While normally I shrug off most Slashdot anti-MS FUD, I've got to admit, this one's going to be a huge pain in the ass to rollout.
Normally, I just read the whitepapers, run a test on a workstation then rollout a Windows update using the free SUS server. This one, I'm going to have to rollout the update (just for XP SP1 users), figure out an update plan for Office, figure out who actually uses those image programs, etc.
And here's a question: SP2 isn't affected. Why didn't they rollout this fix in SP1 *before* rolling out SP2, if they clearly knew it needed fixing. Most companies I know (mine included) are in the middle of testing SP2 migration plans. This adds another wrinkle to the whole process.
"Listen to me, you; when I catch you, I'm gonna pull out your eyes and stick 'em down your pants, so you can watch me kick the crap outta you, okay? Then I'm gonna use your tongue to paint my boat!" -- Moe
That's funny, I don't remember an exploit. I remember a hole. I remember example exploits, but I don't recall a live exploit that did damage to any system being reported anywhere. Feel free to link me to one if you can prove me wrong here.
Look harder. Some of the proof of concepts were altered to do really malacious stuff. My Mac users go to primarily art/design sites, and that's where they found the fubared disk images (things that said stuff like "download this until Apple fixes it"). Target the audience.
The exploit did not require clicking 'disk images on the net.' It did not require any kind of carelessness or stupidity on the user's part. That's why it was considered such a serious hole.
Actually, it required going to a page that hosted a.dmg. Not many are out there.
Besides Mr. Admin, what were your Mac users doing running with admin privileges? That's the only way they could fuck up/Applications
Ah, the grand old question. My users refuse to run as anything but root. The first time I set up OS X, they were frustrated that they were being asked for their passwords. "OS 9 never did this". They never grew out of it.
About that 1 or 2 stupid things monthly... Does giving administrator accounts to the graphics department qualify?
I personally blame the Mac mindset. These staff members flat out believe their computing experience should be different than anyone else's. Everyone else in the company has a login, they don't. I figure as long as they're only fucking up their own machines and have no real access to the domain, let them play.
You can see the code. [apple.com] As for better, I'm not going to turn this into a Mac v. PC pissing contest. I know which is better, and you don't understand the Mac OS well enough to argue the point.
Actually, you see the Darwin code. You don't see anything from the GUI, which is where much of this problem lie. I understand Macs as well as most people: I own one. My primary machine is an iBook and my secondary machines at home are Windows XP and FreeBSD. It's a great desktop, but I don't think for a second it's any more secure than my FreeBSD box. And I keep my iBook locked up tighter than most people (I require special permissions to even go into "Applications", for example).
"is that it's a never-ending job, when the user is at the keyboard, doing things that I would never do. I've been telling my old 'customers' that I'm retired. I then tell them that I will give them support for free for life if they buy a Mac."
That's funny, because remember that exploit Apple had a few months back: the one where you click a disk image and it automatically ran?
We have only 4 Mac users, and 2 of them clicked disk images on the net. *2 of them*. Half of the staff. Both got weird variants of a program that basically hosed their Applications directory.
Now, if my PC users had that batting average (.500), I'd be pulling my hair out. Fortunately, we only have 1 or 2 people do stupid things monthly.
Mac is really no better, and I think if virus writers actually targetted the thing we'd see an "anti-resurgance". Personally, no OS is secure unless I can see the code.
The article doesn't mention, but they could very well be using the.NET Compact Framework, which is a hell of a lot smaller and doesn't contain any of that server stuff. There's Winforms (which they wouldn't need) but the rest would be salvagable for a couple of lego bricks.
As for using.NET for desktop apps (*shrug*), I've sure seen it. I have to deal with a lot day-to-day, and if it's a choice between pounding out a few objects and events in.NET vs. installing the latest Java VM on everyone's machine to run one app, I'll take the.NET route. Considering.NET will practically be the Official Framework (tm) for Longhorn, it'd be good to learn it now.
I think it's perfectly reasonable and acceptable that big business is going after some of the file sharing networks on nothing more than "guilt by association".
Sure, there are legal downloads on nearly all of the services, but the vast majority on, say, Kazaa is illegal. If police knew a road was being by 95 drug trafficers and 5 ordinary citizens, they'd be in the right to close the road -- regardless if those 5 raised a stink about it or not.
Quite frankly, I don't think there's a single popular P2P service ("popular" defined as, say, 1,000,000 or more users) that has a great majority of legal files over illegal. Closing down the services is just like closing down that road.
"It's like they don't get it - HDTV is about the HIGH DEFINITION not the LSTCTV (lots of stupid channels tv)."
Blame the content providers. Viacom offers massive discounts if a company gets their Nickelodean/Nick 2/Nicktoons/Nick at Nite over the standard Nickelodean package. In fact, it can sometimes cost more to just get the one channel. Viacom makes it up with having 4+ channels to advertise on instead of 1.
Got the HDTivo. Shelled out for it. Best decision I've made.
* 250 hours of regular programming. Phenominal. I still have episodes from when I first bought the thing. * OTA HDTV. It picks up a lot of channels DirecTV doesn't carry. A nice bonus.
Actually, they did the learn. The result was.NET. Look at the class structure. Clean, organized. Documentation is good too (although it's sparse for the compact version of the framework).
I think.NET and Windows 2000 are the only 2 products MS did really really well out of the box. Read up on the framework. It makes the MFC look like a piece of dung (which it essentially is).
Sure. It's the collective culture of multiple people. When the US makes bad policy decisions, do we naturally assume those are the decisions of the American people. Of course not. They're the decisions of a few leaders meant to represent many different viewpoints.
I don't think there's ever been a situation at Microsoft where all of the company's employees agreed entirely with the direction of the company. Corporate decisions are more compromises than anything.
"Umm, maybe because he has to in order to make something function the way he wants to?"
Exactly. HIM. I agree it must be a pain in the ass to translate all of that to Mono. However, his statements are blanketing: basically he's saying multiple layers of abstraction are bad in a GUI. Not true at all.
Miguel makes a semi-interesting point, but Mr. Microsoft makes a better one: why on earth would the average programmer be rooting upwards through the class tree 10 or 11 levels?
The whole point of abstraction is that Joe Programmer knows "button" derives from the next highest object. That's it. It's nice to know the other levels when you're learning the language's abstraction model for the first time/creating it, but once you get into down and dirty practical programming, you only really need to look up and down a few levels. If you're going all the way back up to Object and reconfiguring it, you're reinventing the wheel. That was the language designer's job.
"Microsoft talking design and technologies out in the open with other developers who aren't Microsoft employees?"
Microsoft doesn't. Microsoft's developers do. Check out the MS Research site and the stuff they have released (like that project on Sourceforge).
I've always said there's a big difference between the "large scary corporation" and the employees. The employees are humans like everyone else. It's only the company as a whole that's done anything truly wrong.
I don't think aspx has anything whatsoever to do with the Avalon team. Is this just an attempt at a really bad troll?
Re:Why no comparison with D3D?
on
OpenGL 2.0 Released
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· Score: 1, Insightful
"Winner technology wise?!! What are you talking about."
I'm talking about tech that D3D has and OpenGL is catching up to. Developers were using pixel shaders right out of the gate on Xbox. A lot of what's native to DirectX is (like you said) grafted onto OpenGL.
The point of a true "graphics library" is to give programmers as many high-level choices for manipulating graphics as possible. Cross-platform compatibility shouldn't be a goal. That should be handled by another layer entirely.
Also, if you're going to compare "winners", Avalon for Windows Longhorn is likely going to be installed on some 10s of millions (if not over 100 million) machines. If you don't start learning (and liking) DX now, you're going to be left behind.
Let me get this straight: you're putting Hitler, Bin Laden, G.W. Bush and Bill Gates in the SAME CAMP? My god...
Re:Why no comparison with D3D?
on
OpenGL 2.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"D3D is a proprietary windows programming API owned by Microsoft and designed for games with some incredibly ugly and arduous API semantics"
Programming anything graphic-related on the PS2 is equally as arduous, but the system is the most successful in the world. Programming simplicity does not a success make (look at Java). I think you're letting your love for Open standards blind you from the fact that D3D is flat-out the winner, technology-wise.
Re:Does this work with older cards?
on
OpenGL 2.0 Released
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· Score: -1, Troll
I've got karma to burn.
"PMS headaches" is not a scientific phrase. It's a flag. To the rest of the world that the speaker of said word is a fucking dumbass.
It ranks right up there with "morning sickness".
Seeing how you actually tried to use it in a serious sentence, I figured someone should tell you.
Unreal's OpenGL engine is crude, and it's only really there to allow Mac and Linux clients (which aren't used nearly as much as the Windows client). On Windows, D3D is the default.
Actually, Epic has it right: they released a UT2004 server for Linux first, then built the client primarily for Windows. Play to each of its strengths.
Never in the history of the world has a true democracy developed from another country coming in and pointing a gun at the head of the current leader. Never. Find me one example that this could potentially become a democracy and I'll be very impressed.
"I'll take spam and forged email over paying MSFT $.25 a message."
You might. Many of us in the business world certainly wouldn't. This stuff wastes us far more than $.25 a message. I don't care who gets the money -- if the problem was solved let the problem be solved.
"Obvious, really, but shouldn't they be listening to Apple"
No. No. No! When Apple first introduced this "revolution", I remember being at a school computer lab rushing out to get USB floppy drives. All Apple did was increase our budget for Mac machines that year (we ended up getting 1 or 2 less) and floppy continued to subsist for over 6 years.
Slashdot Mirror
While normally I shrug off most Slashdot anti-MS FUD, I've got to admit, this one's going to be a huge pain in the ass to rollout.
Normally, I just read the whitepapers, run a test on a workstation then rollout a Windows update using the free SUS server. This one, I'm going to have to rollout the update (just for XP SP1 users), figure out an update plan for Office, figure out who actually uses those image programs, etc.
And here's a question: SP2 isn't affected. Why didn't they rollout this fix in SP1 *before* rolling out SP2, if they clearly knew it needed fixing. Most companies I know (mine included) are in the middle of testing SP2 migration plans. This adds another wrinkle to the whole process.
"Listen to me, you; when I catch you, I'm gonna pull out your eyes and stick 'em down your pants, so you can watch me kick the crap outta you, okay? Then I'm gonna use your tongue to paint my boat!" -- Moe
That's funny, I don't remember an exploit. I remember a hole. I remember example exploits, but I don't recall a live exploit that did damage to any system being reported anywhere. Feel free to link me to one if you can prove me wrong here.
.dmg. Not many are out there.
/Applications
Look harder. Some of the proof of concepts were altered to do really malacious stuff. My Mac users go to primarily art/design sites, and that's where they found the fubared disk images (things that said stuff like "download this until Apple fixes it"). Target the audience.
The exploit did not require clicking 'disk images on the net.' It did not require any kind of carelessness or stupidity on the user's part. That's why it was considered such a serious hole.
Actually, it required going to a page that hosted a
Besides Mr. Admin, what were your Mac users doing running with admin privileges? That's the only way they could fuck up
Ah, the grand old question. My users refuse to run as anything but root. The first time I set up OS X, they were frustrated that they were being asked for their passwords. "OS 9 never did this". They never grew out of it.
About that 1 or 2 stupid things monthly... Does giving administrator accounts to the graphics department qualify?
I personally blame the Mac mindset. These staff members flat out believe their computing experience should be different than anyone else's. Everyone else in the company has a login, they don't. I figure as long as they're only fucking up their own machines and have no real access to the domain, let them play.
You can see the code. [apple.com] As for better, I'm not going to turn this into a Mac v. PC pissing contest. I know which is better, and you don't understand the Mac OS well enough to argue the point.
Actually, you see the Darwin code. You don't see anything from the GUI, which is where much of this problem lie. I understand Macs as well as most people: I own one. My primary machine is an iBook and my secondary machines at home are Windows XP and FreeBSD. It's a great desktop, but I don't think for a second it's any more secure than my FreeBSD box. And I keep my iBook locked up tighter than most people (I require special permissions to even go into "Applications", for example).
*sigh* iDon'tThinkSo.
"is that it's a never-ending job, when the user is at the keyboard, doing things that I would never do.
I've been telling my old 'customers' that I'm retired. I then tell them that I will give them support for free for life if they buy a Mac."
That's funny, because remember that exploit Apple had a few months back: the one where you click a disk image and it automatically ran?
We have only 4 Mac users, and 2 of them clicked disk images on the net. *2 of them*. Half of the staff. Both got weird variants of a program that basically hosed their Applications directory.
Now, if my PC users had that batting average (.500), I'd be pulling my hair out. Fortunately, we only have 1 or 2 people do stupid things monthly.
Mac is really no better, and I think if virus writers actually targetted the thing we'd see an "anti-resurgance". Personally, no OS is secure unless I can see the code.
The article doesn't mention, but they could very well be using the .NET Compact Framework, which is a hell of a lot smaller and doesn't contain any of that server stuff. There's Winforms (which they wouldn't need) but the rest would be salvagable for a couple of lego bricks.
.NET for desktop apps (*shrug*), I've sure seen it. I have to deal with a lot day-to-day, and if it's a choice between pounding out a few objects and events in .NET vs. installing the latest Java VM on everyone's machine to run one app, I'll take the .NET route. Considering .NET will practically be the Official Framework (tm) for Longhorn, it'd be good to learn it now.
As for using
I think it's perfectly reasonable and acceptable that big business is going after some of the file sharing networks on nothing more than "guilt by association".
Sure, there are legal downloads on nearly all of the services, but the vast majority on, say, Kazaa is illegal. If police knew a road was being by 95 drug trafficers and 5 ordinary citizens, they'd be in the right to close the road -- regardless if those 5 raised a stink about it or not.
Quite frankly, I don't think there's a single popular P2P service ("popular" defined as, say, 1,000,000 or more users) that has a great majority of legal files over illegal. Closing down the services is just like closing down that road.
"It's like they don't get it - HDTV is about the HIGH DEFINITION not the LSTCTV (lots of stupid channels tv)."
Blame the content providers. Viacom offers massive discounts if a company gets their Nickelodean/Nick 2/Nicktoons/Nick at Nite over the standard Nickelodean package. In fact, it can sometimes cost more to just get the one channel. Viacom makes it up with having 4+ channels to advertise on instead of 1.
Got the HDTivo. Shelled out for it. Best decision I've made.
* 250 hours of regular programming. Phenominal. I still have episodes from when I first bought the thing.
* OTA HDTV. It picks up a lot of channels DirecTV doesn't carry. A nice bonus.
Actually, they did the learn. The result was .NET. Look at the class structure. Clean, organized. Documentation is good too (although it's sparse for the compact version of the framework).
.NET and Windows 2000 are the only 2 products MS did really really well out of the box. Read up on the framework. It makes the MFC look like a piece of dung (which it essentially is).
I think
"Could you elaborate on what you were saying?"
Sure. It's the collective culture of multiple people. When the US makes bad policy decisions, do we naturally assume those are the decisions of the American people. Of course not. They're the decisions of a few leaders meant to represent many different viewpoints.
I don't think there's ever been a situation at Microsoft where all of the company's employees agreed entirely with the direction of the company. Corporate decisions are more compromises than anything.
"Umm, maybe because he has to in order to make something function the way he wants to?"
Exactly. HIM. I agree it must be a pain in the ass to translate all of that to Mono. However, his statements are blanketing: basically he's saying multiple layers of abstraction are bad in a GUI. Not true at all.
Miguel makes a semi-interesting point, but Mr. Microsoft makes a better one: why on earth would the average programmer be rooting upwards through the class tree 10 or 11 levels?
The whole point of abstraction is that Joe Programmer knows "button" derives from the next highest object. That's it. It's nice to know the other levels when you're learning the language's abstraction model for the first time/creating it, but once you get into down and dirty practical programming, you only really need to look up and down a few levels. If you're going all the way back up to Object and reconfiguring it, you're reinventing the wheel. That was the language designer's job.
"Microsoft talking design and technologies out in the open with other developers who aren't Microsoft employees?"
Microsoft doesn't. Microsoft's developers do. Check out the MS Research site and the stuff they have released (like that project on Sourceforge).
I've always said there's a big difference between the "large scary corporation" and the employees. The employees are humans like everyone else. It's only the company as a whole that's done anything truly wrong.
I don't think aspx has anything whatsoever to do with the Avalon team. Is this just an attempt at a really bad troll?
"Winner technology wise?!! What are you talking about."
I'm talking about tech that D3D has and OpenGL is catching up to. Developers were using pixel shaders right out of the gate on Xbox. A lot of what's native to DirectX is (like you said) grafted onto OpenGL.
The point of a true "graphics library" is to give programmers as many high-level choices for manipulating graphics as possible. Cross-platform compatibility shouldn't be a goal. That should be handled by another layer entirely.
Also, if you're going to compare "winners", Avalon for Windows Longhorn is likely going to be installed on some 10s of millions (if not over 100 million) machines. If you don't start learning (and liking) DX now, you're going to be left behind.
Let me get this straight: you're putting Hitler, Bin Laden, G.W. Bush and Bill Gates in the SAME CAMP? My god...
"D3D is a proprietary windows programming API owned by Microsoft and designed for games with some incredibly ugly and arduous API semantics"
Programming anything graphic-related on the PS2 is equally as arduous, but the system is the most successful in the world. Programming simplicity does not a success make (look at Java). I think you're letting your love for Open standards blind you from the fact that D3D is flat-out the winner, technology-wise.
I've got karma to burn.
"PMS headaches" is not a scientific phrase. It's a flag. To the rest of the world that the speaker of said word is a fucking dumbass.
It ranks right up there with "morning sickness".
Seeing how you actually tried to use it in a serious sentence, I figured someone should tell you.
Unreal's OpenGL engine is crude, and it's only really there to allow Mac and Linux clients (which aren't used nearly as much as the Windows client). On Windows, D3D is the default.
Actually, Epic has it right: they released a UT2004 server for Linux first, then built the client primarily for Windows. Play to each of its strengths.
"Unemployment is currently at the same level that Clinton ran on in the 1996 election, 5.4%."
And did the employment rate plummet in the same way during the first 4 years of Clinton's presidency as it has with Bush?
Never in the history of the world has a true democracy developed from another country coming in and pointing a gun at the head of the current leader. Never. Find me one example that this could potentially become a democracy and I'll be very impressed.
"unsung heroes of Open Source out there whose names may not be on the tips of everyones tongues"
Define "everyone". Ask mom who Bill Gates is and she'll probably know. Ask mom who Linus Torvalds is and expect a blank stare.
"I'll take spam and forged email over paying MSFT $.25 a message."
You might. Many of us in the business world certainly wouldn't. This stuff wastes us far more than $.25 a message. I don't care who gets the money -- if the problem was solved let the problem be solved.
"Obvious, really, but shouldn't they be listening to Apple"
No. No. No! When Apple first introduced this "revolution", I remember being at a school computer lab rushing out to get USB floppy drives. All Apple did was increase our budget for Mac machines that year (we ended up getting 1 or 2 less) and floppy continued to subsist for over 6 years.