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That they are using it does not mean that VB6 as a tool is still alive. In fact, the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported as of April 8, 2008.

That's about the same time they stopped supporting VFP 9.0. We were using VFP 6.0 when MS announced on the UniversalThread (UT) that VFB 6.0 would be the last version of that tool. The 250,000 VFP coders registered at UT were outraged and threatened a mass exodus to a tool MS didn't control. In the end, tens of thousands did migrate to other tools, while Microsoft put VFP on minimal life support to prevent further defections. I saw the handwriting on the wall and I moved my apps to Qt in 2004 and have been well pleased.

Microsoft had their MVP VFP coders, like Kevin McNish (IIRC) and others, start pushing C# and .NET as a replacement for VFP and holding classes on the UT, and many took the leap to .NET. Now it appears that MS screwed them twice in about five years. Will they bend over and take it for a third time?

Microsoft, however, allows any Joe Dirt to buy OEM licenses and install on any homebuilt computer.

Only when building a computer to sell, not to use. (Source)

We'll just switch over to other well-supported Microsoft technologies, like Visual J++, for our PlaysForSure application.

We'll just switch over to other well-supported Microsoft technologies, like Visual J++, for our PlaysForSure application.

In the automotive industry, look at Ford. They are 'cooperating' with Microsoft. Given a choice, I'd rather have Android in my car as compared to any offers from Microsoft.

5 minutes time... easily. You don't need DDOS (multiple machines) to suck up the connections either: 1 single man can do it.

APK

P.S.=> Can you "counter" for it? Yes, & a couple ways:

I feel the 2nd is more effective, personally...

---

1.) Via software OR hardware router firewall tables - IF you want to take that route, it's an ONGOING HASSLE, if the hacker/cracker KNOWS what they're doing, keeping @ it (that is, IF the hacker/cracker doesn't know ways around it, & trust me, there are that too)

AND, perhaps MORE EFFECTIVELY?

2.) Using features in your Operating System's IP Stack, such as that found in Windows!

E.G.=> SynAttackProtect , which tells the system in the case of the Syn-Ack type attack, to drop trying to re-communicate with systems that are "bombing you" with unrouteable requests...

In fact, here is a write up on that much:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938202.aspx

---

There you go!

(NOW - Hopefully, some Linux person will post the equitable substitute they use, & some Mac folks too, so others can GAIN by this on their platforms also!)

... apk

The Mango update will support sockets. Currently Windows Phone 7 supports http, and does not need to go through any cloud services to communicate to the web or any generic web service. Tethering is another issue, probably won't be part of the Mango update, and is driven more by carriers than anything. Even android's tethering is under pressure from the carriers

True, but nonetheless, all Android phones with 2.2+ (whether stock or modded by phone manufacturer) have tethering built in. So far, cell operators have stripped that functionality from phones they sell, and the purge in the Market is just an extension of that. But I don't have to buy an Android phone from operators (or at least from those of them which block tethering apps - they show up on T-Mobile phones, for example), and even if I do, I can sideload a tethering app.

Apps for smartphones are usually written from scratch in their own native environments. No porting occurs from non-smartphone c/c++ environments for almost all smartphone apps.

For starters, I was talking about porting from smartphone C/C++ environments, since we already have plenty (iPhone, and a good chunk of Android market, esp. games).

Furthermore, even that aside, it depends on the kinds of apps. The simple $0.99-priced ones, yeah, those are written from scratch. For more interesting stuff, the UI layer usually is, but they often use C/C++ libraries to implement various protocols and other functionality. To give a specific example: on Android, there are many apps that permit you to browse SMB/CIFS shares on the network. All of them do so by including Samba as a library.

Furthermore, even the ability to port .NET libraries is limited, since WP7 does not support so much stuff (e.g. no Reflection.Emit / DynamicMethod / Expression.Compile).

Some would say that the development environment for Windows Phone 7 is a feature which gives it an edge in the long run. It's surprisingly elegant compared to it's competitors.

Do you mean VS? Yes, I'd much prefer that to Eclipse to develop for my phone, but it boils down to the same thing - I'll take a slow, inconvenient IDE for a platform where I can implement what I want over a nice and sleek one where I can't.

Also, there are some things about WP right now that few people are aware of, but when you run into them, they can be a major deal breaker. Did you know that if you move to a different country, you'll need a new Live ID for your phone, with no ability to transfer any purchases (apps etc) from the old ID?

let the OS know that instead of paging this memory to disk when low on memory, it should instead just free it and let the application know it has done so

madvise with MADV_DONTNEED or equivalently, or VirtualAlloc with MEM_RESET under Windows. Discardable memory isn't as useful as you think though.

the OS really doesn't have any intelligent insight into the usefulness of a particular allocation to an application

But applications can tell the OS what pages are important. On Unix, applications can use posix_fadvise and madvise. On NT. each page has a priority attached to it, and pages with lower priority are evicted only after those with higher priority are gone.

Electronically doing this is not an option.

Nonsense. Historical redaction fiascos involving soft copies of documents occurred because people were too stupid to realize that simply adding a black rectangle to the document didn't remove the obscured text. Adobe Acrobat includes a set of redaction tools that replaces the redacted content with a placeholder such as the traditional black rectangle. Microsoft offers a free redaction add-in for Word that removes the redacted text from the document so that it can't be recovered. Redact-It sells a product that reliably redacts text from documents of various formats, including Outlook messages.

Yeah, but you can't download Windows source code nor most of the parts from MacOS, so Linux is a good case study.

Huh? Sure you can.

I am sorry by that logic MSDOS is the most reliable OS ever created, and there isn't a lot os support for that these days. More importantly, however, people aren't software; and 10 years is a very long time for a version of an operating system.

Computers, as we think of them, are less than a century old, and the hardware and software are far from stable or mature. Knives and masonry went through a very long period of primitive change before they got to anything like what was in use a few thousand years from now. So we should not be shocked that technology becomes outdated faster than other more established technologies?

Nor are your right when you claim that "Windows XP is the most reliable OS Microsoft created." Long lived sure, but both Vista and Windows 7 are better when it comes to reliability, stability, and security. And Windows 7 has a very good track record when it comes to installing it on older hardware. If you look at the minimum requirements for running iTunes, they match the minimums needed for Windows 7. So they can upgrade.

Which they should do, because Windows XP is no long available for mainstream support from Microsoft. So it is not outrageous for a software company to say they aren't going to support it either, if it doesn't affect a significant number of their customers.

So what was your point again?

PS: You misspelled mirror

It's a 0-year-old operating system. Microsoft is still selling it.

It's ten yers old dammit, you cannot say that I am 0 years old just because I am still alive after 41 years. It has reached its end of life and NO Microsoft are no longer selling it (that ended October 22 last year), some OEMs might but it is not exactly a future-proof sale...

You're also taking for granted that the current computer will be capable of running Windows 7 in the first place. It's not always going to be the case.

I think that's a fair assumption. You'd have a hard time finding a computer made in the last 10 years that didn't meet the minimum system requirements for Windows 7:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

GGP already has a copy of Windows.

Is it an OEM copy or a retail copy? As I understand this page, only a retail copy can lawfully be run on a Mac, as OEM copies are tied to the PC that they were sold with, and Apple has declined to sell copies of Windows with Mac computers.

Even an OEM copy of Windows 7 Ultimate doesn't cost that much.

According to this page, an OEM copy of Windows isn't intended to be sold to people who build their own PC for themselves to use. OEM copies are only for people who build PCs to sell.

You can buy an entire nettop for not that much more than that

I mentioned this once to a Mac salesman at Best Buy, and he told me that running Windows in a virtual machine on any current Mac would be far faster than running it on the bare hardware of a nettop.

No it's not completely useless at all. You could still write apps in VB even now - no one was forcing you to move and indeed there may be no point unless you need .NET features.

What do you mean, it's not completely useless? In one fell swoop VB.Net became an inferior language to C# with no benefits. I tend to view a comment like that about the whole sorry situation as either being apologist or simply not understanding how software and development tools continue to be supported. Yes, I'm sure you can still crack open a copy of VB6 every now and again but if you want to write with something that's supported and has support for new features and use your old code it's going to be excruciatingly painful. No two ways about it.

And Microsoft and 3rd parties have always provide reasonable migration tools if you did choose to move. MS still provide migration tools and advice even now. It's certainly not a hands-off migration and it requires substantial effort but it is possible and unless VB programmers were complete morons, the differences between the two environments are not insurmountable to figure out.

Yes, everyone knows about those 'migration' tools. They're crap and completely unnecessary. Why anyone should need to go through some arduous migration process and 'get advice' because they've invested in a product and in their code for many years I have absolutely no idea. Note that we're not talking about some minor incompatibilities and some porting here. It's a total break. Any vendor who gets you to do that needs to be dropped.

It wasn't sane at all. VB was a shoddy language with some pseudo OO aspects, a handful of not especially powerful helper methods and functions.

I'm afraid you can pontificate all you want but Visual Basic became popular for many business applications because it was specifically a rapid application development language and people were happy with the pseudo OO aspects because many people simply didn't need or want to be dragged into the whole pointless OO development brain damage life cycle. People who don't know that and tow the party line.......I doubt whether they've even used VB. That was a big reason why people used it.

It should have been no surprise to anyone that MS concluded it was so broken that it was better to implement a VB dialect over .NET and supply migration tools rather than continue polishing a turd.

I'm sure that's how you'd like things to be but history views it differently. A 'VB dialect over .Net' was not what anyone wanted. What people wanted was for their code to work with minimal effort. What happened was that a whole installed base of apps were cut off from future development overnight, few if any VB apps were re-written, no one was going to completely migrate and re-write millions of lines of code and as such VB.Net is nowhere near as popular as it's original incarnation. In fact, I don't even know why they called it VB.

The future of the Microsoft GUI is not with Windows but with SharePoint. SharePoint is now the true Heart of Microsoft while providing the richest developer experience for any sort of cleint GUI development. Please take the time to look at the SharePoint client object model this allows for development in Javascript, Silverlight or .NET for any real world client. SharePoint, apart from being the best server side backend available - fullstop Sharepoint leader in ECM Magic quadrant - a blog, This is about the only technology stack anyone scared about their career should be considering. And it is also the most sucessfully technology Microsoft has ever invested in, even back in 2008 with the previous version of SharePoint Bill Gates Says fastest growing software in Microsofts History Its sad to say, most Slashdot readers are NOT aware of this, and still caught up in the old ways of the world

Great. Completely useless to the existing code already written in VB, but nevermind. It also became clear to everyone that VB.Net was totally useless. C# is the primary language to develop with in .Net and if you can do the same thing in all .Net languages and they only differ via syntax then why not just use C#? Witness how ActivePerl and Python sank like bricks.

No it's not completely useless at all. You could still write apps in VB even now - no one was forcing you to move and indeed there may be no point unless you need .NET features. And Microsoft and 3rd parties have always provide reasonable migration tools if you did choose to move. MS still provide migration tools and advice even now. It's certainly not a hands-off migration and it requires substantial effort but it is possible and unless VB programmers were complete morons, the differences between the two environments are not insurmountable to figure out.

VB was completely sane to develop with, once it got somewhere near good enough around version 5/6. I know it's not fashionable amongst many, but a massive number of business applications were written with it and you didn't have to deal with a lot of time consuming stuff like memory management as you did with C++ or full blown object oriented concepts that you just didn't need most of the time. It was a very sensible thing to develop with for many applications. What Microsoft should have done was implemented and improved classic VB but implemented it on top of .Net so all you needed was a recompile as with previous versions.

It wasn't sane at all. VB was a shoddy language with some pseudo OO aspects, a handful of not especially powerful helper methods and functions. It's saving grace was not the language but the GUI on top which allowed forms to be slapped together, bound to data without writing much code and OCX / ActiveX controls that allowed the crappy functionality to be extended in useful ways. It should have been no surprise to anyone that MS concluded it was so broken that it was better to implement a VB dialect over .NET and supply migration tools rather than continue polishing a turd.

The only reason I have Silverlight installed is to be able to access Project Tuva. Feynman is as good a reason as it gets. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.

1. Microsoft has a patch that demotes IPv6 access for one day only. Not only does this throw a wrench in the worlds ability to gauge problems but it does nothing to solve the end users issue. Paradoxically simply disabling IPv6 is much better at this point as not breaking IPv4 is much more important to the forward progress of IPv6 deployment than a few end-users who can enable IPv6 later when they can get their issues fixed.

I think this is the support item you're referring to.

I did at first think the same way, but then I realised - that doesn't appear to be an automatically-pushed patch. It looks like a support article to which an admin can refer a user who is screaming "I don't care, make my internet work NOW." It's something that can be applied in a hurry to temporarily resolve the problem, but doesn't sweep it under the carpet because the underlying problem will still need to be dealt with in time. In that context, I think that this is a more responsible approach than telling users to disable IPv6 permanently.

You may already know this, but Autoruns is a great utility that will provide a quick review of the environment. It's basically a HiJackThis but more professional. It will even display based on which user hive you select.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902

Seriously, almost every computer sold between 2001 and 2010 came with a WinXP license

I thought OEM licenses weren't fully transferable. They appear to be restricted to a single PC according to this page.

Which operating system out there now has a system-wide, OS-level resume

Windows since Vista. As with Lion, this boils down to apps supporting it.

So far as I know, both Gnome and KDE on Linux also have something similar - again, subject to app support.

This isn't simply "restarting an app with some arguments". It's actually reloading the exact same objects in the exact same states as you had running when you quit the app.

journaling function?

I'm not sure what, precisely, you mean by this; but in Windows 7 you can right-click on a file and choose "Restore previous versions" from the context menu. This is configurable in Control Panel -> System -> System Protection, and is turned on by default for the system drive. I can't say for sure where this feature has appeared first; if I remember correctly, there was something like that even in XP, but buried very deep in advanced settings.

The big problem with those is that people who are supposed to know about them in order to use them (in the first case, developers; in the second, users) usually don't. The tech is there, but it was never properly marketed.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he was referring to Versions. But the way Lion implements them is *way* beyond anything else out there. You don't just restore to a previous version of a file (although you can), but when you enter the interface, the app you are in actually opens the previous versions live, right there, and you can interact directly with them. So you can search through for some specific version (instead of just going by a timestamp) and can even interact with an older version, allowing you to just restore a single paragraph, if that's all you want.

Actually, you can get Silverlight for OS/X easily enough directly from Microsoft. Intel Mac, OS/X 10.4.11 or better, Safari 3+ or Firefox 3+.

I'm not surprised it's not in the App Store yet, but I suspect it will be, as will MS Office for Mac. There's money to be made, and Microsoft be wantin' some o' dat. It's a lot more likely that Microsoft products will show up in the App Store than anything from Adobe, though. That's a pissfight you need a rain slicker for, not just boots. Let's see, what was that big yellow rubberized rain coat called again...

Which operating system out there now has a system-wide, OS-level resume

Windows since Vista. As with Lion, this boils down to apps supporting it.

So far as I know, both Gnome and KDE on Linux also have something similar - again, subject to app support.

journaling function?

I'm not sure what, precisely, you mean by this; but in Windows 7 you can right-click on a file and choose "Restore previous versions" from the context menu. This is configurable in Control Panel -> System -> System Protection, and is turned on by default for the system drive. I can't say for sure where this feature has appeared first; if I remember correctly, there was something like that even in XP, but buried very deep in advanced settings.

The big problem with those is that people who are supposed to know about them in order to use them (in the first case, developers; in the second, users) usually don't. The tech is there, but it was never properly marketed.

$30 for the OS is the same price as the current OS. The only difference is there is no family pack. This is because device on an Apple account is considered the same device for licensing purposes. If you have 10 macs on you account, then all 10 macs can get the Appstore Software. This is a really attractive feature of Apple software, and I am glad that all Appstore software is going to follow this model. One of my biggest issues with MS is having to buy MS WIndows at $200 a pop for every machine I own.

$200??? Windows 7 Home update version can be found for anywhere between $50 and $90.

If you aren't updating and are buying a new machine, the OEM Windows 7 Home pricing is very competitive with a similar cost range.

If you are building your own machine, then you can get Windows 7 Home for $80-$90.

If you are a student, you can get Windows 7 Professional for $30

Who said anything about easy access?!

NTFS has supported journelling for years and has Previous Versions feature (available from file Properties). Application resuming/restarting has been around since Vista and the OS has several hooks for registering for these events and messages. The fact that no-one implements it isn't relevant.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb525422(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb525423(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373651(VS.85).aspx

It will be the same in Lion. Unless the apps are rewritten to support these features they won't work. It doesn't just happen magically.

Who said anything about easy access?!

NTFS has supported journelling for years and has Previous Versions feature (available from file Properties). Application resuming/restarting has been around since Vista and the OS has several hooks for registering for these events and messages. The fact that no-one implements it isn't relevant.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb525422(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb525423(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373651(VS.85).aspx

It will be the same in Lion. Unless the apps are rewritten to support these features they won't work. It doesn't just happen magically.

Who said anything about easy access?!

NTFS has supported journelling for years and has Previous Versions feature (available from file Properties). Application resuming/restarting has been around since Vista and the OS has several hooks for registering for these events and messages. The fact that no-one implements it isn't relevant.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb525422(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb525423(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373651(VS.85).aspx

It will be the same in Lion. Unless the apps are rewritten to support these features they won't work. It doesn't just happen magically.

Really?? I found it unusable. Too many websites that would just not render at all.

Probably sites detecting that you were using IE and were trying to send garbage specific to older versions of IE. This is why feature detection instead of agent detection is appropriate.

Not to even mention that stupid graphic hardware accelerator. That feature either needs to detect your hardware, or not turn on my default.

It does. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2398082

from MicroCRAP.

Your customers will thank you.

Yours In Novosibirsk,
Kilgore T.

showing users how the ALT key will bring back their beloved file menu

you do know that using group policy you can turn on / off the menu bar in IE 8.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc985351.aspx

Turn on menu bar by default
Moving the menu bar above the navigation bar

run "gpedit.msc" to change these settings.

I want to recommend a curriculum from Alpha Omega that my two high school aged boys are currently using. The online curriculum blends real time quiz and test grading with teacher/parent graded items and they offer a wide range of subjects from K-12. The Computer Information System electives for the high school students address what is typically taught in the high schools in this area but Alpha Omega has chosen to base their classwork on OpenOffice which I thought was refreshing.

The direct links to the electives are:

Business Computer Information Systems 1-A
Business Computer Information Systems 1-B

If you are less interested in business computer information systems and more interested in plain computer science I would like to suggest
DreamSpark by Microsoft. It is a plan offered to students that gives them access to all the MS tools for one year. On package they tout as providing a great introduction to programming is their Kodu programming and game platform that allows students to quickly begin programming and playing the games they create.

Absolutely correct. Unfortunately to many reporters, even tech reporters, lack of money means technology dies. With (L)GPL and similar licenses, it's lack of use that really kills a project. As long as something is used widely, someone will develop it, or at least keep it running as new hardware comes out. Money helps, certainly, but it is not everything. For instance, Torvalds certainly is no billionare who pays others to make all of his software. Though, that is another option for creating software.

There are a lot of curriculum materials that are being used by home schoolers to teach programming and software development at the Microsoft Beginner Developer Learning Center Kid's Corner http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308754.aspx Everything from videos to whole courses for differing ages. You can also find some good curriculum based on Small Basic at http://smallbasic.com/ (see the wiki and tutorial) and http://www.teachingkidsprogramming.org/ I also recommend the CS Unplugged curriculum at http://csunplugged.org/

Ok, people spout it all the time because it *IS* seriously superior to Windows.
To put it another way, the Unix model isn't special, but the Windows model is especially bad.

Still just hand-waiving. Empty claims. What *is* it that is so superior?

I'll tell you what, take a fresh Windows machine, and connect it directly to the internet, and see how long it runs without getting infexted.

Since XP SP1 Windows TCP stack has been protected by default by the built-in firewall. You are a decade late. I can take any Vista or Windows 7 and hook it up - it will not get infected even though it has not been patched at all.

Even when you compare Windows 7 with a recent version of Mac OS or Linux, the result is similar, though not as drastic.

Citation needed

On the server side, there is Trusted BSD, SE Linux, and Mac OS has a similar sandbox system. windows? Nothing officially supported, last I checked.

When did you last check? 2002? Windows Service Hardening (see for instance http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.01.securitywatch.aspx) has been standard for services since Server 2003. Windows always (the NT line) had proper fine-grained tokens per process - unlike the bit-security in *nix and Linux which had to have SELinux or comparable solutions bolted on afterwards (you do realize that *nix security model is *still* centered around merely securing the file system, right?)

Service hardening uses the fact that each process has a full token and created a security identifier (SID) per service. The resulting privilege list is the union between the actual account the service executes under *and* the service account. Which means that hardened services by default are sandboxed - they can only use resources for which they are explicitly granted access - regardless of whether they run under the Local System account (root). All access to resources - even in-memory objects through handles - already checked the security token. This is just one example of the opposite of your claims: Windows security model was (and still is) more advanced and capable than *nix.

What you need apparmor and loadable security modules for was always possible in Windows.

On top of that, because you can *grant* privileges in Windows (unlike in *nix where you have to *be* root to access certain parts of the OS/kernel), more services can actually run with lower-privileges users. The accounts Local Service and Network Service which runs most services are actually "local users" in terms of privileges.

Personally, I don't run Windows auto-update anymore since Microsoft started to install unwanted Firefox add-ons that way. Instead, I rely exclusively on WSUS Offline Update, so far with good results.

Meanwhile, the rest of us moved on to versions of Windows that don't use browser-based update systems at all.

Personally, I don't run Windows auto-update anymore since Microsoft started to install unwanted Firefox add-ons that way. Instead, I rely exclusively on WSUS Offline Update, so far with good results.

Meanwhile, the rest of us moved on to versions of Windows that don't use browser-based update systems at all.

As a developer I mostly focus on MCPD's for whatever area I'm working on. .Net or Sharepoint. I then fill in MCTS's in the gaps for technologies like SQL Server and Biztalk.
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcts.aspx

For system engineers there are specific exams too.
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcitp.aspx

PMP is also a standard cert for management. I think most consultants/programmers should take this to understand the basics of how a project is put together.
http://www.pmi.org/Certification/Project-Management-Professional-PMP.aspx

As a developer I mostly focus on MCPD's for whatever area I'm working on. .Net or Sharepoint. I then fill in MCTS's in the gaps for technologies like SQL Server and Biztalk.
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcts.aspx

For system engineers there are specific exams too.
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcitp.aspx

PMP is also a standard cert for management. I think most consultants/programmers should take this to understand the basics of how a project is put together.
http://www.pmi.org/Certification/Project-Management-Professional-PMP.aspx

A hanging driver or non-responsive hardware is different than a crashing driver. If code crashes while in kernel mode, bad things happen.

That's true. Actually Windows has a strange history with display drivers. Initially NT based OSs (NT 3.1 and NT 3.5) were supposed to run almost all of the display driver in user mode with a small kernel mode component called a video miniport that could access hardware.

Of course that was too slow in practice so everyone mapped the hardware registers into user mode memory. E.g.

http://www.osronline.com/ddkx/graphics/vidintro_5d7r.htm

The display driver has direct access to I/O-mapped and memory-mapped video registers. This access allows a display driver to achieve high performance. For example, the driver might need to access video hardware registers to send line-drawing commands at high throughput.

Similarly, for graphics cards, such as the S3, many of the innermost loops in the graphics engine code require reads and writes of several video controller ports (for example, text output in graphics mode, bit block transfers, and line drawing). Rather than requiring the display driver to send an IOCTL to the miniport driver for each request, the display driver is permitted to access the video hardware directly.

But user mode that can access DMA registers can bring down the system.

NT 4.0 moved everything to kernel mode for performance with the memorably bogus justification that "if you crash the display driver the system is useless anyway". Then again if everyone just mapped both the framebuffer and the hardware registers to user mode memory anyway, the kernel mode part wasn't really doing anything.

XP was the same but added time outs for threads stuck in the driver. Vista moved most of the code back to user mode with a small KMD.

The architecture is clever than the NT 3.x video miniport though - see here

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/pri103_wh06.ppt

It all sounds quite sensible the way they describe it - most of the code is in user mode. It packs commands into packets and calls kernel mode code whose sole purpose is to add the packets into a DMA list. Graphics hardware then DMAs the commands and executes them. In the later versions of WDDM the display memory is virtualised. So theoretically you can stop buggy user mode code using the DMA engine to clobber memory it shouldn't be able to access.

Mind you I'm pretty sure that architectural changes like this are the reason for Vista's reputation for being a resource hog. OTOH Windows 7 seems OK, and it still has much the same architecture.

You don't necessarily need user mode drivers to recover from crashes. I've seen XP recover from a hang in driver - actually due to a badly seated connector in a laptop - by switching to the stock VGA driver and popping up a dialog box.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd349392(v=ws.10).aspx

Very impressive actually - XP must have a watchdog timer and the ability to switch back to the non accelerated Microsoft VGA driver when the accelerated and vendor provided driver gets stuck waiting for the hardware. What's interesting is that the resolution and bit depth of the display changes. So the GDI must be able to recover from this on the fly.

On Windiows - auto switching from IGP to defdicated graphics is done by at least the NVidia "Optimus" drivers.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10449383-1.html

No, it's a separate download. Fortunately, it's free.

Microsoft Security Essentials

All this really 'proves' is that 95% of the people who are smart enough to download a free AV program....

This is a malware removal tool for people who already think they have a virus. See the Microsoft Safety Scanner main page. The very first words on that page are Do you think your PC has a virus? Not to mention it expires 10 days after download. Clearly not an AV for 'smart' people.

....except it probably can't possibly be LESS than 5%

Considering MSS is for people who think they already have a virus, I think the only conclusion you can draw is that slashdot headlines are some of the most worthless pieces of shit on the internet (and that's saying soemthing)

Though it doesn't name it in TFA, I'm betting that this also has something to do with the Malicious Software Removal Tool that is a part of normal Windows updates. This is downloaded and installed and run by default if you let Windows Update do its thing without manually configuring which update to install and which to ignore.

If you had bothered to read just the first 2 paragraphs of the computerworld article linked to you would have noticed this:

Microsoft cited that statistic and others from data generated by its new Safety Scanner, a free malware scanning and scrubbing tool that re-launched May 12.

And if you follow the link to the actual software, Microsoft Safety Scanner, this is the introduction:

Microsoft Safety Scanner

Do you think your PC has a virus?

The Microsoft Safety Scanner is a free downloadable security tool that provides on-demand scanning and helps remove viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. It works with your existing antivirus software.

Note: The Microsoft Safety Scanner expires 10 days after being downloaded. To rerun a scan with the latest anti-malware definitions, download and run the Microsoft Safety Scanner again.

The Microsoft Safety Scanner is not a replacement for using an antivirus software program that provides ongoing protection.

So no, this is *not* based on reporting back from MSRT. This is reporting from a tool which is labelled as a diagnostics one-off tool (works for 10 days) for users who think that their computers *may* be infected. Drawing any conclusion about infection rates from a self selected population is stupid if not outright dishonest. Timothy who wrote the hit-paragraph about the time2pwn of an unpatched XP box is most certainly being deliberately dishonest as a slashdot editor should be able to display a minimum of common consideration.

As usual the headlines are skewed by editors trying to drum up clicks and thus advertising revenue. The *text* of the original article is actually fair to the point that this is a self-selection and never claims what is in the headline. The CW editor obviously took a little liberty on the title. The title used at the front page and on slashdot is even more skewed with no basis at all, not in the article and not in reality.

Though it doesn't name it in TFA, I'm betting that this also has something to do with the Malicious Software Removal Tool that is a part of normal Windows updates. This is downloaded and installed and run by default if you let Windows Update do its thing without manually configuring which update to install and which to ignore.

When this is run, and it detects known malware, it reports the infection and the full version (Major release, SP number, and updates that are installed) to Microsoft and attempts to remove it.

Since it's run in quiet mode at installation, I'm inclined to believe that this 5% number is pretty reliable on Windows 7 machines, somewhat reliable on Vista machines, and of marginal reliability in regards to XP boxes. Due to the nature of Windows Update settings on those OS', ranging from On by default in Vista and 7, to on if you made it so in XP.

As a sysadmin that helps look after over 10,000 desktops and close to 500 servers, I'm even more inclined to believe that 5% is accurate. Compared to what I was seeing 5 years ago, Malware is /much/ less common now. Despite the fact that it's craftier. Windows users, while still apt to click on everything that they're asked to click on, have a harder time wrecking their systems due to the security subsystem changes that have been made in Vista and 7.

Is Windows secure? Fuck no. Is it infinitely better than it was when XP came out? Unquestionably, and anyone that disagrees with that is too busy trolling Microsoft to see that they have made significant improvements.

The hilarity is that Windows now has a better CLI shell than any Linux or Unix too.

If you Linux fans don't believe me, then quickly, tell me how to get the following three pieces of information as a CSV formatted text file:

- The list of running processes
- The list of running system services
- The list of installed OS hotfixes/patches

For each one, make sure you capture at least a few columns of relevant or related information (e.g.: the pid of a process).

I can do all three with Windows PowerShell in seconds:

  Get-Process | Export-Csv 'processes.csv'
  Get-Service | Export-Csv 'services.csv'
  Get-HotFix | Export-Csv 'hotfixes.csv'

Don't like it so verbose? You can also use the shorter aliases instead, such as: "ps | epcsv procs.csv"

Yes, Linux is free and open, and that's a good thing. Yes, it scales well and runs on all sorts of unusual or purpose-built hardware. Yes, it can be very secure if managed properly. But no, it is absolutely not more usable than Windows.

Linux doesn't have the central control required for the kind of consistency of design that is required for user friendliness. The "ps" and "service" programs were written by different people in different ways, and are wildly different. The OS hotfix install/query commands aren't even consistent across contemporary Linux releases!

What Linux desperately needs is a set of guidelines for developers. For an example, take a look at Microsoft's guidelines for PowerShell snap-in developers.

Imagine for a second what a nirvana Linux CLI scripting would be if every Linux tool was written that consistently!

The group policy editor is included in XP pro. For XP home, you can follow the MS knowledge base instructions for this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555444

Agree completely, functional programming is a key enabling paradigm for the parallel world. I think thats why so many .NET developers are stoked with the PLINQ extensions... it just makes life so easy.

That's one of the features I put in my own Keyboard driver that I install on all my PCs. (Here if you want it.) Also, it has AltGr support for accented characters as well as ©®¼±÷ etc. It's really easy with the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.