Funny how a closed source proprietary tech like Flash can get so much love from the/. crowd. I seem to recall it being the subject of much ire not so long ago. What changed? Oh yeah, Silverlight appeared and so Flash became good because anything that can stop MS is good. My enemies enemies are my friends, I guess.
But what about the actual technology? For video it's no contest. Silverlight is streets ahead of Flash. Much more parsimonious with precious bandwidth and excellent scaling. But this isn't about the best technology is it? No, it's religous wars. Same as it ever was.
W7 is news unless you live under a rock. Back in the real world there are more than a handful of people that use Windows. Some of them even quite like it but let's keep that quiet shall we. And what about Linus's sock puppets?
I don't hate Apple, but I don't think they are the wonderful innovative company that much of the media makes them out to be. They take good ideas and polish them, much like Microsoft do. That's not criticism, that's a compliment.
Anyway I'm sure there will be something in Snow Leopard but I'll bet it won't revolutionary.
Well, 'cos it hasn't been released yet and there are no meaningful technical details of what it is. So on the face of it, it would appear to be a piece of marketing fluff from the company that is best at that. I just find it very hard to believe that a company which is very good at polishing other people's ideas is going to solve the problem of automatic parallelisation of software.
I think everyone who uses Firefox and receives the very regular updates fixing critical issue after critical issue knows just how rubbish the Firefox security is!
As so many others have said, it's hard to see how fixing horrendous buffer overflows that allow arbitrary code execution is something to be celebrated.
This is silly. If 3rd party software wants to use different HTML rendering libraries then it can just do so. It really is as simple as that. Nobody compels you to link against the MS HTML libraries.
Also the libraries are needed for HTML help so they really aren't going anywhere.
The enterprises will do clean installs rather than in place upgrades. The entire system will be deployed through system center or suchlike. Silly article.
The bug was introduced September 2006 and fixed in May 2008. I think there were many very troubling issues relating to this bug that everyone who is works on and relies on OSS should be concerned about. The main point, in my view, is the lack of process. This is a bug that was introduced by the downstream packagers of OpenSSL. So, the distro supplies something that you think is OpenSSL, but in reality it isn't. It's the downstream packagers' version of OpenSSL. I'm afraid any trust evaporates at that point.
You can't beat the fantastic quality of Debian, especially when it comes to the fantastic work done with Valgrind and Purify to remove some of the bugs in the OpenSSL seeding code used to generate encryption keys. Obviously no closed source code could possibly live up to those marvellous standards. It's just not possible to write high quality closed source code. In fact the mere act of releasing previously closed source code under the GPL makes it high quality.
It really trivialises the issue of security to say the open source is secure and closed source is not, or indeed vice versa. You really should not use ideology to evaluate the security of products and platforms.
It made me laugh when a poster here suggested that Apple's stellar security record is down to open sourcing of Darwin. What orthognal universe is that poster inhabiting?
Another thought: Debian OpenSLL.
No, it's all a lot more complex which is of course why software developers find it so hard, as evinced in their results.
Another thing that makes security hard is the pathetic protocols that we all rely on. It doesn't matter whether your code is open or closed source, you really won't have much success trying to secure inherently insecure protocols like DNS, SMTP etc.
Why would Windows be the problem? Safari doesn't pass Acid 3 on other platforms. It's the Webkit nightly builds that do.
It's also not the most useful indicator of standards compliance it being for standards that aren't yet accepted, in place or even in widespread use.
It turns out that IE8 is by far the most standards compliant version of IE. It's very very late in the day but MS have taken a lot of heat for not being compliant. At least give them some credit for significant improvements where they are due. And yes, it's a shame it wasn't 5 years ago.
It seemed a little unfair that they only used the nice hardware RAID controller with the Intel SSDs. I would have liked to see them use it with all the other disks to get a more level playing field.
None of the browsers I have tried pass the Acid 3 test so I have given up using the internet. There's really no point if you can't get Acid 3 to go to 100/100.
Slashdot Mirror
Hard to believe, but an 8 year old OS with life support turned off is still overwhelmingly preferred to Linux, OS X and so on...
Funny how a closed source proprietary tech like Flash can get so much love from the /. crowd. I seem to recall it being the subject of much ire not so long ago. What changed? Oh yeah, Silverlight appeared and so Flash became good because anything that can stop MS is good. My enemies enemies are my friends, I guess.
But what about the actual technology? For video it's no contest. Silverlight is streets ahead of Flash. Much more parsimonious with precious bandwidth and excellent scaling. But this isn't about the best technology is it? No, it's religous wars. Same as it ever was.
IE6? No, I didn't think so.
W7 is news unless you live under a rock. Back in the real world there are more than a handful of people that use Windows. Some of them even quite like it but let's keep that quiet shall we. And what about Linus's sock puppets?
I don't hate Apple, but I don't think they are the wonderful innovative company that much of the media makes them out to be. They take good ideas and polish them, much like Microsoft do. That's not criticism, that's a compliment.
Anyway I'm sure there will be something in Snow Leopard but I'll bet it won't revolutionary.
Well, 'cos it hasn't been released yet and there are no meaningful technical details of what it is. So on the face of it, it would appear to be a piece of marketing fluff from the company that is best at that. I just find it very hard to believe that a company which is very good at polishing other people's ideas is going to solve the problem of automatic parallelisation of software.
Vapourware
I think everyone who uses Firefox and receives the very regular updates fixing critical issue after critical issue knows just how rubbish the Firefox security is!
As so many others have said, it's hard to see how fixing horrendous buffer overflows that allow arbitrary code execution is something to be celebrated.
If a developer needs a library then they can just install it when they install their software. It really is as simple as that.
This is silly. If 3rd party software wants to use different HTML rendering libraries then it can just do so. It really is as simple as that. Nobody compels you to link against the MS HTML libraries.
Also the libraries are needed for HTML help so they really aren't going anywhere.
The enterprises will do clean installs rather than in place upgrades. The entire system will be deployed through system center or suchlike. Silly article.
If you like vista why not stick windows 7 on it?
Thanks for pointing that out. I guess that shows that the process is even more broken than I thought!
The bug was introduced September 2006 and fixed in May 2008. I think there were many very troubling issues relating to this bug that everyone who is works on and relies on OSS should be concerned about. The main point, in my view, is the lack of process. This is a bug that was introduced by the downstream packagers of OpenSSL. So, the distro supplies something that you think is OpenSSL, but in reality it isn't. It's the downstream packagers' version of OpenSSL. I'm afraid any trust evaporates at that point.
You can't beat the fantastic quality of Debian, especially when it comes to the fantastic work done with Valgrind and Purify to remove some of the bugs in the OpenSSL seeding code used to generate encryption keys. Obviously no closed source code could possibly live up to those marvellous standards. It's just not possible to write high quality closed source code. In fact the mere act of releasing previously closed source code under the GPL makes it high quality.
It really trivialises the issue of security to say the open source is secure and closed source is not, or indeed vice versa. You really should not use ideology to evaluate the security of products and platforms.
It made me laugh when a poster here suggested that Apple's stellar security record is down to open sourcing of Darwin. What orthognal universe is that poster inhabiting?
Another thought: Debian OpenSLL.
No, it's all a lot more complex which is of course why software developers find it so hard, as evinced in their results.
Another thing that makes security hard is the pathetic protocols that we all rely on. It doesn't matter whether your code is open or closed source, you really won't have much success trying to secure inherently insecure protocols like DNS, SMTP etc.
That's exactly how UAC works when you run as standard user.
Driver model in 7 is same as Vista so 7 will launch with excellent driver support, even for 64 bit OS.
Why would Windows be the problem? Safari doesn't pass Acid 3 on other platforms. It's the Webkit nightly builds that do.
It's also not the most useful indicator of standards compliance it being for standards that aren't yet accepted, in place or even in widespread use.
It turns out that IE8 is by far the most standards compliant version of IE. It's very very late in the day but MS have taken a lot of heat for not being compliant. At least give them some credit for significant improvements where they are due. And yes, it's a shame it wasn't 5 years ago.
It seemed a little unfair that they only used the nice hardware RAID controller with the Intel SSDs. I would have liked to see them use it with all the other disks to get a more level playing field.
None of the browsers I have tried pass the Acid 3 test so I have given up using the internet. There's really no point if you can't get Acid 3 to go to 100/100.
Well I think Vista is just dandy and if 7 is lots better then I'll be well chuffed.
True, but there will likely still be more people running Windows 9x than Mac PPC.
But why should they deserve to be left out in the cold more than someone running Linux?
I'll bet there are more windows desktop machines that can't run silverlight than linux ones. That's my point.