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Black Screen of Death Not Microsoft's Fault
Barence follows up to the ongoing Black Screen of Death Saga by saying "Microsoft says reports of 'Black Screen of Death' errors aren't caused by Windows Updates, as claimed by a British security firm. The software giant claims November's Windows Updates didn't alter registry keys in the way described by Prevx, which said that the Microsoft Patches caused PCs to boot with just a black screen and a Windows Explorer window. Microsoft is now blaming the problem on malware. Prevx has issued a grovelling apology on its own blog."
Not really a surprise though. All the things I've read about Prevx come to just marketing their shit, somewhat like Symantec is. Not really a surprise they'll make shit statements like this and then just 'sorry' afterwards.
DId you rad the link? this is not being reported by very many people at all.
And in fact, it isn't their problem.
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What do you want them to replace it with? hundreds of .conf files scattered randomly about the filesystem, with no standard format?
After having used Linux and Windows and OS X systems for years, OS X does this right.
Yes there are "hundreds of conf files". But they are not scattered around, they are all in ~/Library/Preferences.
And they are usually named via the company name + app convention, like com.apple.mail.
And as opposed to being in "no standard format", they are all plist files (which are basically XML).
So it's easy to find where they are, easy to figure out what plist file belongs to what, and easy to edit or remove them as needed. If there is corruption (which I have never actually seen in practice) it would be limited to a single file - and an app encountering a preference file it could not read would simply replace it with a new default version. You would at worst lose a few custom settings for one app - and even then only as long as it took you to pull a backup of that single file out of Time Machine, since it's easy to restore the preferences for a single application from any backup.
However, I have to add that even if you went with a Linux system where the conf files are scattered all over in many different forms, I can say with confidence it is still 100% better than the nightmare of the registry. In practice the files are very easy to edit regardless of format, it's really only the question of the location that gets annoying.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe one day Microsoft will get rid of the Windows Registry. It's like putting port holes on the bottom of your boat. Sure, they let you see the fish, but sooner or later one is going to break and sink your ship.
The Windows registry has always been a bane of Windows use since it's inception.
Because Malware would clearly have trouble modifying the config files that would be used instead?
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The vast majority of malware, rootkits, spyware, viruses, etc that plague windows so severely are completely dependent on having administrator rights. If windows users would join the rest of the computing community in the present century and realize that they don't need administrator rights to check their email, they would see the infection rate drop astronomically.
The days of malware failing without admin rights are gone. The vast majority of malware today is coded to be "rights aware", and stay in the users profile if limited rights or UAC is present.
At work, I took away users' admin rights around 2000 and our infection rates dropped to near 0%. Since Vista and UAC became mainstream adware infections are actually up. It's easy to clean though since it remains confined to the users profile.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
When performing a Windows 2000 or XP install, it prompts you to name a user, which is an administrator account.
So it is designed by default to log you in as an administrator.
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On UNIX-like systems, files are not actually deleted from the disk until the last open file descriptor is closed. You can use this to get completely anonymous temporary files that are garbage-collected when the program abnormally terminates by opening a file and then unlinking it. The file still exists, but it isn't in any directory. When you run the rm command, it and all of its dependent libraries are opened and mapped into the process's address space. Deleting them just removes them from the directory that contains them, it does not return their space for reuse until later.
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