Damn it. When I first saw this article, I interpreted it as "Rick Berman is now sleeping with the fishes, see?" I couldn't wait to find out the gory details.
Hot damn, it's easy to criticise isn't it? Had any of the following occurred to you?
a1. Really? And how does the system know this? What's the requisite cut-off date, etc.? The best that can probably be done here is a period scan via Windows Update for updated drivers, and, surprise surprise, that's _exactly_ what Windows XP and 2000 do (XP default, 2000 you have to ask). a2. That would be a great idea, except DRIVERS AREN'T COMPILED INTO THE WINDOWS KERNEL! It's called a MOD-U-LAR KER-NEL, mate; but coming from Linux I guess you haven't heard of that 1980's breakthrough.
b1. Now here I do have to agree with you. I've never understood why access to real estate on the start bar isn't better regulated by the OS. Windows XP makes an attempt, at least. b2. Got to agree with you here - Windows Installer is fairly good about checking on this sort of thing but not everybody uses it.
c1. Um, no. Users just don't _read_ the frigging manuals! They expect everything to be as easy as their toaster at home (whether they're right or wrong in expecting this is a different discussion:)
What I find concerning (funny? interesting?) is the fact that this is marketed as a solution not just for the Internet but also for the "corporate intranet".
Not to stick up too much for VB, but given that I have to use it everyday at work, I can assure you that it _does_ have syntax formatting - unless by "syntax formatting" you're referring to something different than what I think you're meaning?
VB 6 also has classes, encapsulation and simple (interface only, not implementation) single inheritence. No polymorphism, which is the major bugbear. But on the flip side it does include the best GUI form builder ever made...
PCDOS _was_ MS-DOS, it was just rebranded by IBM, who paid a healthy royalty to MS on every box shipped. Where do you think MS made most of their early money?
I don't get it. Didn't you just invalidate your argument? If "most people" (I'm not sure I agree with you on that, but that's a different argument) don't understand those things, then by your logic those things should all have failed. But most of the things you listed are pretty common, i.e. successful, items. Why should TiVo fail if those other things haven't? Clearly consumer comprehension isn't necessarily the governing factor:)
All of what you said is true, but you omitted certain other pieces of information...
-lotsa bugfixes and plenty new bugs to fool around with... basically no net gain or loss here
Windows XP comes with Automatic Updating, so as bugs are fixed patches are downloaded and installed automatically (user configurable as to how "automatic" it all is).
-WinXP Home has no support for joining a domain... this is a bad thing if you rely on NT domain-style security (term used loosely here thanks you people for noticing)
Yes, specifically advertised as being a feature of XP _Professional_.
-by default, you have to really try hard to find the three-finger-salute logon option.. you know, the one that generates a hw interrupt for local logon, that kind of thing. This, again, is a point in Win2K favour
Easy if you're a member of a domain, unnecessary if you're not and user switching is activated, so while true I don't understand what your problem is.
-WinXP comes with a neato remote-DOS exploit in the form of the SSDP sevice (Universal Plug'n'Pray, the one the FBI was decrying as such a security threat. Those over-active whiners!;)
See Automatic Updating above. Patches were released to Windows Update _before XP shipped_!
-XP also comes with a "firewall" which basically does nothing - or, more likely, fools users (hey anybody dumb enough to use XP seriously deserves it) into thinking they're secure from remote attack. Until the latest worm snipes 'em, that is..
Unfair. It's a perfectly functioning port filtering firewall. But it doesn't scan your mail for viruses or anything like that, which is what I think you're alluding to with this point. Having said that, doesn't Outlook Express block dangerous attachments now? (I have XP but don't use OE, so I don't know.)
Uh, no, Luke does _not_ kill Vader in "Splinter of the Mind's Eye". He _defeats_ Vader in a battle, thanks mainly to a force-channelling crystal he manages to find (the aforementioned "splinter"), but Vader escapes. Read the book again:)
That's strange, I have a Sony DAV-500 that was region-free out-of-the-box. I guess the mod was done at the resellers; all I had to do was ask the salesman "is it region-free?"; the reply was "standard".
Then again, this is New Zealand; I understand it's harder to find region-fixed players in the stores than region-free ones...:)
(Others may want to correct any huge mistakes I make in my analysis...)
My understanding is that all.NET-capable languages are compiled to MSIL ("Microsoft Intermediate Language") which is _not_ machine-specific, nor is it as low-level even as Java's bytecodes; it is quite human-readable (calls like System.Console.Print etc. are in the clear; variable and memory accessor functions however are done via registers) and readily reversible. This MSIL can then be just-in-time compiled to machine-specific code by the MSIL VM.
As of Visual Studio Beta 1, MS were non-committal on how they were going to handle reverse-engineering issues, since it's a whole heap easier to do that now than ever (well, ever since VB 2, anyway, which also wrote out its code in the clear).
Presumably they will have to come up with a strategy that lets the developer target x86 at build time, rather than MSIL...?
May well be too late for this anyway, but if anybody's still reading way down here the following may be of interest:
I just want to be sure everyone's straight on a couple of things.
1. The information about the Microsoft whois results is not unique to
Microsoft, Demon.net, nor is it anything new. As an example;
From: Yehuda Sharvit
To: NTBUGTRAQ@LISTSERV.NTBUGTRAQ.COM
Old stuff.
I got this from whois.internic.net 5 months ago:
AOL.COM.STOCKHOLDERS.GET.ORALSEXONDEMAND.COM
AOL.COM.KCAUTOWEB.COM
AOL.COM.IS.REGULARLY.HAX0RED.BY.INSIDE-AOL.COM
AOL.COM.HACKED.BY.PSYKOJOKO.ON.A.ROOT-NETWORK.CO M
AOL.COM.EATMYSHIT.ORG
AOL.COM.AMSLIQUIDATORS.COM
AOL.COM
2. There is no correlation between the whois information and the fact that
Microsoft domains' DNS servers are currently down (or were down at the time
of sending this message).
~11:00pm Pacific Time last night Microsoft DNS servers suffered some sort of
technical problem. Whether this is a DoS or not is still speculation, MS
have not stated clearly what is the cause but say they are currently working
on a solution. Domains such as Microsoft.com, MSN.com, Hotmail.com,
MSNBC.com, and many others maintained by those DNS servers are all currently
unavailable.
An example IP address that you can use to verify that their web servers are
still up is;
http://207.46.230.229/ms.htm
3. There have been some reports of browsers being redirected to other web
pages when looking for sites like www.microsoft.com. MyDomains.com and
Register.com have both, allegedly, delivered up web pages to clients looking
for Microsoft sites.
From all of the information I've been able to see, in my opinion this would
appear to be a result of sporadic problems with Microsoft's DNS servers from
as far back as Thursday last week. If the MS DNS' were failing back then,
clients who have multiple DNS servers configured which include
non-rootservers might have received entries for such popular site addresses
as www.microsoft.com or www.yahoo.com which were statically entered into a
DNS server which the client queried (e.g. not an authoritative server for
the domain in question). Large DNS installations may have done this to limit
the bandwidth their servers would use to make dynamic or periodic queries on
such popular site names, thinking they'd not change.
However, in each case I've had reported it would appear that when the
dynamic or periodic query fails, the address supplied to a client query is
that of some internal server (internal to the org hosting the DNS server,
possibly the address of the DNS server itself). Some reports have suggested
DNS hijacking but I've seen nothing that resembles that.
4. On the surface it looks as if Microsoft's main DNS servers are housed on
the same physical network segment. Determining whether this is accurate or
not is pretty difficult if you're not at the backbone level, but the
addresses for their servers appear in a single subnet range.
They may well be using something like a Cisco Distributed Director to
redirect DNS queries around the world. If that's true, one would think they
would have been able to have it replaced by now, or at least removed and let
the servers handle the queries directly.
Its actually quite astonishing that they haven't been able to get any form
of DNS up to respond to public queries. This fact certainly adds fuel to the
conspiracy theories, be that disgruntled and banned gamers seeking revenge
or some DoS against DNS that can't be filtered.
Unfortunately, unless we get an email from some private account, we're not
going to see something from MS on this until the issue is resolved (if you
don't count the PR quotes being offered by some folks by phone).
More as it uncovers itself.
Cheers,
Russ - Surgeon General of TruSecure Corporation/NTBugtraq Editor
I don't think this can be right (as much as I'd like it to be) because the Playstation 2 as released in NZ is most definitely _not_ multi-region. So it can't be illegal to release a region-coded player, otherwise Sony wouldn't have just done it.
Hmm, it's a while since we've seen Sengan round here... he got booted, didn't he? (Can anybody remember what for? Something to do with Iraq if I recall?)
... When they know damned well they can't keep their M$ box up 15 days, while my server is sitting here chugging away at 100 days....
Gee, that's weird... (chooses server at random)
D:\WINNT> net statistics server
Server statistics for AKL_SVR_1
Statistics since 6/7/00 8:58 PM
That's a boot date of 6/7 (6 August for you Americans), meaning an uptime of more than 120 days so far, which is nothing out of the ordinary for the NT servers around here. The reboot on the 6/7 was to apply some patches. (That's an NT 4 SP 6a box, BTW; W2K boxes tend not to require reboots after patches, which is A Good Thing.)
It'll keep on chugging away until we need to reboot for the next set of patches, probably next year some time.
What are you talking about 'choice'? If MS was interested in offering 'choice' they would offer a product called UsefullOfficeApps v1.0 which included only about 10% of MSOffice's features and would come standard with their OS - or for $5. They are not offering 'choice' they are AGAIN using their market force to push something on computer users they dont really need - and trying to convince them its in their best interest.
Jesus, what does it take to satisfy you guys? MS _does_ offer such a product; it's called Microsoft Works, it _is_ cheap, it _does_ only offer the basic features (but enough to still be useful!) and it _does_ come standard with the OS if you buy from major vendors.
If you don't want Office, then DON'T BUY IT! If you want Office, but don't want to lease it, then BUY IT OUTRIGHT AND DON'T SUBSCRIBE TO THE LEASING MODEL!
So if you don't have a backup program which works with Exchange, to back up this file you have to take the server down (manually, no scripting here) [snip]
Of course it's scriptable. Have you never heard of the NET STOP command?
Slashdot Mirror
Damn it. When I first saw this article, I interpreted it as "Rick Berman is now sleeping with the fishes, see?" I couldn't wait to find out the gory details.
What a let-down.
Hot damn, it's easy to criticise isn't it? Had any of the following occurred to you?
:)
a1. Really? And how does the system know this? What's the requisite cut-off date, etc.? The best that can probably be done here is a period scan via Windows Update for updated drivers, and, surprise surprise, that's _exactly_ what Windows XP and 2000 do (XP default, 2000 you have to ask).
a2. That would be a great idea, except DRIVERS AREN'T COMPILED INTO THE WINDOWS KERNEL! It's called a MOD-U-LAR KER-NEL, mate; but coming from Linux I guess you haven't heard of that 1980's breakthrough.
b1. Now here I do have to agree with you. I've never understood why access to real estate on the start bar isn't better regulated by the OS. Windows XP makes an attempt, at least.
b2. Got to agree with you here - Windows Installer is fairly good about checking on this sort of thing but not everybody uses it.
c1. Um, no. Users just don't _read_ the frigging manuals! They expect everything to be as easy as their toaster at home (whether they're right or wrong in expecting this is a different discussion
Cheers
A.
What I find concerning (funny? interesting?) is the fact that this is marketed as a solution not just for the Internet but also for the "corporate intranet".
Takes employee perks to a new level...
"Solipsism" (sp?) is the word you are looking for...
A nice idea, but it flies in the face of what we know about Picard; surely he'd never break the Prime Directive like that?
There is no thou shalt not copy without paying a fee commandment.
There is a "thou shalt not steal commandment", though.
Downloading MP3s is not stealing it's copying
Oh, right. I forgot. Silly me!
So if I find your credit card number online and download that, that's not stealing, that's just copying, right? Cool!
Not to stick up too much for VB, but given that I have to use it everyday at work, I can assure you that it _does_ have syntax formatting - unless by "syntax formatting" you're referring to something different than what I think you're meaning?
VB 6 also has classes, encapsulation and simple (interface only, not implementation) single inheritence. No polymorphism, which is the major bugbear. But on the flip side it does include the best GUI form builder ever made...
working for the incumbent telco
Dude, you work for Telecom? Quit now while you still have a soul.
PCDOS _was_ MS-DOS, it was just rebranded by IBM, who paid a healthy royalty to MS on every box shipped. Where do you think MS made most of their early money?
Read an MS EULA sometime; they absolve themselves of all negligence and incompetence.
Which would not necessarily stand up in court; most Western jurisdictions do not allow you to contract out of negligance.
I don't get it. Didn't you just invalidate your argument? If "most people" (I'm not sure I agree with you on that, but that's a different argument) don't understand those things, then by your logic those things should all have failed. But most of the things you listed are pretty common, i.e. successful, items. Why should TiVo fail if those other things haven't? Clearly consumer comprehension isn't necessarily the governing factor :)
Cheers
A.
Agreed. Hell, I've got Windows NT 4.0 boxes that haven't been rebooted in months.
All of what you said is true, but you omitted certain other pieces of information...
;)
-lotsa bugfixes and plenty new bugs to fool around with... basically no net gain or loss here
Windows XP comes with Automatic Updating, so as bugs are fixed patches are downloaded and installed automatically (user configurable as to how "automatic" it all is).
-WinXP Home has no support for joining a domain... this is a bad thing if you rely on NT domain-style security (term used loosely here thanks you people for noticing)
Yes, specifically advertised as being a feature of XP _Professional_.
-by default, you have to really try hard to find the three-finger-salute logon option.. you know, the one that generates a hw interrupt for local logon, that kind of thing. This, again, is a point in Win2K favour
Easy if you're a member of a domain, unnecessary if you're not and user switching is activated, so while true I don't understand what your problem is.
-WinXP comes with a neato remote-DOS exploit in the form of the SSDP sevice (Universal Plug'n'Pray, the one the FBI was decrying as such a security threat. Those over-active whiners!
See Automatic Updating above. Patches were released to Windows Update _before XP shipped_!
-XP also comes with a "firewall" which basically does nothing - or, more likely, fools users (hey anybody dumb enough to use XP seriously deserves it) into thinking they're secure from remote attack. Until the latest worm snipes 'em, that is..
Unfair. It's a perfectly functioning port filtering firewall. But it doesn't scan your mail for viruses or anything like that, which is what I think you're alluding to with this point. Having said that, doesn't Outlook Express block dangerous attachments now? (I have XP but don't use OE, so I don't know.)
Cheers
A.
Sigh. That'll teach me not to preview.
<DOMAIN>\<NT USERNAME>\<MAILBOX ALIAS>
So tell me mister support person, what is my login and ID for Exchange?
Just in case you're still interested in knowing the answer to this, the password is your Windows NT account password, and the login is
\\
So, for example, user Joe in domain FINANCE with mailbox JoeB would login with
FINANCE\Joe\JoeB
Works for POP3 too.
Cheers,
Alastair
Binoculars aren't mentioned anywhere, so I assume they're safe... :)
Uh, no, Luke does _not_ kill Vader in "Splinter of the Mind's Eye". He _defeats_ Vader in a battle, thanks mainly to a force-channelling crystal he manages to find (the aforementioned "splinter"), but Vader escapes. Read the book again :)
That's strange, I have a Sony DAV-500 that was region-free out-of-the-box. I guess the mod was done at the resellers; all I had to do was ask the salesman "is it region-free?"; the reply was "standard".
:)
Then again, this is New Zealand; I understand it's harder to find region-fixed players in the stores than region-free ones...
Cheers
Alastair
(Others may want to correct any huge mistakes I make in my analysis...)
.NET-capable languages are compiled to MSIL ("Microsoft Intermediate Language") which is _not_ machine-specific, nor is it as low-level even as Java's bytecodes; it is quite human-readable (calls like System.Console.Print etc. are in the clear; variable and memory accessor functions however are done via registers) and readily reversible. This MSIL can then be just-in-time compiled to machine-specific code by the MSIL VM.
My understanding is that all
As of Visual Studio Beta 1, MS were non-committal on how they were going to handle reverse-engineering issues, since it's a whole heap easier to do that now than ever (well, ever since VB 2, anyway, which also wrote out its code in the clear).
Presumably they will have to come up with a strategy that lets the developer target x86 at build time, rather than MSIL...?
Cheers
Alastair
May well be too late for this anyway, but if anybody's still reading way down here the following may be of interest:
O M
I just want to be sure everyone's straight on a couple of things.
1. The information about the Microsoft whois results is not unique to
Microsoft, Demon.net, nor is it anything new. As an example;
From: Yehuda Sharvit
To: NTBUGTRAQ@LISTSERV.NTBUGTRAQ.COM
Old stuff.
I got this from whois.internic.net 5 months ago:
AOL.COM.STOCKHOLDERS.GET.ORALSEXONDEMAND.COM
AOL.COM.KCAUTOWEB.COM
AOL.COM.IS.REGULARLY.HAX0RED.BY.INSIDE-AOL.COM
AOL.COM.HACKED.BY.PSYKOJOKO.ON.A.ROOT-NETWORK.C
AOL.COM.EATMYSHIT.ORG
AOL.COM.AMSLIQUIDATORS.COM
AOL.COM
2. There is no correlation between the whois information and the fact that
Microsoft domains' DNS servers are currently down (or were down at the time
of sending this message).
~11:00pm Pacific Time last night Microsoft DNS servers suffered some sort of
technical problem. Whether this is a DoS or not is still speculation, MS
have not stated clearly what is the cause but say they are currently working
on a solution. Domains such as Microsoft.com, MSN.com, Hotmail.com,
MSNBC.com, and many others maintained by those DNS servers are all currently
unavailable.
An example IP address that you can use to verify that their web servers are
still up is;
http://207.46.230.229/ms.htm
3. There have been some reports of browsers being redirected to other web
pages when looking for sites like www.microsoft.com. MyDomains.com and
Register.com have both, allegedly, delivered up web pages to clients looking
for Microsoft sites.
From all of the information I've been able to see, in my opinion this would
appear to be a result of sporadic problems with Microsoft's DNS servers from
as far back as Thursday last week. If the MS DNS' were failing back then,
clients who have multiple DNS servers configured which include
non-rootservers might have received entries for such popular site addresses
as www.microsoft.com or www.yahoo.com which were statically entered into a
DNS server which the client queried (e.g. not an authoritative server for
the domain in question). Large DNS installations may have done this to limit
the bandwidth their servers would use to make dynamic or periodic queries on
such popular site names, thinking they'd not change.
However, in each case I've had reported it would appear that when the
dynamic or periodic query fails, the address supplied to a client query is
that of some internal server (internal to the org hosting the DNS server,
possibly the address of the DNS server itself). Some reports have suggested
DNS hijacking but I've seen nothing that resembles that.
4. On the surface it looks as if Microsoft's main DNS servers are housed on
the same physical network segment. Determining whether this is accurate or
not is pretty difficult if you're not at the backbone level, but the
addresses for their servers appear in a single subnet range.
They may well be using something like a Cisco Distributed Director to
redirect DNS queries around the world. If that's true, one would think they
would have been able to have it replaced by now, or at least removed and let
the servers handle the queries directly.
Its actually quite astonishing that they haven't been able to get any form
of DNS up to respond to public queries. This fact certainly adds fuel to the
conspiracy theories, be that disgruntled and banned gamers seeking revenge
or some DoS against DNS that can't be filtered.
Unfortunately, unless we get an email from some private account, we're not
going to see something from MS on this until the issue is resolved (if you
don't count the PR quotes being offered by some folks by phone).
More as it uncovers itself.
Cheers,
Russ - Surgeon General of TruSecure Corporation/NTBugtraq Editor
-- Alastair
I don't think this can be right (as much as I'd like it to be) because the Playstation 2 as released in NZ is most definitely _not_ multi-region. So it can't be illegal to release a region-coded player, otherwise Sony wouldn't have just done it.
(j/k)
(o/t)
Hmm, it's a while since we've seen Sengan round here... he got booted, didn't he? (Can anybody remember what for? Something to do with Iraq if I recall?)
Anyway, welcome back!
Cheers,
Alastair
... When they know damned well they can't keep their M$ box up 15 days, while my server is sitting here chugging away at 100 days. ...
Gee, that's weird... (chooses server at random)
D:\WINNT> net statistics server
Server statistics for AKL_SVR_1
Statistics since 6/7/00 8:58 PM
That's a boot date of 6/7 (6 August for you Americans), meaning an uptime of more than 120 days so far, which is nothing out of the ordinary for the NT servers around here. The reboot on the 6/7 was to apply some patches. (That's an NT 4 SP 6a box, BTW; W2K boxes tend not to require reboots after patches, which is A Good Thing.)
It'll keep on chugging away until we need to reboot for the next set of patches, probably next year some time.
So what was your point again?
What are you talking about 'choice'? If MS was interested in offering 'choice' they would offer a product called UsefullOfficeApps v1.0 which included only about 10% of MSOffice's features and would come standard with their OS - or for $5. They are not offering 'choice' they are AGAIN using their market force to push something on computer users they dont really need - and trying to convince them its in their best interest.
Jesus, what does it take to satisfy you guys? MS _does_ offer such a product; it's called Microsoft Works, it _is_ cheap, it _does_ only offer the basic features (but enough to still be useful!) and it _does_ come standard with the OS if you buy from major vendors.
If you don't want Office, then DON'T BUY IT! If you want Office, but don't want to lease it, then BUY IT OUTRIGHT AND DON'T SUBSCRIBE TO THE LEASING MODEL!
What more do you want?
So if you don't have a backup program which works with Exchange, to back up this file you have to take the server down (manually, no scripting here) [snip]
Of course it's scriptable. Have you never heard of the NET STOP command?