If there existed a secure, integrated/easy way to verify that this XPSP2 fileset came from Microsoft without tampering (publishing MD5 sums is the antithesis to easy to normal users), I would click on the.torrent or whatever without hesitation.
There is. Windows natively supports digital signatures for executables, and the XP2 installer is digitally signed by Microsoft. All you have to do is right-click the installer, go to Properties, then check the Digital Signatures tab.
Guarantees replacement of any locked laptop that's stolen
What you neglect to notice is that by the time the laptop is stolen, it's no longer locked since the lock's been forced. Ergo, it wasn't a "locked laptop that [was] stolen".
If you really want to "get it" see the Samba project. That cat and mouse game has been going on for the better part of a decade.... Mono can be blown up at any time simply with a patch.
That's pure FUD, and shows a complete lack of understand of the issues involved.
Samba has had problems with SMB because SMB was an undocumented protocol that changed as new features were added. Not because Microsoft was making changes just to screw them.
.NET, on the other hand, is a publically documented development platform. (One that's an ECMA standard, no less!) Even if Microsoft wanted to pull a fast one and try to change something to make Mono incompatible, their hands are tied since changes that would be required to break Mono compatibility would also break every application that runs on.NET.
I am sick of doing something in one app that brings a Windows machine to a crawl or worse, hang. Login to a Windows XP machine and it can be up to 30 seconds before the harddrive quiets down enough to get any work done.
This is because Windows saves the "Last Known Good" configuration after you successfully log in for the first time after a reboot. Successive logins are pretty much instantaneous. Solution: reboot less, remove unneeded programs from your Startup directory, factor the backup time into the boot time, go get coffee instead of clicking angrily at your mouse.
As for your hourglass pointer problems -- maybe you should check to make sure you're using Windows XP and not 98. An hourglass means the current application (not the entire system) is too busy to respond to you, and the hourglass/pointer combo means that the current application is processing your request in the background, but remains responsive to user commands.
and make performance claims in them without any sort of supporting evidence?
I thought it was particularly laughable that they just do some handwaving and declare ASP.NET slower than PHP because "there is a lot more code to run through to execute the same ASP page than... an equivalent PHP page".
It's total bullshit.
ASP.NET JITs to native code. The extra baggage of the extent of the ASP.NET Framework has zero performance penalty after the initial compilation stage. PHP is interpreted, every request unless you buy their commercial solution, which gives PHP the "$$" they lovingly placed under "Platform Price" for ASP.NET.
They also take the easy potshots at IIS as a security weakness (IIS6, a rewrite of IIS which has been out and in production for well over a year, has zero security vulnerabilities); and they just poo-poo the fact that Mono/Apache runs ASP.NET just as well, if not better, than Windows/IIS.
What good will the standard be if the company that owns 95% of the desktop starts shipping a.Net that deviates from the standard?
It would at least have to be backward compatible with the standard, or else existing applications won't run, and lack of proper standards never stopped the Samba project. The threat here is a good one to keep in mind, but also keep in mind that Microsoft has been touting.NET's conformance to the ECMA standard very heavily, they would take a major hit if they suddenly decided to start heading in the other direction.
What about the parts of.Net that are not covered by the the standard, and in fact have intellectual property encomberances?
Microsoft has never used one of their patents offensively to stop competition. Yes, I know that just because they haven't doesn't mean that they never will, but a combination of factors strongly suggest they won't: antitrust concerns, no matter how much you think they completely slinked through their trials, have put serious shackles on how they can stomp out potential competition; and more importantly their stock price would drop if they resorted to using patents in that manner, which is seen as the move of desperation.
And on the other hand, it can be argued that you're not exposing yourself to any less IP liability by using any other solution available. Microsoft, among others, have patents that technically cover just about every software you've ever written and ever will write..NET is really no different.
Why is.Net any better than Java for application development. Is its speed any better? Is Mono's speed any better than Java's?
.NET is better for many reasons: performance is one: MSIL was designed from the start to be JITted, and so it actually does so on par with real native code; flexibility is another: you can run and interoperate between many different languages under.NET, including Java itself; and community support will increasingly become another reason: Microsoft has totally committed itself to the platform, and for better or for worse, when the 900 pound gorilla moves, it makes waves.
I'm kind of surprised that AV companies don't use custom VMware-type environments
They do, but you can still tell whether your code is running in one of these environments if you're tricky enough. This is exactly the "sandbox" they're referring to.
There aren't really NEW applications that are really creative; perhaps the only thing that goes close would be USENET
Newspapers have been publishing the written word to people for hundreds of years. Telephone networks have had party lines since their conception. Usenet is just an extension of that idea; there's nothing "creative" about it, at least if you're judging it by the same standards as saying that Photoshop isn't "creative".
It could also be argued that there are no original ideas.
another beautiful woman approached me asking if I had any questions. I said that if I had any questions I'd find someone who "really" knows what they are talking about. Her reply: "Um, I'm the vice president."
First J. Edgar Hoover, and now Dick Cheney. What's this world coming to?:(
The "Fab 4" came to the states. I don't know how you missed it, it was all over the news. I never thought I'd see teenage girls so excited over manufacturing! Truly a historic day for the industry!
less spam isnt acceptible, the only answer is NONE
You're absolutely right. If they can't completely stop spam, they shouldn't even try! In fact, they should send more spam, since less spam isn't acceptable!
Europe is 3,837,000 Sq. Miles and the US is 3,537,438 Sq. Miles.
Europe is also fairly populated throughout, meaning that complete coverage is cost-efficient. The US has areas of moderate-to-heavy population surrounded by nothing but miles and miles and miles of farm fields.
Who'd want to take a train to the middle of North Dakota?
try SharpDevelop, a.NET IDE for Windows (only) that's GPL.
And once you've tried SharpDevelop, nobody will blame you for coming back to Visual Studio. Seriously, I give the SharpDevelop folks their props, and maybe in a year or so it'll be ready for prime time, but as of today, their IDE is slow, crash-prone, lacking in features (no COM/ActiveX interop), and it will eat your code if you make changes in certain parts of your source file that the UI designer doesn't agree with. It's also infuriatingly annoying that the source code view always scrolls back to the top of your file whenever you toggle between it and the designer!
I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools.
You'd be very hard pressed to find someone who uses.NET that would say it was "incomprehensible" and "poorly documented"..NET is not a rebranding of OLE or COM; it's a new object model that happens to, through a seperate interop process, have backward support for OLE and COM.
I guess that's proof that M$ programmers actually go on dates!
How else do they convince people to work for them? Given a choice between a life at Microsoft filled with women and champagne, or a life working on Free Software filled with Richard Stallman and Pabst Blue Ribbon, it's easy to tempt people to the dark side.
There is a fair bit of arrogance renaming someone else's measurements without using them yourself. What are you going to do next rename Bordeaux into Bordo so you can get your heads around other French concepts?
It's funny that you use the French as an example, as the French have a government body dedicated solely to coming up with French words to rename foreign inventions and concepts.
Microsoft needs to close this hole and improve the application install/uninstall process.
But part of Windows XP Logo testing is that a normal user who has permission to install software should be able to complete the installer to install the application for only their login.
You can't blame Microsoft because the application developers are lazy. That's like blaming Linus because Gnome and KDE use too much memory.
On the simple end, you can set a bitmap as the background of IE's toolbars. On the complex end, you can completely rewrite the UI (see MyIE2, Avant Browser, etc.).
And software plug-ins that block images.
There's no technical reason such a plugin doesn't exist today. IE exposes an interface that you can use to capture and modify/deny a request for everything it loads, including images. If you prefer going all out, IE itself can disable all images.
And making it possible to use the address bar to search from Google, *not* MSN.
Easily done. How else do you think all that spyware out there hijacks your browser's default search preferences?
Making it so that if I click on the back button while posting to Slashdot my post is still there.
Tools > Internet Options > Temporary Internet Files > Settings... > Change the value from "Automatically" to "Every time I start Internet Explorer".
You've got a couple valid points with your other items -- the ActiveX one in particular is already addressed in XP SP2, in fact.
There are languages that come with their own, specialised runtime with distinct advantages. Highly dynamic languages like Smalltalk or Ruby come to mind
The CLR does a pretty good job with dynamic languages, despite what the poor results from the programmers at ActiveState have said after their halfhearted attempts to get Perl running under it. IronPython (A Python compiler and runtime for.NET) is turning out to be faster than the original C Python implementation.
MSIL is just as suited to running a dynamic language as regular assembly is.
as well as languages like Ada or SPARK, where the compiler does all the checks and correctness proofs, so it's perfectly valid to compile everything down to low-level, unchecked machine code in the end
That's what the Microsoft.NET CLR does. MSIL was intended from the start to be able to JIT as efficiently as possible, so it was designed to be type-checked and provably safe, so the JIT can output optimal native code -- in most cases, it'll emit exactly the same code that a native C compiler would have output for the same routine. Microsoft's implementation never interprets the MSIL bytecode for execution. The Mono implementation only does if you use the debugging "mint" tool, or if you're unfortunate enough to be running on a platform they haven't created a JIT for yet.
This is a striking contrast to Java, whose bytecode was JITted only as an afterthought. The CLR can run Java code, but it can't optimize it that well due to the unavoidable overhead that the Java design enforces.
Using the CLR as the common base for everything would cost an order of magnitude of performance
You seriously owe it to yourself to look into C# if you think it's "an order of magnitude" slower than native code. You'll be very pleasantly surprised by its high performance. You might even have a hard time telling it apart from native code (Windows.Forms notwithstanding).
MS is hardly doomed.. in fact, one major REASON it's moving to a new set of API's is to avoid the commodity the Win32API is becoming!
The main reason Microsoft is pushing away from the Win32 API is not because it's a commodity (even WINE still doesn't have it right). The reason is that the Win32 API has years upon years of bad design and accumulated cruft, and is difficult to secure. Microsoft, while building their market share, had to cater to everybody -- even at the expense of design coherence. (For example: "Yes, Win95 can run Quake!" was a necessity even though it required massive design faults to make it happen.)
Now that Microsoft is in a solid position of owning the desktop market, they've successfully transitioned over to a stable, robust kernel design; now they can start ditching Win32 and start sheperding developers to a completely different, well-designed API. See the.NET Framework for phase one of the plan, which ditches the legacy dependancy on unverifable languages like C. Phase two is WinFX/Avalon, which ditches the legacy dependancy on the Windows UI fundamentals.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds eerily like a "cheap knockoff" of Dashboard to me.....
Where exactly do you think the author of Dashboard got the data-consolidation sidebar idea from?
If there existed a secure, integrated/easy way to verify that this XPSP2 fileset came from Microsoft without tampering (publishing MD5 sums is the antithesis to easy to normal users), I would click on the .torrent or whatever without hesitation.
There is. Windows natively supports digital signatures for executables, and the XP2 installer is digitally signed by Microsoft. All you have to do is right-click the installer, go to Properties, then check the Digital Signatures tab.
Guarantees replacement of any locked laptop that's stolen
What you neglect to notice is that by the time the laptop is stolen, it's no longer locked since the lock's been forced. Ergo, it wasn't a "locked laptop that [was] stolen".
don't know if builds earlier than 2162 fix it though
No crash in a fully patched IE from XP SP1.
If you really want to "get it" see the Samba project. That cat and mouse game has been going on for the better part of a decade. ... Mono can be blown up at any time simply with a patch.
.NET, on the other hand, is a publically documented development platform. (One that's an ECMA standard, no less!) Even if Microsoft wanted to pull a fast one and try to change something to make Mono incompatible, their hands are tied since changes that would be required to break Mono compatibility would also break every application that runs on .NET.
That's pure FUD, and shows a complete lack of understand of the issues involved.
Samba has had problems with SMB because SMB was an undocumented protocol that changed as new features were added. Not because Microsoft was making changes just to screw them.
Seriously, get a clue.
I am sick of doing something in one app that brings a Windows machine to a crawl or worse, hang. Login to a Windows XP machine and it can be up to 30 seconds before the harddrive quiets down enough to get any work done.
This is because Windows saves the "Last Known Good" configuration after you successfully log in for the first time after a reboot. Successive logins are pretty much instantaneous. Solution: reboot less, remove unneeded programs from your Startup directory, factor the backup time into the boot time, go get coffee instead of clicking angrily at your mouse.
As for your hourglass pointer problems -- maybe you should check to make sure you're using Windows XP and not 98. An hourglass means the current application (not the entire system) is too busy to respond to you, and the hourglass/pointer combo means that the current application is processing your request in the background, but remains responsive to user commands.
and make performance claims in them without any sort of supporting evidence?
... an equivalent PHP page".
I thought it was particularly laughable that they just do some handwaving and declare ASP.NET slower than PHP because "there is a lot more code to run through to execute the same ASP page than
It's total bullshit.
ASP.NET JITs to native code. The extra baggage of the extent of the ASP.NET Framework has zero performance penalty after the initial compilation stage. PHP is interpreted, every request unless you buy their commercial solution, which gives PHP the "$$" they lovingly placed under "Platform Price" for ASP.NET.
They also take the easy potshots at IIS as a security weakness (IIS6, a rewrite of IIS which has been out and in production for well over a year, has zero security vulnerabilities); and they just poo-poo the fact that Mono/Apache runs ASP.NET just as well, if not better, than Windows/IIS.
What good will the standard be if the company that owns 95% of the desktop starts shipping a .Net that deviates from the standard?
.NET's conformance to the ECMA standard very heavily, they would take a major hit if they suddenly decided to start heading in the other direction.
.Net that are not covered by the the standard, and in fact have intellectual property encomberances?
.NET is really no different.
.Net any better than Java for application development. Is its speed any better? Is Mono's speed any better than Java's?
.NET is better for many reasons: performance is one: MSIL was designed from the start to be JITted, and so it actually does so on par with real native code; flexibility is another: you can run and interoperate between many different languages under .NET, including Java itself; and community support will increasingly become another reason: Microsoft has totally committed itself to the platform, and for better or for worse, when the 900 pound gorilla moves, it makes waves.
It would at least have to be backward compatible with the standard, or else existing applications won't run, and lack of proper standards never stopped the Samba project. The threat here is a good one to keep in mind, but also keep in mind that Microsoft has been touting
What about the parts of
Microsoft has never used one of their patents offensively to stop competition. Yes, I know that just because they haven't doesn't mean that they never will, but a combination of factors strongly suggest they won't: antitrust concerns, no matter how much you think they completely slinked through their trials, have put serious shackles on how they can stomp out potential competition; and more importantly their stock price would drop if they resorted to using patents in that manner, which is seen as the move of desperation.
And on the other hand, it can be argued that you're not exposing yourself to any less IP liability by using any other solution available. Microsoft, among others, have patents that technically cover just about every software you've ever written and ever will write.
Why is
I'm kind of surprised that AV companies don't use custom VMware-type environments
They do, but you can still tell whether your code is running in one of these environments if you're tricky enough. This is exactly the "sandbox" they're referring to.
There aren't really NEW applications that are really creative; perhaps the only thing that goes close would be USENET
Newspapers have been publishing the written word to people for hundreds of years. Telephone networks have had party lines since their conception. Usenet is just an extension of that idea; there's nothing "creative" about it, at least if you're judging it by the same standards as saying that Photoshop isn't "creative".
It could also be argued that there are no original ideas.
There is an auto-update for Firefox, take a look at Options > Advanced > Software Updates.
:(
And it's constantly telling me to upgrade Firefox 0.9.2 to Firefox 0.9
another beautiful woman approached me asking if I had any questions. I said that if I had any questions I'd find someone who "really" knows what they are talking about. Her reply: "Um, I'm the vice president."
:(
First J. Edgar Hoover, and now Dick Cheney. What's this world coming to?
The "Fab 4" came to the states. I don't know how you missed it, it was all over the news. I never thought I'd see teenage girls so excited over manufacturing! Truly a historic day for the industry!
But wait, were you telnetting *from* 25?
You do realize you can block traffic based on the target port, not just the source port, right?
less spam isnt acceptible, the only answer is NONE
You're absolutely right. If they can't completely stop spam, they shouldn't even try! In fact, they should send more spam, since less spam isn't acceptable!
Europe is 3,837,000 Sq. Miles and the US is 3,537,438 Sq. Miles.
Europe is also fairly populated throughout, meaning that complete coverage is cost-efficient. The US has areas of moderate-to-heavy population surrounded by nothing but miles and miles and miles of farm fields.
Who'd want to take a train to the middle of North Dakota?
try SharpDevelop, a .NET IDE for Windows (only) that's GPL.
And once you've tried SharpDevelop, nobody will blame you for coming back to Visual Studio. Seriously, I give the SharpDevelop folks their props, and maybe in a year or so it'll be ready for prime time, but as of today, their IDE is slow, crash-prone, lacking in features (no COM/ActiveX interop), and it will eat your code if you make changes in certain parts of your source file that the UI designer doesn't agree with. It's also infuriatingly annoying that the source code view always scrolls back to the top of your file whenever you toggle between it and the designer!
I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools.
.NET that would say it was "incomprehensible" and "poorly documented". .NET is not a rebranding of OLE or COM; it's a new object model that happens to, through a seperate interop process, have backward support for OLE and COM.
You'd be very hard pressed to find someone who uses
Keep those 0-day exploits coming, boys.
It's not a 0-day exploit. If you've installed MS04-013, which was released in April, then you're not vulnerable to this.
I guess that's proof that M$ programmers actually go on dates!
How else do they convince people to work for them? Given a choice between a life at Microsoft filled with women and champagne, or a life working on Free Software filled with Richard Stallman and Pabst Blue Ribbon, it's easy to tempt people to the dark side.
There is a fair bit of arrogance renaming someone else's measurements without using them yourself. What are you going to do next rename Bordeaux into Bordo so you can get your heads around other French concepts?
It's funny that you use the French as an example, as the French have a government body dedicated solely to coming up with French words to rename foreign inventions and concepts.
Microsoft needs to close this hole and improve the application install/uninstall process.
But part of Windows XP Logo testing is that a normal user who has permission to install software should be able to complete the installer to install the application for only their login.
You can't blame Microsoft because the application developers are lazy. That's like blaming Linus because Gnome and KDE use too much memory.
And themes.
On the simple end, you can set a bitmap as the background of IE's toolbars. On the complex end, you can completely rewrite the UI (see MyIE2, Avant Browser, etc.).
And software plug-ins that block images.
There's no technical reason such a plugin doesn't exist today. IE exposes an interface that you can use to capture and modify/deny a request for everything it loads, including images. If you prefer going all out, IE itself can disable all images.
And making it possible to use the address bar to search from Google, *not* MSN.
Easily done. How else do you think all that spyware out there hijacks your browser's default search preferences?
Making it so that if I click on the back button while posting to Slashdot my post is still there.
Tools > Internet Options > Temporary Internet Files > Settings... > Change the value from "Automatically" to "Every time I start Internet Explorer".
You've got a couple valid points with your other items -- the ActiveX one in particular is already addressed in XP SP2, in fact.
There are languages that come with their own, specialised runtime with distinct advantages. Highly dynamic languages like Smalltalk or Ruby come to mind
.NET) is turning out to be faster than the original C Python implementation.
The CLR does a pretty good job with dynamic languages, despite what the poor results from the programmers at ActiveState have said after their halfhearted attempts to get Perl running under it. IronPython (A Python compiler and runtime for
MSIL is just as suited to running a dynamic language as regular assembly is.
as well as languages like Ada or SPARK, where the compiler does all the checks and correctness proofs, so it's perfectly valid to compile everything down to low-level, unchecked machine code in the end
That's what the Microsoft.NET CLR does. MSIL was intended from the start to be able to JIT as efficiently as possible, so it was designed to be type-checked and provably safe, so the JIT can output optimal native code -- in most cases, it'll emit exactly the same code that a native C compiler would have output for the same routine. Microsoft's implementation never interprets the MSIL bytecode for execution. The Mono implementation only does if you use the debugging "mint" tool, or if you're unfortunate enough to be running on a platform they haven't created a JIT for yet.
This is a striking contrast to Java, whose bytecode was JITted only as an afterthought. The CLR can run Java code, but it can't optimize it that well due to the unavoidable overhead that the Java design enforces.
Using the CLR as the common base for everything would cost an order of magnitude of performance
You seriously owe it to yourself to look into C# if you think it's "an order of magnitude" slower than native code. You'll be very pleasantly surprised by its high performance. You might even have a hard time telling it apart from native code (Windows.Forms notwithstanding).
MS is hardly doomed .. in fact, one major REASON it's moving to a new set of API's is to avoid the commodity the Win32API is becoming!
.NET Framework for phase one of the plan, which ditches the legacy dependancy on unverifable languages like C. Phase two is WinFX/Avalon, which ditches the legacy dependancy on the Windows UI fundamentals.
The main reason Microsoft is pushing away from the Win32 API is not because it's a commodity (even WINE still doesn't have it right). The reason is that the Win32 API has years upon years of bad design and accumulated cruft, and is difficult to secure. Microsoft, while building their market share, had to cater to everybody -- even at the expense of design coherence. (For example: "Yes, Win95 can run Quake!" was a necessity even though it required massive design faults to make it happen.)
Now that Microsoft is in a solid position of owning the desktop market, they've successfully transitioned over to a stable, robust kernel design; now they can start ditching Win32 and start sheperding developers to a completely different, well-designed API. See the