes ("mutable", "volatile", per-thread storage, etc.) have been bolted on to give some hints to the compiler.

An interesting comment overall, but what relevance does "mutable" have to multi-threaded programming? It is just a way to say that a particular field in a class is never const, even when the object itself is as a whole. There are no optimizations the compiler could possibly derive from that (in fact, if anything, it might make some optimizations non-applicable).

Same goes for "volatile", actually. It forces the code generator to avoid caching values in registers etc, and always do direct memory reads & writes on every access to a given lvalue, but this won't prevent one core from not seeing a write done by another core - you need memory barriers for that, and ISO C++ "volatile" doesn't guarantee any (nor do any existing C++ implementations).

Microsoft Research did some work on "Polyphonic C#" [psu.edu], but nobody seems to use that.

It's a research language, not intended for production use. Microsoft Research does quite a few of those - e.g. Spec# (DbC), or C-omega (this is what Polyphonic C# evolved into), or Axum (the most recent take at concurrency, Erlang-style).

Those projects are used to "cook" some idea to see if it's feasible, what approach is the best, and how it is taken by programmers. Eventually, features from those languages end up integrated into the mainstream ones - C# and VB. For example, X# became LINQ in .NET 3.5, and Spec# became Code Contracts in .NET 4.0. So, give it time.

This has become a huge mess in C/C++, as more attributes ("mutable", "volatile", per-thread storage, etc.) have been bolted on to give some hints to the compiler.

An interesting comment overall, but what relevance does "mutable" have to multi-threaded programming? It is just a way to say that a particular field in a class is never const, even when the object itself is as a whole. There are no optimizations the compiler could possibly derive from that (in fact, if anything, it might make some optimizations non-applicable).

Same goes for "volatile", actually. It forces the code generator to avoid caching values in registers etc, and always do direct memory reads & writes on every access to a given lvalue, but this won't prevent one core from not seeing a write done by another core - you need memory barriers for that, and ISO C++ "volatile" doesn't guarantee any (nor do any existing C++ implementations).

Microsoft Research did some work on "Polyphonic C#" [psu.edu], but nobody seems to use that.

It's a research language, not intended for production use. Microsoft Research does quite a few of those - e.g. Spec# (DbC), or C-omega (this is what Polyphonic C# evolved into), or Axum (the most recent take at concurrency, Erlang-style).

Those projects are used to "cook" some idea to see if it's feasible, what approach is the best, and how it is taken by programmers. Eventually, features from those languages end up integrated into the mainstream ones - C# and VB. For example, X# became LINQ in .NET 3.5, and Spec# became Code Contracts in .NET 4.0. So, give it time.

Microsoft has its own offering similar to Apple's GCD - Parallel Patterns Library for C++. It's mostly same primitives (tasks & groups of tasks) on lower level, though it also offers a few simple STL-like algorithms with automatic parallelization.

For .NET, the same task primitives are offered, and then there's Parallel LINQ on top of that, which is effectively automatic parallelization of queries over sequences, with all the typical operations - map, reduce, filter, group, join, order - supported.

I wish I could mod you higher than +5, you just summed up some of the things that bother me most about the OS that is somehow still the most popular desktop OS in the world.

To anyone using Windows (XP, Vista or 7) right now, go ahead and open up an Explorer window, and type in ftp:// followed by any url.
Even when it's a name that obviously won't resolve, or an ip of your very own local network of a machine that just doesn't exist, this'll hang your Explorer window for a couple of solid seconds. If you're a truly patient person, try doing that with a name that does resolve, like ftp://microsoft.com . Better yet, try stopping it.... say goodbye to your explorer.exe .

This is one of the worst user experiences possible, all for a mundane task like using ftp. And this has been present in Windows for what, a decade?

I'm not sure I get it - GCD just looks like a threadpool library. Windows has had a built-in threadpool API that's been available since Windows 2000, and it seems to do pretty much the same thing as GCD.

is there a more full-featured console available in windows 7? CMD feels so clunky after coming from the terminal app in Mac OS X.

Windows 7 comes with PowerShell which is more featured than CMD. You can also try and download a copy of bash for Windows, there sre a few versions.

Most digital signatures I've been familiar with (at least in the Microsoft world) tend to use a PKI to verify identity.
By trusting the certification authority, you implicitly trust the signer's identity, and that the identity has been verified.
Digital Signatures on TechNet

Microcrap.

Go ahead. Mod me down.

Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout

Whenever you start a Chinese program, and you get garbage instead of Chinese characters, use Microsoft AppLocale to fix the problem. Works like a charm.

I'd be interested in knowing what options are available for similarly hardening Windows. What I'd really like to see is for the average system to become difficult enough to compromise that there is no longer fertile ground for automated attacks and the botnets that follow. I think that's achievable too, if we really wanted to do it.

You could start with using the features already provided in Windows http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc507874.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A3D1BBED-7F35-4E72-BFB5-B84A526C1565&displaylang=en.

The nice part is that almost all of the security settings are trivially deployed via Active Directory and GPOs. Deploying Linux security settings in a corporate environment generally involves rolling your own scripts and distribution methods.

I'm not saying Windows doesn't have room for improvement in the realm of security. On the contrary, there are tons of hardening features and settings in Windows but most are turned off by default for compatibility reasons (or really annoying like the Vista default implementation of UAC).

I'd be interested in knowing what options are available for similarly hardening Windows. What I'd really like to see is for the average system to become difficult enough to compromise that there is no longer fertile ground for automated attacks and the botnets that follow. I think that's achievable too, if we really wanted to do it.

You could start with using the features already provided in Windows http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc507874.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A3D1BBED-7F35-4E72-BFB5-B84A526C1565&displaylang=en.

The nice part is that almost all of the security settings are trivially deployed via Active Directory and GPOs. Deploying Linux security settings in a corporate environment generally involves rolling your own scripts and distribution methods.

I'm not saying Windows doesn't have room for improvement in the realm of security. On the contrary, there are tons of hardening features and settings in Windows but most are turned off by default for compatibility reasons (or really annoying like the Vista default implementation of UAC).

I used http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

I'll see thank you.

And at that, it's actually already got some very impressive capabilities. In particular, and relevant to the discussion at hand (hardware-accelerated 3D) try this page in you favorite browser(s): http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/01FlyingImages/Default.html .

The IE9 preview, early though it is, blows Firefox et. al completely out of the water. Try running the number of images up to the max (256), zooming in, and holding the Shift key while moving your mouse. On my machine, IE9 preview will still get 28 FPS. Opera 10.5 will come next closest, at about 9.5 but with terrible background flicker. Firefox 3.6 gets about 5.5 FPS, not smooth at all.

This is true, but also irrelevant. We're talking about the possibility of a specific performance optimization here. Obviously, software rendering *can* do 3D - this has been known for decades, and is what other browsers use if you go to a 3D website like http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/01FlyingImages/Default.html . The fact that it's possible to do the same thing does not mean that it's possible to do it with the same performance though, which is the crux of the matter. WDDM drivers provide a lot of capabilities that non-WDDM drivers lack. WDDM drivers require kernel driver interfaces that XP lacks (if you added support for them to XP, it wouldn't really be XP anymore; this is a non-trivial modification of an old and long-stable portion of the kernel). The way IE9 gets the performance it does on 3D relies upon these capabilities. No Vista/Win7 = No WDDM = No support for those features = No IE9 hardware accelerated performance. There might be another way to get equivalent performance, but neither MS nor anybody else has demonstrated it yet.

I'm not sure what you think is "funny" about that, but maybe you just have an odd sense of humor. Actually, I suppose if you were the sort to bash anything that MS does which looks like a mistake, without any idea of what was involved, yeah it might be funny.

Go visit this page, in whatever browser(s) you please: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/01FlyingImages/Default.html

• IE8: The default 36 images get nominally 4 FPS, but it doesn't even finish drawing the old frame before starting the new one so it tears abominably. At 4 images it gets about 30 PFS, smoothly. The follow-the-mouse function doesn't work.
• Chrome 4.1: At 36 images, only 2 FPS, though no tearing. At 4 images, 30 FPS. Animation is still smooth, but framerate drops terribly if you zoom in oh hold the Shift key for faster rotation.
• Firefox 3.6: 20 FPS at 36 images, and very clearly not smooth if you hold the shift key (fast spinning). 60 FPS and smooth at 16 images, though it drops to 12 FPS if you zoom in.
• Opera 10.5: At 36 images, 25 FPS and smooth. Faster rotation is fine, but zooming in gives a flickering background and only 20 FPS. It'll do 100 images (at 12 FPS) but the background flickers fit to give you a seizure.
• IE9 preview: At 36 images, 60 FPS and smooth, even zoomed in or with Shift. No change at 64 images. 100 images causes a drop to 57 FPS. I can go up to 256 images before the framerate drops to 30, and it's still smooth even with zoom and Shift.

I don't have Safari or Konqueror installed here, but I think you get the idea. IE8 can't even execute the page's code right. Chrome crawls at the 3D effect. Firefox is OK at wide angle and crawls when zoomed. Opera is the fastest of the released browsers, but has horrible flicker when images pass the edge of the screen. None of these browsers use hardware accelerated drawing.

The very, very early preview of IE9, which does use hardware acceleration, blows them all away. No performance degradation until it reaches the point where most other browsers drop to the single digits. No trouble with zooming or fast motion. No flicker or tearing. If you'd told me I was watching a demo of a 3D engine written in C++, I'd have believed you (not been terribly impressed, but believed you). For something using pure JavaScript I'm amazed.

My system has a mid-range GPU (GeForce 9600M) but pretty good CPU (Core 2 Duo T9600, 2.8GHz), running Win7 x64. I'm guessing IE9 uses vertical sync, since it maxes at my refresh rate (60 Hz). Clearly, simply compiling the JS to native binary isn't enough to get the really impressive performance, since the other browsers do that. Since Vista/Win7 use 3D to render the desktop anyhow, I can certainly believe it's easier to incorporate this kind of functionality into those operating systems. It may be possible with XP, but so far there's no indication that you can get comparable performance - none of the browsers that will run on XP can, at least.

So does MS: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100997681033.aspx