Maybe he doesn't know this, but DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) uses this same method for inter-process communication. Its not used much anymore since it is rather slow, but some apps still do it for backwards compatibility. As with any communication mechanism, you have to check for buffer-overrun exploits as well as a multitude of other exploit areas.
actually, there are a lot of legacy business apps out there, most have DDE features because it was a really cool thing to implement. Eliminating DDE would really piss people off.
Eliminating all buffer overflows from messages passed between windows would be a massive undertaking (that would have to be done by each application's developer/vendor!)
the author of the article is right by pointing out that this is a problem that will not soon go away... though he probably made it worse by drawing attention to it:-)
No "ID Number" will lessen the likelyhood of identity theft. If the ID# gets used as an access mechanism to other stuff (money, services, healthcare) there will be really painful consequences when your ID (or private info associated with it for password purposes) gets loose...
bleh. another good thing FirstName-MiddleInitial-LastName has done for us- our last presidential election - Florida (i know, let it go)
John S. Smith commits a felony. about a dozen people named John S. Smith show up to vote but are not allowed because the felon lists include the name John S. Smith, and the voters who turned up couldnt prove they were'nt THAT John S Smith:-)
ironically, had we used a national ID system (and if these people had ID cards) it may have gone differently:-)
Regardless, though, mandatory ID cards encourage some nasty behavior on the part of the government- though its not like it would be a big change. you already have to have an ID card if you, say, get in your car, or want to travel at an airport.
And globalization. Globalization, wonderfully promising as it is, kills 3rd world agriculture (which is pretty much everyone there.) Remember, they're competing with heavily subsidized american agribusiness (See delfstrom's comment).
We subsidize our food prices because it keeps food prices stable for us. We can afford to pay these subsidies because we are orders of magnitude wealthier than 3rd world countries...
The commies claim we accumulate this wealth on the backs of cheap labor from the same 3rd world countries, who are kept impoverished by not being able to compete with our subsidized agribusiness...
If you're a big company and you develop software, make sure you include a security mechanism that is rendered useless if reverse engineered (i.e., a shitty security mechanism). That way your technology is safe from reverse engineering.
If MS turns to legal action to fight off REAL's using Window Media, then MS looks evil, and REAL can draw more attention to their OPEN SOURCE efforts. Thus the open source thing is just a tool for REAL to take the moral high ground in their fight against MS:-)
This might be great, you're right. But it won't be: this is Real we are talking about, the pioneer of the clunky-as-all-hell media applications that do nothing for anyone but barely stream audio and crash when the juices start flowing
You might be right, but this is also Real, who market quite aggressively, whose products obnoxiously make themselves the default player for everything, and who sign agreements with lots of content providers for things that streaming actually IS used for a lot (sports and news).
However, even a "community" license will improve the interoperability of their products, however good or bad or annoying they are.
Article says they did a "clean room" implementation, which i guess shows that they didnt just copy MS's work.
As for DMCA... even if the MS protocol has security features, making software to emulates the protocol isnt necessarily the same as making software that would defeat its security features... EXCEPT that releasing their source would defeat the SECURITY BY OBSCURITY method! I wonder if the DMCA covers this:-)
I can't say enough for the power of Windows 98 on low-end client workstations.
I dunno, man. It may be that a low-end workstation won't run win2k well, but there are soooo many applications for win9x that crash... i mean there just isnt anything else to say. it can really piss you off : ) but i guess everyone knows this
Not so- palladium might just be a ruse to persuade corporate types to order massive upgrades. With Win2K, workstation/server OS's have finally gotten quite decently stable, usable, and friendly to configure, backup etc. Since there isnt that much reason to upgrade from 2K to XP, MS needs a 'killer feature' to promote adoption of the next generation OS -- this would be palladium. Nice side effect- eliminates competition!
Re:Now begins the hardest part...
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
·
· Score: 1
Adoption strategy: * make sure everyone has the winamp plugin that plays ogg. * get windows media player to support it (is it possible to just make a dll for that??) * put ogg on P2P:-)
Man, what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where these yahoo's go into Redmond and tell Microsoft they owe them a royalty for every version of IE, Office, and any other program that can read JPG's. They'll be lucky if Ballmer doesn't have their company bought or sued into the ground by the time they get their parking validated.
Hmmm, actually it might kinda suck if MS bought them
Well, there was the GIF patent and it took what, around 5 years to get decent PNG support in most apps? (but it finally works well in web browsers, office progs, photoshoppish progs, etc)
If JPEG goes the way of gif, perhaps people will realize its in their benefit to stay w/ and open format, and the next major release of everything will have whatever the "open" alternative is... but realistically its probably gonna take another 5 years _
Most of the people seemed to be artsy yuppies, your typical Mac user.
Actually, that's a really smart thing to do. The switchover poster-folks (who are plastered ALL OVER manhattan, by the way), these people are clearly non-technical, and say that their computer's work.
Also, I think Apple threw in a windows LAN admin in one of their commercials, for variety i guess.
I think this set of ads is possibly the most genius AD that apple ever made (PC users dont really want their computers to be "different" anymore, they just want them to work. nice simple message!) _
So Toast and Jam users have this guy's assurance, that desptite what the EULA says, they're gonna be nice and won't pull any DRM or auto-updates or any funny stuff on unsuspecting users.
Not at all reassuring, but whatever. I actually liked easy CD creator for windows, and i've used Toast for macs- its a great tool, and will continue to be one for making CDs full of files.
My recommendation is to continue to use Toast / Jam / CD creator until you can no longer make audio CDs from mp3's, and if / when that day comes, switch to another program. end of story.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe he doesn't know this, but DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) uses this same method for inter-process communication. Its not used much anymore since it is rather slow, but some apps still do it for backwards compatibility. As with any communication mechanism, you have to check for buffer-overrun exploits as well as a multitude of other exploit areas.
actually, there are a lot of legacy business apps out there, most have DDE features because it was a really cool thing to implement. Eliminating DDE would really piss people off.
Eliminating all buffer overflows from messages passed between windows would be a massive undertaking (that would have to be done by each application's developer/vendor!)
the author of the article is right by pointing out that this is a problem that will not soon go away... though he probably made it worse by drawing attention to it :-)
No "ID Number" will lessen the likelyhood of identity theft. If the ID# gets used as an access mechanism to other stuff (money, services, healthcare) there will be really painful consequences when your ID (or private info associated with it for password purposes) gets loose...
Nevermind all the "minority-report" style stuff
bleh. another good thing FirstName-MiddleInitial-LastName has done for us- our last presidential election - Florida (i know, let it go)
:-)
:-)
John S. Smith commits a felony. about a dozen people named John S. Smith show up to vote but are not allowed because the felon lists include the name John S. Smith, and the voters who turned up couldnt prove they were'nt THAT John S Smith
ironically, had we used a national ID system (and if these people had ID cards) it may have gone differently
Regardless, though, mandatory ID cards encourage some nasty behavior on the part of the government- though its not like it would be a big change. you already have to have an ID card if you, say, get in your car, or want to travel at an airport.
-pete
Yess. The issue is economics.
And globalization. Globalization, wonderfully promising as it is, kills 3rd world agriculture (which is pretty much everyone there.) Remember, they're competing with heavily subsidized american agribusiness (See delfstrom's comment).
We subsidize our food prices because it keeps food prices stable for us. We can afford to pay these subsidies because we are orders of magnitude wealthier than 3rd world countries...
The commies claim we accumulate this wealth on the backs of cheap labor from the same 3rd world countries, who are kept impoverished by not being able to compete with our subsidized agribusiness...
How do our businesses hurt them? read delfstrom's comment
neato line of thinking, shows why politicians have incentive to act in entertainment co's favor.
the patent claims would invalidate the GPL license :-(
Lesson Learned here:
If you're a big company and you develop software, make sure you include a security mechanism that is rendered useless if reverse engineered (i.e., a shitty security mechanism). That way your technology is safe from reverse engineering.
If MS turns to legal action to fight off REAL's using Window Media, then MS looks evil, and REAL can draw more attention to their OPEN SOURCE efforts. Thus the open source thing is just a tool for REAL to take the moral high ground in their fight against MS :-)
This might be great, you're right. But it won't be: this is Real we are talking about, the pioneer of the clunky-as-all-hell media applications that do nothing for anyone but barely stream audio and crash when the juices start flowing
You might be right, but this is also Real, who market quite aggressively, whose products obnoxiously make themselves the default player for everything, and who sign agreements with lots of content providers for things that streaming actually IS used for a lot (sports and news).
However, even a "community" license will improve the interoperability of their products, however good or bad or annoying they are.
Article says they did a "clean room" implementation, which i guess shows that they didnt just copy MS's work.
:-)
As for DMCA... even if the MS protocol has security features, making software to emulates the protocol isnt necessarily the same as making software that would defeat its security features... EXCEPT that releasing their source would defeat the SECURITY BY OBSCURITY method! I wonder if the DMCA covers this
I can't say enough for the power of Windows 98 on low-end client workstations.
I dunno, man. It may be that a low-end workstation won't run win2k well, but there are soooo many applications for win9x that crash... i mean there just isnt anything else to say. it can really piss you off : ) but i guess everyone knows this
Flawed Microsoft Strategy?
Not so- palladium might just be a ruse to persuade corporate types to order massive upgrades. With Win2K, workstation/server OS's have finally gotten quite decently stable, usable, and friendly to configure, backup etc. Since there isnt that much reason to upgrade from 2K to XP, MS needs a 'killer feature' to promote adoption of the next generation OS -- this would be palladium. Nice side effect- eliminates competition!
Adoption strategy: :-)
* make sure everyone has the winamp plugin that plays ogg.
* get windows media player to support it (is it possible to just make a dll for that??)
* put ogg on P2P
the unisys patent expired
Hmmm, actually it might kinda suck if MS bought them
Ahem.
(1) Snow.
(2) 5 hours from any major city.
Still, cost of living in central NY is pretty reasonable.
Actually, come to think of it, all it takes for overnight adoption of an alternative to JPEG is for microsoft to offer support for something else :-)
Well, there was the GIF patent and it took what, around 5 years to get decent PNG support in most apps? (but it finally works well in web browsers, office progs, photoshoppish progs, etc)
If JPEG goes the way of gif, perhaps people will realize its in their benefit to stay w/ and open format, and the next major release of everything will have whatever the "open" alternative is... but realistically its probably gonna take another 5 years
_
Most of the people seemed to be artsy yuppies, your typical Mac user.
Actually, that's a really smart thing to do. The switchover poster-folks (who are plastered ALL OVER manhattan, by the way), these people are clearly non-technical, and say that their computer's work.
Also, I think Apple threw in a windows LAN admin in one of their commercials, for variety i guess.
I think this set of ads is possibly the most genius AD that apple ever made (PC users dont really want their computers to be "different" anymore, they just want them to work. nice simple message!)
_
However, if they could convince Dell to sell Dell branded Apple machines, they'd gain a ton of marketshare.
I'm sure this would do great things for Dell's relationship with Microsoft, which factors bigtime into the cost of Dell's microsoft PC sales
yeah, except OS X is a significant step above OS 9, whereas XP is not fundamentally different from win 2K
(though XP has some nifty/useful features, e.g. smarter view of folders full of mp3s...)
pattern matching in CS101? I thought it was a somewhat advanced topic :-)
I think the patent is using pattern matching specifically to selectively route packets based on a set of rules
hhhhmmmmm
So Toast and Jam users have this guy's assurance, that desptite what the EULA says, they're gonna be nice and won't pull any DRM or auto-updates or any funny stuff on unsuspecting users.
Not at all reassuring, but whatever. I actually liked easy CD creator for windows, and i've used Toast for macs- its a great tool, and will continue to be one for making CDs full of files.
My recommendation is to continue to use Toast / Jam / CD creator until you can no longer make audio CDs from mp3's, and if / when that day comes, switch to another program. end of story.
The wife looks good in an OpenBSD t-shirt...
:-)
hehe she must really love you then
her friends probably make fun of her
wow, thats brilliant. is the federal gov't paying for this insurance?
tax dollars at work, i guess