I have not used FBSD for many years seriously. But from what I saw in a VM is that PC-BSD is FreeBSD but with more fluff added on like a cute installation program and premade setup desktop. You can even run./sysinstall (the FreeBSD and setup program) to add additional dists.
For those who do not run FreeBSD, the dists are huge repositories with make makefiles that FreeBSD will read and then fetch automatically from the internet, compile, and install. It is a port of the ports in/usr/share/ports if I remember correctly as I have not run it since 2005.
FreeBSD is a cool unix that encourages make files and is a very easy unix to work with, with tons of/usr/share/samples of script files to do crazy stuff and great config files/etc that have things like #to do this cool thing uncomment this line.
Of course that might be gone now as the last version I ran seriously was FreeBSD 4.12 as the BSD project went to shit and I switched back to Windows sigh.
If you can't think of a use Hairy, then it is just a toy to tinker with compared to Linux these days. There was a cool NAS program that ran on FreeBSD that turned a used PC into a BSD home media server and DVR, but that kernel now uses Linux due to better device support.
Funny, as I heard of BSD back in the 1990s when I was in highschool and wanted to run a BBS, but not Linux. I heard of Linux years later as BSD OS was advertised everywhere. I kind of wished FreeBSD won
Employees hate them but you have to show you are providing value and to CYA so the employer can make a case to fire you. Otherwise you can claim racism.
Every help desk or desktop support position I have worked on looked at metric. You had to show you could do 9 hours of work in 8 hours or you are fired. My exwife was a teacher and she got fired because she couldn't raise test scores enough. Accountants are measured in how much money they are saved. CEOs are measured in how much they raise their share price for Wall Street etc.
THis is life folks and I would bow to anyone who does not have to work in these conditions as I never have. Everyone and I mean everyone uses them to force more output and to avoid lawsuits. We hate it but it makes sense and helps drive the share price up for your employer.
I am thinking of leaving IT for these reasons sadly, but I figure if I do marketing research then my job is dependent on how much more sales my boss can make year after year
Since IE 8 is more standards compliant the odds are much better that it will simple work with other versions of IE. The upcoming win7 sp 1 cd will have IE 10 and so will win 8. Since it is the most sfandards compliant browser to date the days of coding or sgandardizing on one browser for 5 years will be done hopefully.
IE 7 is an insecure piece of crap. Many still preferred IE 6 until a few years ago. If you insist on IE put a request for anew desktop as soon as your employer has a win 7 image ready so you have IE 8 or 9. It sounds like your desktops are obsolete anyway. Chrome works fine with 2 gigs. Sounds like a bad flash installation. IE 7 is unsafe and horrible with google maps. Obselete
Apple has become so aggresive today that I am glad the mac lost over the pc. Apple today is far more evil than ms ever was. Sure bundling IE was annoying but at least they didnt block netscape and firefox for having rectangular Windows
You run a business and not a charity. I would even go a step farther and say it is immoral and unethical if investor money paid for it. It is not yours but the company's.
It is a good deed and we would appreciate your contribution. However, your bank doest care nor your landlord or your car dealership. If I see your name and decide to use your software to drive away sales from all the hard work you have done then how is that fair? RMS is an idiot as your users will not pay you rent by purchasing support.
But what you really ought to be worried about is copyright and GPL violation. Does storing the program in the machines ram count as distributing? Get a lawyer! If it is copyleft or has a gpl linking license you are good to go with your addons. See if you can use a BSD or MIT package that has similiar features if you cant opensource. You may have to make your own sdk from scratch but get a lawyer first. Good luck with your business!
As a user I would prefer a mac and wish ot had more software. My heart says Apple.
My brain says pc. Especially software development and costs. Windows 7 is certainky tolerable and I work in I.T. Windows gives me the skills. Cancelling carbon is insulting. I dont care if it makes pretty apps with aqua instead. If I blew millions on a carbon based product I will simply just focus on Windows instead. It is a business and not a foss charity
And this is why corporate America,software companies, and businesses love Microsoft and still use XP. Just dont be so shocked when no mac ports of popular win32 pacakages stay off your platform.
If it took 10 years of work for your carbon app to have what it has today then logically it will take the same effort to rewrite it right? 10 years of expenses down the drain? I dont think so! If I were Adobe I would cancel mac support of the products in protest. Adobe 7 years ago almost wen win32 only as mac users represented only 10% of users at 50% of the costs.
What you are talking about is a scarcity mindset. Studies show it is not that simple as wealth can be created by people being more productive as well as technological advances. The governments simply print more and banks create it out of thin air with debt. With more Chinese buying more and living better it helps other chinese be less idle. Why is it Americans have more things than other people? Wealth is being created because of effenciency. In a recession the opposite is true except for the wealthy. Pent up demand and cheaper prices and cheaper wages fixes the problem and starts the cycle over. Bill Gates did indeed get money almost out of thin air as a pc could increase productivity many times over! The cost for dos and Windows even with all its faults paid for itself for businesses.
If write permission is possible you can insert a DLL into another executable with the same permissions. That file can interact with another dll or file at a higher privilege and can execute that way.
Seriously, there are somethings that do not need the internet. an operating room sure as hell is one of them! It is negligent not to do it and if a hospital can afford expensive doctors and $300,000 pieces of equipment it can afford to pay several thousand for a Cisco engineer to setup a DMZ network and firewall to separate devices from regular PCs.
If they have Cisco routers go setup a DMZ and invest several thousand hiring a Cisco consultant from an I.T. shop to setup a private intranet that is trusted with obsolete medical devices and printers and things of that nature. Setup the regular network to run updated software. Baracuda networks and others are coming up with virus scanning and deletions in hardware as well.
Client PCs need to be updated regularly and the hospitals I have seen the secretaries and nurses have their own desktops anyway as do the doctors in their offices. It is not expensive to setup if you have the infrastructure with Cisco and Ethernet already. Where I worked patients had their own private wifi network that was seperate from facility anyway if they brought in iphones or laptops. I think that is a great idea.
Why does a renal care scanner need facebook access anyway or internet? IE 6 is insecure because it was the pre-internet age where AOL and MSN is what MS was really fighting and it shows with obsolete software that is inappropriate today.
Maybe I am overlooking other issues but to me it means hospitals can finally upgrade and not care what the other devices are using.
The issue is documentation and looking up patient records.
If you do a treatment and it kills the patient, but the records show he/she was allergic to something or another doctor did the same treatment a year ago, or something related to that can land you in a lawsuit and a revocation of your license.
Electronic records are a life saver and a CYA in court in case the worse happens. So if the system is down you have to watch your back. Also people have different shifts throughout the day/night and need to know the data on existing patients as well.
Where I worked their credit card scanners and signature keypads needed to integrate with the browser. Therefore it had to be activeX based which was IE. Also anything that hooks into a computer, but the backed is browser based has to be IE. No other browser talks to hardware with maybe the exception of future releases of Chrome when NACL is finished.
IE 6 is standardized too if the app is more than 2 years old which blows. In 2009 companies sold IE 6 rendered intranet software which means no OpenBSD unless you run a VM or something retarded. I am talking SAP, Oracle and others and not just small medical software consulting companies. This is why XP is having a hard time dying in the largest companies.
There are software that is developed for Windows because that is what everyone else also uses that is not intranet based as well. Think VB client server apps and mix in portable medical scanners and very very expensive diagnostic equipment and that too runs on Windows and is something you do not throw out every Windows release.
I do agree that it is a problem, even if IE is no longer insecure if you read earlier stories from today (why everyone is flaming you).
With such high security requirements where lives are in danger and lawsuits with HIPA.
Here is my solution would be to have trusted Ethernet connections setup through the CISCO routers where doctors looking at MRI images with IE 6 can do much else but interact with medical software and intranet apps. For uses on client computers to access email from patients and browse the web I would setup a second network for that. Something like an intranet DMZ with subnet would be ideal! It would surprising easy if they already have CISCO and $1000 and a week with a local IT firm could set it up and work with the I.T. staff. I understand devices come with Windows but who gives a crap about a medical scanner accessing facebook. It is for a single task and does not deserve to be on the same network. I know it is a pain and some doctors may complain but where I worked in Alaska earlier this year all the nurses and secretaries had their own PCs anyway for email. So give them their own network. Then they can use Firefox or Chrome and keep ancient versions of IE for reviewing cat skins to trusted clients for doctors only.
That is allowed?No one should email or bring flash drives to work. HIPPA issues are scary enough. I did a contract with a hospital last February and well aware of obsolete software. That hopsital had a policy at least of disabling USB ports, put a big red warning screen for anyone daring to go to the internet with IE 6, and encrypting the hard drives.
I did cringe and asked if they would at least use SP 3 for the Windows workstaitons and leave SP 2 for the custom devices. IT is not like someone will browse facebook while using the MRI. They said they had to do more testing and I just shook my head in disbelief.
With medical billing and ERP software being intranet based they use it. That is a good thing to cut down on cost and quickly save lives so the records are there for the staff.
I did a contract with one last March which was upgrading to new state of the art medical billing system to be Obamacare compliant.
Ran Windows 7? No. Windows XP Service pack 3 right? No. Windows XP SP 2 with IE 6?!
Normally it is not an issue but with HIPPA it is very serious this irritated me. Someone can literally hold the hospital hostage if these medical records for tens of millions of dollars and they need at least a patched and still supported version of XP like corporate America does. The problem is custom medical software and custom devices for Xrays and MRIs use IE 6 still and are not certifed with XP SP 3... unless you give them $$$$ to buy all new epuipment over again. This is new software being developed in 2010 I may add requiring IE 6 and some software wont even run with SP 3 on XP. This means no security patches.
It does not surprise me there are viruses on hospital computers as they can't be patched. WIth HIPPA you would think a hospital would always demand and use state of the art fully patched systems for security. But if were the medical records software company or make MRI machines I would be still requiring IE 6 too so I can then price gouch and double dip and charge3 another $400,000 in 2013 when support ends. I can make even MORE money.... end rant
The greed is incredible in the industry, but doctors can be the most and worst clients and users if you chat with anyone who supports them. THey feel supperior because they have those PHDs and make tons of money. Luckily I just helped install stuff and ignored the rest of the staff. As a result I.T. staff just never upgrade as they do not want to deal with these users at all
You do not have to do that anymore. All major browsers have XSS protection including even old IE 8. If you are are really paranoid or work in a large office which can't leave older versions of IE go install OpenDNS which actively removes malware domains. Sweet idea and can eliminate any nasty scripts or exploits for things like PDF files, unless they have a hard coded IP Address.
THis will solve the same issue with XSS in another layer of proction
IE 9 is the fastest browser around as it is the only one that supports 100% GPU html rendering. True some Google optimized javascript benchmarks show Chrome ahead but multimedia heavy sites work better in IE 9.
IE 9 renders standards just like every other browser and IE 8 does most of the time. Seriously you are living in 2001 with IE 6 just like those who say IE is insecure. MS got its game back starting with IE 8.
I saw a link recently which had a Javascript acid test and IE 10 is the only browser that had a perfect score! FF had 33 errors and Chrome had over 420!
IE 9 still has issues like the lack of adblock which is why I use Chrome occasionally but it is a usable browser for work that is modern
Keeping flash and Java up to date helps. WIth Java these days it is best to disable it in your browsers if you have to use it for things like eclipse on the desktop. Thats what I do as Java 7 is a pile of dung even if it is much more secure. I haven't used a Java applet since 2002 seriously. SO I can still use Java 6 and not worry about being hacked when I browse.
With WIndows Vista and Windows 7 it is very difficult as hell to target a browser with the exception of Firefox because it does not support sandboxing. The reason why is because ASLR is a ram address randomization technique so if you overflow a buffer you can't say "use server.exe by its ram address and inject your dll into it". DEP is something XP only partially supports that Vista and 7 do fully where you can't plant data execution code in regular data like a picture file. In XP with IE 6 you simple render the pic on the page and you have instant data execution as the CPU/Kernel are too dumb to know which is data and which is executable. That is another common broswer exploit.
But today these are rare and hard to do so a plugin is a great way to do it. IE 9 even has a special compiler option which the engineers even control exception handling so the program will never go into an area out of bounds.
Flash and Adobe Air are teh way to go. Keep them updated or use adblock if you can. The first thing I always do when I get a new computer is uninstall PDF reader and flash and then go to file hippo and download only the latest.
The folder has default write privileges. This is how a standard user can install it. It also means privilege escallations dll injections and other nasties. Worse on XP the default user is a full admin without aslr or dep fully implemented.
So does that mean you think windows 8 is the best thing since sliced bread right? After all it is changed. Same with Firefox and its updated release cycle right? Just abunch of whiners when your tickets at the help desk at work go through +999 from angry workers whose extensions just broke. Its better because its change and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.
I would love to work the way only how some cs grad at gnome who has no UI experience say I should use it and decide for me.
End of rant but Windows 95 was a BIG change. Did you see people.whinng and refusing to use it? It should not take a week to learn a gui. Windows 95 took 5 mins and I was set. Maybe a week to discover all the right mouse button settings. XP was a big change too. True some.were not eager to buy it right away but no one flamed and screamed and cried when win98 was taken away. Almost everyone likes win7 but keep XP because of costs and apps. Again it is proof that not everyone is irrational fearing change.
But gnome 3? It is the worst gui ever made and I do not say that lightly. I switched back to windows because I ould rather be in that world again than be forced into that gui. That says a lot
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I have not used FBSD for many years seriously. But from what I saw in a VM is that PC-BSD is FreeBSD but with more fluff added on like a cute installation program and premade setup desktop. You can even run ./sysinstall (the FreeBSD and setup program) to add additional dists.
For those who do not run FreeBSD, the dists are huge repositories with make makefiles that FreeBSD will read and then fetch automatically from the internet, compile, and install. It is a port of the ports in /usr/share/ports if I remember correctly as I have not run it since 2005.
FreeBSD is a cool unix that encourages make files and is a very easy unix to work with, with tons of /usr/share/samples of script files to do crazy stuff and great config files /etc that have things like #to do this cool thing uncomment this line.
Of course that might be gone now as the last version I ran seriously was FreeBSD 4.12 as the BSD project went to shit and I switched back to Windows sigh.
If you can't think of a use Hairy, then it is just a toy to tinker with compared to Linux these days. There was a cool NAS program that ran on FreeBSD that turned a used PC into a BSD home media server and DVR, but that kernel now uses Linux due to better device support.
Funny, as I heard of BSD back in the 1990s when I was in highschool and wanted to run a BBS, but not Linux. I heard of Linux years later as BSD OS was advertised everywhere. I kind of wished FreeBSD won
Employees hate them but you have to show you are providing value and to CYA so the employer can make a case to fire you. Otherwise you can claim racism.
Every help desk or desktop support position I have worked on looked at metric. You had to show you could do 9 hours of work in 8 hours or you are fired. My exwife was a teacher and she got fired because she couldn't raise test scores enough. Accountants are measured in how much money they are saved. CEOs are measured in how much they raise their share price for Wall Street etc.
THis is life folks and I would bow to anyone who does not have to work in these conditions as I never have. Everyone and I mean everyone uses them to force more output and to avoid lawsuits. We hate it but it makes sense and helps drive the share price up for your employer.
I am thinking of leaving IT for these reasons sadly, but I figure if I do marketing research then my job is dependent on how much more sales my boss can make year after year
Sigh. Please upgrade your pentium
Since IE 8 is more standards compliant the odds are much better that it will simple work with other versions of IE. The upcoming win7 sp 1 cd will have IE 10 and so will win 8. Since it is the most sfandards compliant browser to date the days of coding or sgandardizing on one browser for 5 years will be done hopefully.
IE 7 is an insecure piece of crap. Many still preferred IE 6 until a few years ago. If you insist on IE put a request for anew desktop as soon as your employer has a win 7 image ready so you have IE 8 or 9. It sounds like your desktops are obsolete anyway. Chrome works fine with 2 gigs. Sounds like a bad flash installation. IE 7 is unsafe and horrible with google maps. Obselete
Apple has become so aggresive today that I am glad the mac lost over the pc. Apple today is far more evil than ms ever was. Sure bundling IE was annoying but at least they didnt block netscape and firefox for having rectangular Windows
You run a business and not a charity. I would even go a step farther and say it is immoral and unethical if investor money paid for it. It is not yours but the company's.
It is a good deed and we would appreciate your contribution. However, your bank doest care nor your landlord or your car dealership. If I see your name and decide to use your software to drive away sales from all the hard work you have done then how is that fair? RMS is an idiot as your users will not pay you rent by purchasing support.
But what you really ought to be worried about is copyright and GPL violation. Does storing the program in the machines ram count as distributing? Get a lawyer! If it is copyleft or has a gpl linking license you are good to go with your addons. See if you can use a BSD or MIT package that has similiar features if you cant opensource. You may have to make your own sdk from scratch but get a lawyer first. Good luck with your business!
As a user I would prefer a mac and wish ot had more software. My heart says Apple.
My brain says pc. Especially software development and costs. Windows 7 is certainky tolerable and I work in I.T. Windows gives me the skills. Cancelling carbon is insulting. I dont care if it makes pretty apps with aqua instead. If I blew millions on a carbon based product I will simply just focus on Windows instead. It is a business and not a foss charity
And this is why corporate America,software companies, and businesses love Microsoft and still use XP. Just dont be so shocked when no mac ports of popular win32 pacakages stay off your platform.
If it took 10 years of work for your carbon app to have what it has today then logically it will take the same effort to rewrite it right? 10 years of expenses down the drain? I dont think so! If I were Adobe I would cancel mac support of the products in protest. Adobe 7 years ago almost wen win32 only as mac users represented only 10% of users at 50% of the costs.
What you are talking about is a scarcity mindset. Studies show it is not that simple as wealth can be created by people being more productive as well as technological advances. The governments simply print more and banks create it out of thin air with debt. With more Chinese buying more and living better it helps other chinese be less idle. Why is it Americans have more things than other people? Wealth is being created because of effenciency. In a recession the opposite is true except for the wealthy. Pent up demand and cheaper prices and cheaper wages fixes the problem and starts the cycle over. Bill Gates did indeed get money almost out of thin air as a pc could increase productivity many times over! The cost for dos and Windows even with all its faults paid for itself for businesses.
If write permission is possible you can insert a DLL into another executable with the same permissions. That file can interact with another dll or file at a higher privilege and can execute that way.
I would give you mod points if I could.
Seriously, there are somethings that do not need the internet. an operating room sure as hell is one of them! It is negligent not to do it and if a hospital can afford expensive doctors and $300,000 pieces of equipment it can afford to pay several thousand for a Cisco engineer to setup a DMZ network and firewall to separate devices from regular PCs.
Ok here is what the hopital needs to do then.
If they have Cisco routers go setup a DMZ and invest several thousand hiring a Cisco consultant from an I.T. shop to setup a private intranet that is trusted with obsolete medical devices and printers and things of that nature. Setup the regular network to run updated software. Baracuda networks and others are coming up with virus scanning and deletions in hardware as well.
Client PCs need to be updated regularly and the hospitals I have seen the secretaries and nurses have their own desktops anyway as do the doctors in their offices. It is not expensive to setup if you have the infrastructure with Cisco and Ethernet already. Where I worked patients had their own private wifi network that was seperate from facility anyway if they brought in iphones or laptops. I think that is a great idea.
Why does a renal care scanner need facebook access anyway or internet? IE 6 is insecure because it was the pre-internet age where AOL and MSN is what MS was really fighting and it shows with obsolete software that is inappropriate today.
Maybe I am overlooking other issues but to me it means hospitals can finally upgrade and not care what the other devices are using.
The issue is documentation and looking up patient records.
If you do a treatment and it kills the patient, but the records show he/she was allergic to something or another doctor did the same treatment a year ago, or something related to that can land you in a lawsuit and a revocation of your license.
Electronic records are a life saver and a CYA in court in case the worse happens. So if the system is down you have to watch your back. Also people have different shifts throughout the day/night and need to know the data on existing patients as well.
Where I worked their credit card scanners and signature keypads needed to integrate with the browser. Therefore it had to be activeX based which was IE. Also anything that hooks into a computer, but the backed is browser based has to be IE. No other browser talks to hardware with maybe the exception of future releases of Chrome when NACL is finished.
IE 6 is standardized too if the app is more than 2 years old which blows. In 2009 companies sold IE 6 rendered intranet software which means no OpenBSD unless you run a VM or something retarded. I am talking SAP, Oracle and others and not just small medical software consulting companies. This is why XP is having a hard time dying in the largest companies.
There are software that is developed for Windows because that is what everyone else also uses that is not intranet based as well. Think VB client server apps and mix in portable medical scanners and very very expensive diagnostic equipment and that too runs on Windows and is something you do not throw out every Windows release.
I do agree that it is a problem, even if IE is no longer insecure if you read earlier stories from today (why everyone is flaming you).
With such high security requirements where lives are in danger and lawsuits with HIPA.
Here is my solution would be to have trusted Ethernet connections setup through the CISCO routers where doctors looking at MRI images with IE 6 can do much else but interact with medical software and intranet apps. For uses on client computers to access email from patients and browse the web I would setup a second network for that. Something like an intranet DMZ with subnet would be ideal! It would surprising easy if they already have CISCO and $1000 and a week with a local IT firm could set it up and work with the I.T. staff. I understand devices come with Windows but who gives a crap about a medical scanner accessing facebook. It is for a single task and does not deserve to be on the same network. I know it is a pain and some doctors may complain but where I worked in Alaska earlier this year all the nurses and secretaries had their own PCs anyway for email. So give them their own network. Then they can use Firefox or Chrome and keep ancient versions of IE for reviewing cat skins to trusted clients for doctors only.
They use SP 3 which still gets security updates. Even that is not as secure as Windows 7. I doubt BP runs SP 2 with no updates
That is allowed?No one should email or bring flash drives to work. HIPPA issues are scary enough. I did a contract with a hospital last February and well aware of obsolete software. That hopsital had a policy at least of disabling USB ports, put a big red warning screen for anyone daring to go to the internet with IE 6, and encrypting the hard drives.
I did cringe and asked if they would at least use SP 3 for the Windows workstaitons and leave SP 2 for the custom devices. IT is not like someone will browse facebook while using the MRI. They said they had to do more testing and I just shook my head in disbelief.
With medical billing and ERP software being intranet based they use it. That is a good thing to cut down on cost and quickly save lives so the records are there for the staff.
I did a contract with one last March which was upgrading to new state of the art medical billing system to be Obamacare compliant.
Ran Windows 7? No. Windows XP Service pack 3 right? No. Windows XP SP 2 with IE 6?!
Normally it is not an issue but with HIPPA it is very serious this irritated me. Someone can literally hold the hospital hostage if these medical records for tens of millions of dollars and they need at least a patched and still supported version of XP like corporate America does. The problem is custom medical software and custom devices for Xrays and MRIs use IE 6 still and are not certifed with XP SP 3 ... unless you give them $$$$ to buy all new epuipment over again. This is new software being developed in 2010 I may add requiring IE 6 and some software wont even run with SP 3 on XP. This means no security patches.
It does not surprise me there are viruses on hospital computers as they can't be patched. WIth HIPPA you would think a hospital would always demand and use state of the art fully patched systems for security. But if were the medical records software company or make MRI machines I would be still requiring IE 6 too so I can then price gouch and double dip and charge3 another $400,000 in 2013 when support ends. I can make even MORE money. ... end rant
The greed is incredible in the industry, but doctors can be the most and worst clients and users if you chat with anyone who supports them. THey feel supperior because they have those PHDs and make tons of money. Luckily I just helped install stuff and ignored the rest of the staff. As a result I.T. staff just never upgrade as they do not want to deal with these users at all
No ads with HTMl 5 with youtube? Damn I will switch then
You do not have to do that anymore. All major browsers have XSS protection including even old IE 8. If you are are really paranoid or work in a large office which can't leave older versions of IE go install OpenDNS which actively removes malware domains. Sweet idea and can eliminate any nasty scripts or exploits for things like PDF files, unless they have a hard coded IP Address.
THis will solve the same issue with XSS in another layer of proction
Refernce?
IE 9 is the fastest browser around as it is the only one that supports 100% GPU html rendering. True some Google optimized javascript benchmarks show Chrome ahead but multimedia heavy sites work better in IE 9.
IE 9 renders standards just like every other browser and IE 8 does most of the time. Seriously you are living in 2001 with IE 6 just like those who say IE is insecure. MS got its game back starting with IE 8.
I saw a link recently which had a Javascript acid test and IE 10 is the only browser that had a perfect score! FF had 33 errors and Chrome had over 420!
IE 9 still has issues like the lack of adblock which is why I use Chrome occasionally but it is a usable browser for work that is modern
Keeping flash and Java up to date helps. WIth Java these days it is best to disable it in your browsers if you have to use it for things like eclipse on the desktop. Thats what I do as Java 7 is a pile of dung even if it is much more secure. I haven't used a Java applet since 2002 seriously. SO I can still use Java 6 and not worry about being hacked when I browse.
With WIndows Vista and Windows 7 it is very difficult as hell to target a browser with the exception of Firefox because it does not support sandboxing. The reason why is because ASLR is a ram address randomization technique so if you overflow a buffer you can't say "use server.exe by its ram address and inject your dll into it". DEP is something XP only partially supports that Vista and 7 do fully where you can't plant data execution code in regular data like a picture file. In XP with IE 6 you simple render the pic on the page and you have instant data execution as the CPU/Kernel are too dumb to know which is data and which is executable. That is another common broswer exploit.
But today these are rare and hard to do so a plugin is a great way to do it. IE 9 even has a special compiler option which the engineers even control exception handling so the program will never go into an area out of bounds.
Flash and Adobe Air are teh way to go. Keep them updated or use adblock if you can. The first thing I always do when I get a new computer is uninstall PDF reader and flash and then go to file hippo and download only the latest.
The folder has default write privileges. This is how a standard user can install it. It also means privilege escallations dll injections and other nasties. Worse on XP the default user is a full admin without aslr or dep fully implemented.
So does that mean you think windows 8 is the best thing since sliced bread right? After all it is changed. Same with Firefox and its updated release cycle right? Just abunch of whiners when your tickets at the help desk at work go through +999 from angry workers whose extensions just broke. Its better because its change and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.
I would love to work the way only how some cs grad at gnome who has no UI experience say I should use it and decide for me.
End of rant but Windows 95 was a BIG change. Did you see people.whinng and refusing to use it? It should not take a week to learn a gui. Windows 95 took 5 mins and I was set. Maybe a week to discover all the right mouse button settings. XP was a big change too. True some.were not eager to buy it right away but no one flamed and screamed and cried when win98 was taken away. Almost everyone likes win7 but keep XP because of costs and apps. Again it is proof that not everyone is irrational fearing change.
But gnome 3? It is the worst gui ever made and I do not say that lightly. I switched back to windows because I ould rather be in that world again than be forced into that gui. That says a lot