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Vista Post-SP2 Is the Safest OS On the Planet
pkluss noted Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft making the proclamation that "Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pwn2own-mac-hack,2254-4.html
'The NX bit is very powerful.When used properly, it ensures that user-supplied code cannot be executed in the process during exploitation. Researchers (and hackers) have struggled with ways around this protection. ASLR is also very tough to defeat. This is the way the process randomizes the location of code in a process. Between these two hurdles, no one knows how to execute arbitrary code in Firefox or IE 8 in Vista right now. For the record, Leopard has neither of these features, at least implemented effectively. In the exploit I won Pwn2Own with, I knew right where my shellcode was located and I knew it would execute on the heap for me.'
And this was with Vista SP1. No one knows how to exploit Firefox or IE on Vista due to NX and ASLR.
This seems to be a pretty powerful statement, from someone who would stand a chance of knowing.
My only question is, where is Vista SP2? Last I checked, it was not yet released.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Flight Simulator is now grounded.
People are always saying this on here (from NT 4.0 onwards) but how does the average user determine whether their hardware is faulty, their drivers are buggy or their OS is just a load of bloated crap? Vista is ok but I don't see any specific advantage over XP Home apart from being able to alter ACLs with a GUI instead of CACLS, and despite what apologists say, it is slower than XP.
Would you rather that RAM sit there doing nothing? Windows Vista has many features that utilize RAM to its fullest extent. Any free RAM on my system is RAM that is sitting on its lazy ass doing nothing. Windows Vista is actually smart enough to user it (Super Prefetch comes to mind) when my applications are not.
I'm actually typing this in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista Business SP1 32-bit on a Pentium M 1.4 GHz with 1 GB RAM, and it's actually quite snappy.
Windows Update does not use IE and hasn't since XP. You need to get information that isn't many years out of date.
Windows Update does not use IE and hasn't since XP. You need to get information that isn't many years out of date.
Where are my mod points when I need them? Mod parent up informative please!
He is correct.. Vista and beyond use an interface in the Control Panel which is vastly superior to the IE Windows Update. Read up here: Windows Update
The pRNG was disabled in the openssl library, thus compromising any system using keys generated by that library. That is a major, major hole and has nothing to do with sshd initialization scripts (where did you get that from anyway?)
Windows XP was not a continuation of the 95-98-98SE-ME hybrid 16/32bit product line. It is a continuation of Windows NT->2K line, which was 32-bit pure and already very stable in comparison. Apples and oranges.
And XP is slower than 2k.
And 2k is slower than NT4.
More functionality means less performance. Doesn't matter much
Not to feed the troll, but really? In my experience new, feature-rich releases of OSs tend to be much faster than their predecessor. My experience is mostly with OS X and a bit of Ubuntu. OS X in particular has gotten snappier and more featureful with each point release.
Why is it Vista's fault if the hardware manufacturer releases crappy drivers
It's not. If you buy the machine from - say Dell - and it is flaky due to some hardware or driver issue, then Vista shouldn't be blamed - Dell should.
However, that is a very naive view of human nature. In fact, MS plasters their branding all over the place within Vista - so no wonder you are much more likely to be aware that it is a Windows machine rather than a Dell machine. If they wanted to keep a premium image they needed to pursue a different marketing strategy. Their reputation for instability is a marketing problem, not a technical one.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And for those of us who want something usable there's X-Plane. Nothing against Flightgear but last time I checked it still needed a fair bit of work.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
I think you don't properly understand how SuperFetch works. It caches in RAM frequently used program data by pre-emptively loading commonly used applications and program data into unused RAM in anticipation of the user intending to run these applications. If he/she does, load times can be greatly reduced.
However, note that the SuperFetch service runs at a very low priority, and will yield system resources to effectively any other process that requests system resources. Further, in the event of a program requesting memory that isn't available, SuperFetch will just dump from its cache a large enough portion of memory to accomodate the program. By your own admission, and correctly, RAM is _FAST_. The process of re-allocating a segment of memory from SuperFetch to your new program is negligible. SuperFetch will also never page to disk memory in use by an actually running program in order to fill the cache. I'm not saying that running programs won't be cached to disk, but it isn't SuperFetch that is the culprit. There are many other mechanisms in place that can result in this occuring, and SuperFetch isn't the only code on the system that plays around with the cache.
Suffice to say, if you dislike SuperFetch, it's easy to disable it. Just go into Windows Services and change the SuperFetch service startup from Automatic to Disabled, and stop the service. You've now disabled the aggressive pre-caching, no harder than any other tweak for any other operating system.