This program does NOT remove IE. It just makes it look like it removed IE. The functionality is still there, and IE can be pieced back together with a couple lines of visual basic. Even says as much at your link.
MS could NOT use this method to remove IE from the windows distribution. They would have to remove several system components that would destroy the functionality of hundreds of apps.
Actually, Soft-Ice can run on any real mode OS with no problem. It can even be used to debug the BIOS or boot sector with no OS loaded. Thus, being able to run Soft-Ice on freeDOS does not indicate a level of MSDOS compatiblity for freeDOS.
Why do you say a bunch of old DOS acronyms are the hallmark of poor design and exposure? All OS's have data structures with names. All non-protected OS's have accessable data structures. So what you say is just a non-sequitor.
Main problem with DOS
on
FreeDOS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The main problem with DOS is that it runs in real-mode, and therefore has a 1mb addressable memory limit.
Aside from this problem, a web server running on DOS could be more scalable than *nix or NT. The reason for this is simple: there would be no operating system overhead. An implementatin that eschewed the kernel paradigm, stayed away from threads and processes, could be able to handle a lot of connections.
To be clear; MS did ship something called COM+ in Windows 2000, but it wasnt the COM+ project, it was just a bunch of bug fixes, the COM+ team did not make the ship date, but they had to ship something with the name for marketing reasons.
Hey, the thing described in the article is what they used to call COM+ until they didn't make the ship date for Windows 2000.
Make no mistake,.NET is pure FUD. Its a name made up by marketing one day, and development was told to make something that would fit into the marketing scheme.
.NETs only substance is a java clone, passport and messenger.
You are correct. However, in this case there is no single "smoking gun". Its a thousand little tiny pieces, that, even if they are able to piece it altogether, they have to now convince a judge and jury of the interpretation.
You can imagine building a version of Windows that has all of IE ripped out. Now you have to convince people that it really is still windows, that IE really is ripped out, and that it really is still as functional as it started. This you will have an extremely hard time doing, because of course MS will try to find a case where your version causes a GPF or DLL not found error or just any minor glitch where the original does not have it. And sadly, you could do this between every weekly build of windows even without major labotomy surgery.
I'm not totally kidding. People are always saying how its not that original, not that good. Well ok, but it *is* oddly compelling. I didn't really think the writing was great, or the story, or anything. But I was totally addicted. I couldn't explain it. I have talked to many other people who had similar experience.
It was like having a hypnotist whispering "you love this book" in your ear while youread. Really odd.
Making the books electronic would make their mad schemes even easier, since they can actually flash subliminal messages, which is a lot easier than encoding them with some arcane method into the text of the book.
Its true! I'm sure it is! How else could I get so engrossed into a kiddy book?
No chance. I have seen the code for Windows, and its not so pretty. Most of it is written in x86 assembly, with convenions for working with 286s and other obscure stuff, not to mentions of lot of hacking for DOS compatibility and other 3rd party OS enhancers.
Office may be legible, but large parts of Windows is not, at least for the average programmer.
It takes more than a week to just figure out how to even build a single core component in the NT source base, this with full cooperation from the build team. The windows 95 source base is so arcane nobody really understands it.
I know this because I have worked on both code bases.
You think you know how large Windows source base is, but you have misjudged. It is really huge. It was written by hundreds of different companies, tens of thousands of developers. Over 20 years. Mainly in assembly. Always under time pressure, not always with code review.
No my friend, the task of proving your case is much larger than you think. This of course is what MS is counting on: the government does not have the ability to analyse the code and make any sort of determination about what can and cannot be changed.
Your own logic answers your question. You say that the digital copies are higher quality than CDs. But the market has clearly shown that CD quality is "good enough". Thus, no higher quality master is necessary [since digital copies are losses]
Many people here has commented that copy protection will always be broken by crackers. But in the case of music and movies, the reality is "worse" than that. The logic of the corporations is that it will take time and effort to crack each version of the protection, which will ensure the short-term value of a new cd or DVD.
What their logic misses completely is that the copy protection scheme *does not have to be cracked*. A one-time digital-to-analog-to-digital copy is indistinguishable from the original. Thus, all one needs to do is play the thing normally and record it digitally.
You can see how the suits think about this: they know that copying loses quality, and that people care about that. What they are confused about is that although in fact multi-generational analog copies lose quality quickly, a one-time analog copy to digital copy does not.
Wait a minute. You said "No TV - No computer games" and this somehow validates your point? I think not. Would you let your kids hang around playing poker all day and that would be OK because its not electronic? And what does TV have to do with the debate?
My friend, it is you that is mired in confusion.
If your children use the computer as a learning device, they will indeed learn the concepts of mathematics and improve their reading and writing skills much quicker than without. Assuming you guide them properly. Perhaps it is you who are ignorant of the power of the computer? You gave them games, but did you give them Mathematica?
EQ reminds me of a psych test a friend of mine made in college. It was a video game similar to space invaders where he wanted to see how people adapt and optimize thier strategy. In his game, the optimal strategy was to sit in the left corner and only shoot at a special ship that came by periodically (just hold the fire button down), and ignore all everything else. There was a contest with a money prize after a couple of weeks for high score. Not one player in his test found the strategy; they all got confused and ran amok shooting worthless stuff. Sort of like the computer in "War Games" only the real humans never figured it out.
Everquest is a totally mindless game. Like the game of LIFE, it has zero strategy or tactics. If you think it does, remember the psych test.
How about an OS that isn't self wounding? Then we wouldnt need the self healing feature!
Many users do not want it! Cannot tolerate it!
on
Read the Fine Print
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· Score: 2, Informative
I worked on the original Windows Update in windows 98. Before I left the project in disgust. Many people wanted to make it do automatic updates, and I adamantly opposed it, for all the obvious reasons. Cooler heads won the day. Apparently all the cooler heads went away and now only the Bozos are left.
Automatic updates is impossible to do without destroying some percent of the the machines. Windows configurations can be very complicated, and very customized. Many many people use precise bit images of their machines to ensure reliability, repeatability, and consistency. If this automatic update thing kicks in against their will, chaos will ensue.
The light at the end of the tunnel I can see is that this clause will not free Microsoft from responsibility of destroying data. Which will happen. Then I think they can be sued willy nilly.
The idea I think is rather than nit-pick each point he makes to find reasons why their not true, take each one and understand in whhat way it is true.
For example, of course its true that computers allow some people to do things they couldnt do with computers. But really think about the large chunk of people who dont get real benefit from their computer skills; spending too much time writing memos with fancy fonts and spell checking, typing in their checkbooks to balance, things that people spent less time on in the past. I know many people who do things with their computers they couldnt do before, but these are things they dont NEED to be doing now. In the end, for a huge group of people, computers waste more time than they save.
Heres the deal; most people think they are doing good at their job. Even those that are not. Now as the programmer, just because you think you are gods gift to this green earth doesnt mean you are. In fact, you may be a drag on the teams productivity.
Indeed, if you really are great, then you are easy to manage and the managers job is easy. However, if you actually are only mediocre, but think you are great, the manager has a big job getting you up to speed.
Unfortunately, as a manager you have to learn to deal with great programmers, and not-so-great programmers.
In the end, if the non-so-great programmer does not improve, and becomes unhappy about your efforts to help them improve, then you fire them.
You are going to have a rough time in management if your main goal is pleasing the tech staff. Quite the opposite, a manager's job is often to kick some butt and get people out of their comfortable zones. Too often, business as usual is not good enough, and its the manager's job to get people to perform better and faster. Encouraging people to expand themselves and their abilities doesnt always come easy.
This doens't mean you have to be a jerk to do your job! But you also cant be a fawning enabler who helps employees underperform.
Management is a skill, very different from coding, and not usually as pleasant. It is your job to make the right decisions, even when they are unpopular, perhaps even when it hurts someones feelings. Secondary to making the right decisions is making people happy about the decisions you make; certainly thats a good thing to do, but the priority is clear!
Oh, very important note if you use TCP in your game. You have to turn off buffering or your lag will be incredibly bad. The manual might say something like never do this because it spams the network and is very inefficient. What this means is that your bandwidth (bytes/sec) goes down with buffering off. But thats ok because you dont care about bytes per second, just time between packets. You have to be sure your server does not send packets as fast as possible, but on a schedule otherwise you will send to many packets and flood the network.
Slashdot Mirror
This program does NOT remove IE. It just makes it look like it removed IE. The functionality is still there, and IE can be pieced back together with a couple lines of visual basic. Even says as much at your link.
MS could NOT use this method to remove IE from the windows distribution. They would have to remove several system components that would destroy the functionality of hundreds of apps.
Of course the memory model would have to be different, switching between real and p-mode would sucl. Maybe run in "Real Big Mode".
PC-DOS *is* MSDOS, only under a different name, maybe with a few different utilities.
Actually, Soft-Ice can run on any real mode OS with no problem. It can even be used to debug the BIOS or boot sector with no OS loaded. Thus, being able to run Soft-Ice on freeDOS does not indicate a level of MSDOS compatiblity for freeDOS.
Why do you say a bunch of old DOS acronyms are the hallmark of poor design and exposure? All OS's have data structures with names. All non-protected OS's have accessable data structures. So what you say is just a non-sequitor.
The main problem with DOS is that it runs in real-mode, and therefore has a 1mb addressable memory limit.
Aside from this problem, a web server running on DOS could be more scalable than *nix or NT. The reason for this is simple: there would be no operating system overhead. An implementatin that eschewed the kernel paradigm, stayed away from threads and processes, could be able to handle a lot of connections.
To be clear; MS did ship something called COM+ in Windows 2000, but it wasnt the COM+ project, it was just a bunch of bug fixes, the COM+ team did not make the ship date, but they had to ship something with the name for marketing reasons.
Hey, the thing described in the article is what they used to call COM+ until they didn't make the ship date for Windows 2000.
.NET is pure FUD. Its a name made up by marketing one day, and development was told to make something that would fit into the marketing scheme.
Make no mistake,
.NETs only substance is a java clone, passport and messenger.
You are correct. However, in this case there is no single "smoking gun". Its a thousand little tiny pieces, that, even if they are able to piece it altogether, they have to now convince a judge and jury of the interpretation.
You can imagine building a version of Windows that has all of IE ripped out. Now you have to convince people that it really is still windows, that IE really is ripped out, and that it really is still as functional as it started. This you will have an extremely hard time doing, because of course MS will try to find a case where your version causes a GPF or DLL not found error or just any minor glitch where the original does not have it. And sadly, you could do this between every weekly build of windows even without major labotomy surgery.
I'm not totally kidding. People are always saying how its not that original, not that good. Well ok, but it *is* oddly compelling. I didn't really think the writing was great, or the story, or anything. But I was totally addicted. I couldn't explain it. I have talked to many other people who had similar experience.
It was like having a hypnotist whispering "you love this book" in your ear while youread. Really odd.
Making the books electronic would make their mad schemes even easier, since they can actually flash subliminal messages, which is a lot easier than encoding them with some arcane method into the text of the book.
Its true! I'm sure it is! How else could I get so engrossed into a kiddy book?
No chance. I have seen the code for Windows, and its not so pretty. Most of it is written in x86 assembly, with convenions for working with 286s and other obscure stuff, not to mentions of lot of hacking for DOS compatibility and other 3rd party OS enhancers.
Office may be legible, but large parts of Windows is not, at least for the average programmer.
Most of Windows is assembly, not C.
It takes more than a week to just figure out how to even build a single core component in the NT source base, this with full cooperation from the build team. The windows 95 source base is so arcane nobody really understands it.
I know this because I have worked on both code bases.
You think you know how large Windows source base is, but you have misjudged. It is really huge. It was written by hundreds of different companies, tens of thousands of developers. Over 20 years. Mainly in assembly. Always under time pressure, not always with code review.
No my friend, the task of proving your case is much larger than you think. This of course is what MS is counting on: the government does not have the ability to analyse the code and make any sort of determination about what can and cannot be changed.
Your own logic answers your question. You say that the digital copies are higher quality than CDs. But the market has clearly shown that CD quality is "good enough". Thus, no higher quality master is necessary [since digital copies are losses]
Many people here has commented that copy protection will always be broken by crackers. But in the case of music and movies, the reality is "worse" than that. The logic of the corporations is that it will take time and effort to crack each version of the protection, which will ensure the short-term value of a new cd or DVD.
What their logic misses completely is that the copy protection scheme *does not have to be cracked*. A one-time digital-to-analog-to-digital copy is indistinguishable from the original. Thus, all one needs to do is play the thing normally and record it digitally.
You can see how the suits think about this: they know that copying loses quality, and that people care about that. What they are confused about is that although in fact multi-generational analog copies lose quality quickly, a one-time analog copy to digital copy does not.
Wait a minute. You said "No TV - No computer games" and this somehow validates your point? I think not. Would you let your kids hang around playing poker all day and that would be OK because its not electronic? And what does TV have to do with the debate?
My friend, it is you that is mired in confusion.
If your children use the computer as a learning device, they will indeed learn the concepts of mathematics and improve their reading and writing skills much quicker than without. Assuming you guide them properly. Perhaps it is you who are ignorant of the power of the computer? You gave them games, but did you give them Mathematica?
A powerful Swahili.
Oh I forgot, its really 'Role Playing Game'. Anyone who can say that just couldn't have played a 'real' role playing game. I'm just sure of it.
EQ reminds me of a psych test a friend of mine made in college. It was a video game similar to space invaders where he wanted to see how people adapt and optimize thier strategy. In his game, the optimal strategy was to sit in the left corner and only shoot at a special ship that came by periodically (just hold the fire button down), and ignore all everything else. There was a contest with a money prize after a couple of weeks for high score. Not one player in his test found the strategy; they all got confused and ran amok shooting worthless stuff. Sort of like the computer in "War Games" only the real humans never figured it out.
Everquest is a totally mindless game. Like the game of LIFE, it has zero strategy or tactics. If you think it does, remember the psych test.
Mean or not, I think you should be modded up!
How about an OS that isn't self wounding? Then we wouldnt need the self healing feature!
I worked on the original Windows Update in windows 98. Before I left the project in disgust. Many people wanted to make it do automatic updates, and I adamantly opposed it, for all the obvious reasons. Cooler heads won the day. Apparently all the cooler heads went away and now only the Bozos are left.
Automatic updates is impossible to do without destroying some percent of the the machines. Windows configurations can be very complicated, and very customized. Many many people use precise bit images of their machines to ensure reliability, repeatability, and consistency. If this automatic update thing kicks in against their will, chaos will ensue.
The light at the end of the tunnel I can see is that this clause will not free Microsoft from responsibility of destroying data. Which will happen. Then I think they can be sued willy nilly.
The idea I think is rather than nit-pick each point he makes to find reasons why their not true, take each one and understand in whhat way it is true.
For example, of course its true that computers allow some people to do things they couldnt do with computers. But really think about the large chunk of people who dont get real benefit from their computer skills; spending too much time writing memos with fancy fonts and spell checking, typing in their checkbooks to balance, things that people spent less time on in the past. I know many people who do things with their computers they couldnt do before, but these are things they dont NEED to be doing now. In the end, for a huge group of people, computers waste more time than they save.
Heres the deal; most people think they are doing good at their job. Even those that are not. Now as the programmer, just because you think you are gods gift to this green earth doesnt mean you are. In fact, you may be a drag on the teams productivity.
Indeed, if you really are great, then you are easy to manage and the managers job is easy. However, if you actually are only mediocre, but think you are great, the manager has a big job getting you up to speed.
Unfortunately, as a manager you have to learn to deal with great programmers, and not-so-great programmers.
In the end, if the non-so-great programmer does not improve, and becomes unhappy about your efforts to help them improve, then you fire them.
You are going to have a rough time in management if your main goal is pleasing the tech staff. Quite the opposite, a manager's job is often to kick some butt and get people out of their comfortable zones. Too often, business as usual is not good enough, and its the manager's job to get people to perform better and faster. Encouraging people to expand themselves and their abilities doesnt always come easy.
This doens't mean you have to be a jerk to do your job! But you also cant be a fawning enabler who helps employees underperform.
Management is a skill, very different from coding, and not usually as pleasant. It is your job to make the right decisions, even when they are unpopular, perhaps even when it hurts someones feelings. Secondary to making the right decisions is making people happy about the decisions you make; certainly thats a good thing to do, but the priority is clear!
Oh, very important note if you use TCP in your game. You have to turn off buffering or your lag will be incredibly bad. The manual might say something like never do this because it spams the network and is very inefficient. What this means is that your bandwidth (bytes/sec) goes down with buffering off. But thats ok because you dont care about bytes per second, just time between packets. You have to be sure your server does not send packets as fast as possible, but on a schedule otherwise you will send to many packets and flood the network.