...for the most part. Everything that the author listed could also be said for just about any other OS. Though, you said "ditto" on point 10, "Cloning Windows NT". I missed that one. How do you equate that to something on, say, Linux? Just curious, that's all.
I agree 110%. I was blown away when I saw what they did. And, for the longest time, we were unable to alter the Outlook settings (well, we could, but as soon as you closed Outlook, your changes were wacked). So, every morning I had turn off the "Use Word as your Email Editor" option (fortunately, M$ did make this pretty easy). Only after a macro virus spread throughout the company did they FINALLY come to their senses and change the default to use the internal editor (which, is almost every bit as bad as Word).
Yet, this company lives and dies by M$ apps. You know the worst part about it? I get friggn ripped' whenever a NT server crashes or whatever, and I casually say "Heh, that's NT for ya. Guess you don't always get what you pay for.". Everyone's like "Oh PLEASE. Your Linux and FreeBSD stuff wouldn't be any better..yada..yada..yada.." It sucks, I tell ya.
I've seen a lot of comments about "AOL should beef up their security", "People shouldn't open attachments", etc,etc... Yes, these are all valid points. AOL should stay on top of things, and there HAS to be some way to get it through to end users that opening attachments, especially from unknown origins, could be potentally damaging. (I'm speaking from a general perspective, not just this latest exploit). However, remember that AOL is one of the largest ISP's in the country. New users are constantly joining, and seasoned users leave to find a more "streamlined" provider. To stay with the up and up, AOL has to continue to provide new services and features to attract more users. AOL admins probably have a heck of a time keeping up, I would imagine. Also, when you have such a large user base, mostly of "newbies", that represents a pretty nice target for crackers. And really, no matter how much you try to secure a system, no system will EVER be 100% foolproof. Yes, most of the attacks we hear about are actually pretty basic, social engineering methods. But when you look at it, those kinds of exploits are often times the most effective. Basically what I'm saying is, because of AOL's very large user base, it presents itself as a very big target with lots of opportunity for crackers. The best thing to do is to continue to patch holes as they are found (being a little bit proactive wouldn't hurt, either) and continue to educate users.
We use Outlook 97 here at work, and the default email "reader" was Word97, instead of the internal reader of Outlook. I would imagine it would be possible in this instance to embed one of those silly macro viruses. Of course, it would only affect those using Word as their mail reader, but still, I think that would be quite a lot of people. The previous posts also mentioned embedded Javascript, which could affect lots more.
But, yes, the email itself cannot contain viruses. If you were to, say, read your email using pine or elm or something, then simply reading the message won't hurt. But all these fancy new mail clients that use Word or process HTML could be damaging.
I've seen a few posts saying "Oh yeah, I went to a Dvorak and my typing speed increased by 10-15%" I'm not sure about anyone else, but if I switched to a Dvorak keyboard (I've played with some of the Java applets that make your keyboard emulate one), I'm sure my typing speed would _decrease_ by more than 10-15% ! Yeah, yeah, If I used it for awhile, I would get used to it, yeah, yeah. WHY BOTHER?!? I consider myself an exteremly fast typist (sp?), but since I never had any formal keyboarding lessons, I sorta have my own style of typing. But it took years for me to get to where I'm at now, and it would probably take longer to unlearn the QWERTY way and re-learn the Dvorak method. For something as trival as the arrangement of letters on a keyboard, I certainly don't think it's worth the effort.
The way I interpret this guys article is "Hey, Linux people, don't even bother trying to get into the high end market. Your OS can't cut it and nothing you do will change that. Stick with the cheap AMD chips, will ya?". If that's the case, well then BITE ME. Sure, the current version of Linux isn't suited for the high end server/workstation yet...but if we continue to work towards that goal, someday it will be a reality. Look at our advances already! Geez. Inch by inch, Linux is getting faster, more robust, more secure. If we stick to our goals, then I'm sure Linux will emerge as a dominant player in the high end market (if not _the_ dominant). Linux isn't finished growing...it's just started.
Can anyone clarify what they mean by 128-bit system? Is that the internal register size? Bus? I think the the Dreamcast was billed as being 128-bit as well, yet when I looked at the specs, the integer processor was 32-bits, the floating point was 64, and the bus was 32. Yeah, 32+32+64=128, but really that means absolutely nada. Anyone have info on the Playstation2?
I say it's a pretty good idea, but if it is a Midwest get together, Chicago seems, well, kinda de-centralized from the midwest if you know what I mean.
Yes, you are right. In fact, I did use the "Save as Text" option to get the form saved (cause the company I was doing this for only bought me a copy of VB 2.0 and 6.0, not later ones). The main problem I tried to illustrate was the fact that ealier versions of VB used controls that were no longer supported in the later versions. As any VB programmer knows, when you got a ton of controls all squeezed onto one form, maintenence becomes a real bear. Anyone know of a way to port the old controls over to VB 5.0/6.0? I'd rather use the new controls for 5.0/6.0 that replaced the legacy ones, however, if there is a faster way to simply import the legacy controls, that would make the job a piece of cake.
Yes, I believe this is true. I worked on a port of a VB app that was written in VB 2.0, and I had to gather all the "major" VB releases 'cause apparently VB = 4.0 uses normal text files. However, even after I had a full upgrade path to 6.0 (what the customer wanted it re-coded in), I STILL had a problem with legacy controls inside the forms. It was a monsterous project, to port a simple futures calculator. After that fiasco, I decided to stick to MFC only (when I actually program under Windows:) Where I work, we had problems with Word and Access macros too. If you don't upgrade version by version, you'll be left behind in the Microsoft world...
Yeah, I think you're right. The article mentioned gave too little details about what exactly Big Brother had in store. Remember, the NYT got all of it's information from the civil liberties union (mention in the first paragraph). They themselves did not look at a copy themselves. All they said was "A draft prepared by officials at the National Security Council last month, which was provided to The New York Times by a civil liberties group..." A draft. Nothing more. Furthermore, what makes everyone so sure the "civil liberties" group in question didn't leave out parts of the report in order to obscure some facts about it. I believe A) The government has a right to be worried about a cyber-terrorist attack B) They already have anti-terrorist laws in effect for "conventional" technology, why is this any different C) Until we see a final bill, unabridged, and not some NYT article giving their insights to a civil liberties insights on a bill that isn't even out of a subcommitte yet, let's keep the hysteria factor to a minimum.
It's not like I'm not concerned about it, but as it stands now, we don't have enough information about it to really base our judgements on.
I know there are better programming languages and libraries available, but we were talking about creating apps in VC++ using MFC, right? Personally, I'd favor using one of the above posters idea of using Tcl/Tk along with C++, but there is such a notion of using the right tool for the right job. It all depends of the situation, right?
As far as the bugs in the generated code, I was simply guessing on that one. I think most problems I've had with using MFC came from underlying bugs in the MFC classes themselves, which (honestly) is to be expected. No single piece of code is 100% bug free...
Oops, sorry, I didn't mean I like message passing, I mean't that the way MFC implements it is pretty clean. Considering the alternative of coding all those damn messages in a switch(), I think the implementation works well...
Yes, I agree with your idea (I actually use that process quite often). I didn't mean to imply that I simply hold MFC to the highest regrards, but rather look at the pros/cons of the AppWizard boilerplate shells and event driven programming. Don't worry, you aren't missing much in the VB dept.:) It is truely an horrible "language" thats not only cumbersome and slow (even 6.0), but it's damn near impossible to maintain large projects over a period of time.
Personally, I believe the original poster had a point concerning the use of Wizards. If you want to spend 3 months just writing the basic shell of a GUI win32 app, be my guest. Using the AppWizard is basically the only feasable way to start an GUI app. That's pretty lame if you ask me. Not only is this lame, but who knows how many bugs are in that AppWizard code? Knowing MS, probably tons. If I'm on a development team, the last thing I want is to track down bugs in M$ code:) However, I do agree with your point on the event driven model. I can't possibly see any way of writing a GUI win32 WITHOUT using events, it's just inherient (sp) to the way Windows works. And, I actually like the way MFC handles the message processing, but it's a little scary if you think about it....just how much overhead is incurred by passing around hundreds of event messages for every little mouse movement?
Personally, I develop for both Windows and Linux in my spare time. I like learning the ins and outs of different platforms, and I've got to hand it to the MFC development team...they sure have an "interesting" way of doing things...
This is MS FUD at it's finest. Sure, split the *nix crowd even more. Point out to the unconverted that basically "Users of BSD and Linux hate each other and constantly gripe. Nothing ever gets done. Microsoft doesn't have any competitors, so there's nothing to argue with!" I can see some IT manager/director reading this article and saying "Well, I certainly don't want to migrate our mission critical systems over to OS that are maintained by a bunch of pathetic whiners!". The reference to the 600 message thread on slashdot (i missed that one) was an interesting punch, too. I believe that the bitterness and competition between Linux and the BSD camps are actually good for both communities. It keeps both camps from getting lazy, in a form of motivation unknown to MS (well, until recently)......COMPETITION. Competition is good. With competition comes innovation..trying to stay one step ahead of the other camp.
In a way, I got the impression Microslop is really, truely taking Linux as a serious threat. I really hope we're witnessing M$'s last stand with the Linux v.s Windoze war....
Yeah, that's the same story I've heard as well. If it's true, then I'm as happy as a puppy with two peters. I believe that IBM could be a great asset for the Linux community.
Fun ride, eh? I would LOVE to see IBM stick it to MS. MS seriously screwed IBM (ya,ya business as usual, right?) and it would be poetic justice for IBM to come back and wack Gates off his throne.
Slashdot Mirror
...for the most part. Everything that the author listed could also be said for just about any other OS. Though, you said "ditto" on point 10, "Cloning Windows NT". I missed that one. How do you equate that to something on, say, Linux? Just curious, that's all.
I agree 110%. I was blown away when I saw what they did. And, for the longest time, we were unable to alter the Outlook settings (well, we could, but as soon as you closed Outlook, your changes were wacked). So, every morning I had turn off the "Use Word as your Email Editor" option (fortunately, M$ did make this pretty easy). Only after a macro virus spread throughout the company did they FINALLY come to their senses and change the default to use the internal editor (which, is almost every bit as bad as Word).
Yet, this company lives and dies by M$ apps. You know the worst part about it? I get friggn ripped' whenever a NT server crashes or whatever, and I casually say "Heh, that's NT for ya. Guess you don't always get what you pay for.". Everyone's like "Oh PLEASE. Your Linux and FreeBSD stuff wouldn't be any better..yada..yada..yada.."
It sucks, I tell ya.
I've seen a lot of comments about "AOL should beef up their security", "People shouldn't open attachments", etc,etc...
Yes, these are all valid points. AOL should stay on top of things, and there HAS to be some way to get it through to end users that opening attachments, especially from unknown origins, could be potentally damaging. (I'm speaking from a general perspective, not just this latest exploit).
However, remember that AOL is one of the largest ISP's in the country. New users are constantly joining, and seasoned users leave to find a more "streamlined" provider. To stay with the up and up, AOL has to continue to provide new services and features to attract more users. AOL admins probably have a heck of a time keeping up, I would imagine. Also, when you have such a large user base, mostly of "newbies", that represents a pretty nice target for crackers. And really, no matter how much you try to secure a system, no system will EVER be 100% foolproof. Yes, most of the attacks we hear about are actually pretty basic, social engineering methods. But when you look at it, those kinds of exploits are often times the most effective.
Basically what I'm saying is, because of AOL's very large user base, it presents itself as a very big target with lots of opportunity for crackers. The best thing to do is to continue to patch holes as they are found (being a little bit proactive wouldn't hurt, either) and continue to educate users.
We use Outlook 97 here at work, and the default email "reader" was Word97, instead of the internal reader of Outlook. I would imagine it would be possible in this instance to embed one of those silly macro viruses. Of course, it would only affect those using Word as their mail reader, but still, I think that would be quite a lot of people. The previous posts also mentioned embedded Javascript, which could affect lots more.
But, yes, the email itself cannot contain viruses. If you were to, say, read your email using pine or elm or something, then simply reading the message won't hurt. But all these fancy new mail clients that use Word or process HTML could be damaging.
I've seen a few posts saying "Oh yeah, I went to a Dvorak and my typing speed increased by 10-15%"
I'm not sure about anyone else, but if I switched to a Dvorak keyboard (I've played with some of the Java applets that make your keyboard emulate one), I'm sure my typing speed would _decrease_ by more than 10-15% !
Yeah, yeah, If I used it for awhile, I would get used to it, yeah, yeah. WHY BOTHER?!? I consider myself an exteremly fast typist (sp?), but since I never had any formal keyboarding lessons, I sorta have my own style of typing. But it took years for me to get to where I'm at now, and it would probably take longer to unlearn the QWERTY way and re-learn the Dvorak method. For something as trival as the arrangement of letters on a keyboard, I certainly don't think it's worth the effort.
The way I interpret this guys article is "Hey, Linux people, don't even bother trying to get into the high end market. Your OS can't cut it and nothing you do will change that. Stick with the cheap AMD chips, will ya?".
If that's the case, well then BITE ME. Sure, the current version of Linux isn't suited for the high end server/workstation yet...but if we continue to work towards that goal, someday it will be a reality. Look at our advances already! Geez. Inch by inch, Linux is getting faster, more robust, more secure. If we stick to our goals, then I'm sure Linux will emerge as a dominant player in the high end market (if not _the_ dominant). Linux isn't finished growing...it's just started.
Can anyone clarify what they mean by 128-bit system? Is that the internal register size? Bus? I think the the Dreamcast was billed as being 128-bit as well, yet when I looked at the specs, the integer processor was 32-bits, the floating point was 64, and the bus was 32. Yeah, 32+32+64=128, but really that means absolutely nada. Anyone have info on the Playstation2?
Do you have a Playstation 2?
Do you also have a GForce256?
Do you have actual numbers to prove your point?
Do you REALIZE just how fast 10x really is?
Didn't think so.
Please, don't post something if you have absolutely no clue as to what's going on.
I say it's a pretty good idea, but if it is a Midwest get together, Chicago seems, well, kinda de-centralized from the midwest if you know what I mean.
Kansas City, MO, perhaps?
I'm there dude!
Kevin, you are freakn' weird dude.
Let's hold it in Mo. Valley!
Tell me about it.
:)
I'm in rural Iowa, altho 45 minutes from Omaha, Neb, it still sucks.
Someone want to buy me a plane ticket (directions would be nice too
Yes, you are right. In fact, I did use the "Save as Text" option to get the form saved (cause the company I was doing this for only bought me a copy of VB 2.0 and 6.0, not later ones).
The main problem I tried to illustrate was the fact that ealier versions of VB used controls that were no longer supported in the later versions. As any VB programmer knows, when you got a ton of controls all squeezed onto one form, maintenence becomes a real bear. Anyone know of a way to port the old controls over to VB 5.0/6.0? I'd rather use the new controls for 5.0/6.0 that replaced the legacy ones, however, if there is a faster way to simply import the legacy controls, that would make the job a piece of cake.
CRAP!
LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO!
I keep forgetting. (preview, PenguinDude, preview)
Sorry.....
At the end of the second sentence, I meant to say = 4.0.
Sorry...
Yes, I believe this is true. I worked on a port of a VB app that was written in VB 2.0, and I had to gather all the "major" VB releases 'cause apparently VB = 4.0 uses normal text files. :)
However, even after I had a full upgrade path to 6.0 (what the customer wanted it re-coded in), I STILL had a problem with legacy controls inside the forms. It was a monsterous project, to port a simple futures calculator. After that fiasco, I decided to stick to MFC only (when I actually program under Windows
Where I work, we had problems with Word and Access macros too. If you don't upgrade version by version, you'll be left behind in the Microsoft world...
Yeah, I think you're right. The article mentioned gave too little details about what exactly Big Brother had in store.
Remember, the NYT got all of it's information from the civil liberties union (mention in the first paragraph). They themselves did not look at a copy themselves. All they said was
"A draft prepared by officials at the National Security Council last month, which was provided to The New York Times by a civil liberties group..."
A draft. Nothing more. Furthermore, what makes everyone so sure the "civil liberties" group in question didn't leave out parts of the report in order to obscure some facts about it.
I believe
A) The government has a right to be worried about a cyber-terrorist attack
B) They already have anti-terrorist laws in effect for "conventional" technology, why is this any different
C) Until we see a final bill, unabridged, and not some NYT article giving their insights to a civil liberties insights on a bill that isn't even out of a subcommitte yet, let's keep the hysteria factor to a minimum.
It's not like I'm not concerned about it, but as it stands now, we don't have enough information about it to really base our judgements on.
I know there are better programming languages and libraries available, but we were talking about creating apps in VC++ using MFC, right? Personally, I'd favor using one of the above posters idea of using Tcl/Tk along with C++, but there is such a notion of using the right tool for the right job. It all depends of the situation, right?
As far as the bugs in the generated code, I was simply guessing on that one. I think most problems I've had with using MFC came from underlying bugs in the MFC classes themselves, which (honestly) is to be expected. No single piece of code is 100% bug free...
Oops, sorry, I didn't mean I like message passing, I mean't that the way MFC implements it is pretty clean. Considering the alternative of coding all those damn messages in a switch(), I think the implementation works well...
:)
BTW, thanks for the insight on the trade-off
Yes, I agree with your idea (I actually use that process quite often). I didn't mean to imply that I simply hold MFC to the highest regrards, but rather look at the pros/cons of the AppWizard boilerplate shells and event driven programming. :) It is truely an horrible "language" thats not only cumbersome and slow (even 6.0), but it's damn near impossible to maintain large projects over a period of time.
Don't worry, you aren't missing much in the VB dept.
Personally, I believe the original poster had a point concerning the use of Wizards. If you want to spend 3 months just writing the basic shell of a GUI win32 app, be my guest. Using the AppWizard is basically the only feasable way to start an GUI app. That's pretty lame if you ask me. Not only is this lame, but who knows how many bugs are in that AppWizard code? Knowing MS, probably tons. If I'm on a development team, the last thing I want is to track down bugs in M$ code :)
However, I do agree with your point on the event driven model. I can't possibly see any way of writing a GUI win32 WITHOUT using events, it's just inherient (sp) to the way Windows works. And, I actually like the way MFC handles the message processing, but it's a little scary if you think about it....just how much overhead is incurred by passing around hundreds of event messages for every little mouse movement?
Personally, I develop for both Windows and Linux in my spare time. I like learning the ins and outs of different platforms, and I've got to hand it to the MFC development team...they sure have an "interesting" way of doing things...
This is MS FUD at it's finest. Sure, split the *nix crowd even more. Point out to the unconverted that basically "Users of BSD and Linux hate each other and constantly gripe. Nothing ever gets done. Microsoft doesn't have any competitors, so there's nothing to argue with!"
I can see some IT manager/director reading this article and saying "Well, I certainly don't want to migrate our mission critical systems over to OS that are maintained by a bunch of pathetic whiners!". The reference to the 600 message thread on slashdot (i missed that one) was an interesting punch, too.
I believe that the bitterness and competition between Linux and the BSD camps are actually good for both communities. It keeps both camps from getting lazy, in a form of motivation unknown to MS (well, until recently)......COMPETITION. Competition is good. With competition comes innovation..trying to stay one step ahead of the other camp.
In a way, I got the impression Microslop is really, truely taking Linux as a serious threat. I really hope we're witnessing M$'s last stand with the Linux v.s Windoze war....
Ooh, forgot about that one.
Yeah, that's the same story I've heard as well. If it's true, then I'm as happy as a puppy with two peters. I believe that IBM could be a great asset for the Linux community.
Fun ride, eh? I would LOVE to see IBM stick it to MS. MS seriously screwed IBM (ya,ya business as usual, right?) and it would be poetic justice for IBM to come back and wack Gates off his throne.