Not a whole hell of a lot from what I've seen. I apply a lot of patches without restarting and the patch takes effect. It seems like putting in the ol' "Your computer must be restarted for the changes to take effect" thing is just to cover their bases to ensure that the patch has taken effect. One thing to note, sometimes if you don't restart and you go back to Windows Updated, it'll list some of the patches you've already applied. I'm not too sure why. I thought it was just registry entries that indicated which patches had been applied...
"The incident only reinforced to everyone here the value of pdf files and that MS Reader is beyond worthless."
Um....interesting story but where was the part that showed MS Reader was beyond worthless? I saw the part where your company got screwed over by not having backups of the original files but not the part where it showed MS Reader to be "beyond worthless".
Well you better shut your computer down and quit posting on slashdot. Every little bit counts right? Wouldn't want contribute to global warming in any way. Might as well get rid of the computer and tv (if you have one). Back to oil lamps and candles. Of course, production of those is done in factories often which requires power to run so we better not bother with that. You might as well roll your own candles if you need any light while it's dark out to do something like read a book. Make sure you don't buy any books coming off a printing press though. Those things require power to run nowadays. Can you believe it? It's insane! Maybe the best idea is to stand in the middle of a square foot chunk of land and just wait until the whole world magically becomes better. Anyways, back to my mud hut for the night.
The authentication issue is mentioned in the Windows list as well at #3 so they did account for that.
The clear text part though doesn't seem to be accounted for in windows systems unless you count it mentioning IIS. Though I suppose you could view it as them realizing it's a UNIX controlled server world so this is more prevelent on UNIX machines than Windows and also the fact that Windows has other more pressing vulnerabilities ahead of clear text protocols.
"Currently, in the US, it is illegal to write or knowingly spread a malicious virus or trojan. Isn't the Microsoft Windows series of operating systems guilty of spreading malicious viruses and trojans?"
I think you answered your own question in your post. Either that or it was meant to be rhetorical. Knowingly spread. Knowingly. It may spread them but it's not like the OS is going "Sweet, spreading the new SoBig worm now. Next I might give Melissa a call and see what she's been up to. It's been so long since she crawled over my bandwidth"
"So regardless of whether you like it, the minor annoyance served a good purpose and was actually a fairly clever design decision. Much smarter than, oh, allowing macro viruses to execute by default"
And in putting that line in you went from what was likely to be a -1 Troll/Flamebait/Offtopic to +5 Informative. Well done:)
Do people even know what obligatory means anymore? I think all the "Obligatory X quote" comments on slashdot have ruined that word. For the lowdown, obligatory means that there is an obligation to do it. That it *has* to be done. Now, obligatory Simpsons quotes, ok. Those are borderline obligation here. But Dusty Baker? Come on. You had no obligation to make that quote. You just wanted to. Which is perfectly fine and all but...
It doesn't matter what the regular person would have to donate in comparison. That's just your excuse to try and take away the fact that he actually is generous person with his money b/c it makes you feel more comfortable to fit in with his total borg persona. Tax write off or not, he still donated the money.
Good freaking god! What is with the overabundance of qoutes these days? It's not a damned "invalid" registration number. It's just an invalid registration number. It's not a foreign concept. It's not something that nobody knows about. It's not a new word. It's not some crazy device only in imagination stage so we have to place air quotes around it when talking about it. It's just a regular everyday word so no need to quote the bloody thing!
"But it's not deceptive, when everybody in the industry does the exact same thing."
Well actually it is deceptive. They're advertising what isn't actually there. Just b/c everybody does it doesn't make it right and/or non-deceptive.
"Anyway, there's lots of these kinds of small annoyances, but consumers have to educate themselves."
Yes but should they be required to know this kind of info just b/c "producers try to deceive us so we should know all the minute details of this purchase"?
"If everybody in a given product category is consistent, it's not such a big deal."
That definitely makes it much easier but the underlying logic here says that each producer should try to deceive the consumer in the same way to make it easier for them. Maybe it's just me but that seems like a strange way of thinking.
"If being annoying was grounds for a suit, we'd all spend the rest of our lives in court."
I think 50% of the population is involved in some form of court action right now and seems to be growing by the minute.
"I don't like what you said! I'm suing for slander!"
"I got deceived! I'm suing for fraud!"
"I tripped b/c I'm a freaking clumsy moron! I'm suing Nike for not providing non-trippable shoes. And I'll sue the sidewalk makers too for making them so damn hard to land on!"
Related? Are you sure? So you're saying hard drive size ~= product price labelling??
I think product price labelling without tax is different. Mainly b/c every person knows tax will be added after and understands the concept of tax so can take that into account. Not everybody knows that 1000 MB != 1 GB so can't take that into account during their purchase choice.
Both are minor annoyance but I think one should be dealt with sooner than the other. Guess which one? I'll give you a hint. It has nothing to do with hard drives.
The downloaders computer is actually making the company. The uploader is simply providing the means to get the copy just like the author stated.
So to put it in the light he's looking at it: The uploader sends the bits (loans the cd) and the downloader copies the bits (burns the cd). The analogy fits when looked at that way.
Of course, this is one of those round and round arguments that could go on forever:)
"but maybe a lot of other human-created docs could be leniant on typos, as long as the word contains all the necessary letters and the first and last letters are in place."
No. Until the actual language itself is changed people should still abide by the rules the language sets out however crazy they may be. Rules tend to be there for a reason.
Awesome post. You forget to mention one thing but I suppose it's slightly related to Defense in Depth as you described it. Using Design by Contract, rather than the function itself validating it's own input, the client code calling that function should have validated it before it called that function.
If that function had documented itself such that client functions know it will return correct results as long as you pass it proper data (multiple of 8, = 16), then it's completely up to the client code to ensure that data is valid before calling the function. If anything goes wrong due to invalid data, the client code is at fault and should be fixed rather than the function itself being modified (as was the case in this fix).
Not to say they were wrong for doing the fix this way. It's probably the quickest and most effective way to get the fix out quickly without having to pour through multiple source code files to ensure all calls to that function (though I can't see there would be very many) and this particular check will not have a great performance penalty.
When will M$ learn that their crappy WinDoze software is just a bug ridden mess of......excuse me, what? Linux....crash??!?! I have dreamed a dream and now that dream is gone....
"Bill Gates must know as well as any programmer (and I use the word 'programmer' in its loosest possible sense)"
I know ol' Bill has gotten quite a bad rep around here but a bad programmer should not be one of them. He was programming computers back when there were no programming languages. Seriously. Like or hate his business ethics, the man is a truly gifted programmer. Any tidbit I have read about his actual programming skills has come up with nothing but aclaim even from people who hate the man.
In life you have to be reasonable. Don't let your emotions blind you. He may be a crooked, deceitful, underhanded (and hugely successful thus far) business man but it sure as hell wasn't being stupid that allowed him to build the world's largest software company.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a whole hell of a lot from what I've seen. I apply a lot of patches without restarting and the patch takes effect. It seems like putting in the ol' "Your computer must be restarted for the changes to take effect" thing is just to cover their bases to ensure that the patch has taken effect. One thing to note, sometimes if you don't restart and you go back to Windows Updated, it'll list some of the patches you've already applied. I'm not too sure why. I thought it was just registry entries that indicated which patches had been applied...
"The incident only reinforced to everyone here the value of pdf files and that MS Reader is beyond worthless."
Um....interesting story but where was the part that showed MS Reader was beyond worthless? I saw the part where your company got screwed over by not having backups of the original files but not the part where it showed MS Reader to be "beyond worthless".
Well you better shut your computer down and quit posting on slashdot. Every little bit counts right? Wouldn't want contribute to global warming in any way. Might as well get rid of the computer and tv (if you have one). Back to oil lamps and candles. Of course, production of those is done in factories often which requires power to run so we better not bother with that. You might as well roll your own candles if you need any light while it's dark out to do something like read a book. Make sure you don't buy any books coming off a printing press though. Those things require power to run nowadays. Can you believe it? It's insane! Maybe the best idea is to stand in the middle of a square foot chunk of land and just wait until the whole world magically becomes better. Anyways, back to my mud hut for the night.
The authentication issue is mentioned in the Windows list as well at #3 so they did account for that.
The clear text part though doesn't seem to be accounted for in windows systems unless you count it mentioning IIS. Though I suppose you could view it as them realizing it's a UNIX controlled server world so this is more prevelent on UNIX machines than Windows and also the fact that Windows has other more pressing vulnerabilities ahead of clear text protocols.
"Currently, in the US, it is illegal to write or knowingly spread a malicious virus or trojan. Isn't the Microsoft Windows series of operating systems guilty of spreading malicious viruses and trojans?"
I think you answered your own question in your post. Either that or it was meant to be rhetorical. Knowingly spread. Knowingly. It may spread them but it's not like the OS is going "Sweet, spreading the new SoBig worm now. Next I might give Melissa a call and see what she's been up to. It's been so long since she crawled over my bandwidth"
At least be semi-original
All your cola are belong to Pepsi
"So regardless of whether you like it, the minor annoyance served a good purpose and was actually a fairly clever design decision. Much smarter than, oh, allowing macro viruses to execute by default"
:)
And in putting that line in you went from what was likely to be a -1 Troll/Flamebait/Offtopic to +5 Informative. Well done
Do people even know what obligatory means anymore? I think all the "Obligatory X quote" comments on slashdot have ruined that word. For the lowdown, obligatory means that there is an obligation to do it. That it *has* to be done. Now, obligatory Simpsons quotes, ok. Those are borderline obligation here. But Dusty Baker? Come on. You had no obligation to make that quote. You just wanted to. Which is perfectly fine and all but...
Toss in an analogy of technology as a girlfriend and the geeks shall unite with many a +1 Insightful.
:)
Now every geek shall proclaim loud across the land. "I have a girlfriend!! And her name is technology!"
Not that I don't agree with your post
It doesn't matter what the regular person would have to donate in comparison. That's just your excuse to try and take away the fact that he actually is generous person with his money b/c it makes you feel more comfortable to fit in with his total borg persona. Tax write off or not, he still donated the money.
What did you donate today?
Good freaking god! What is with the overabundance of qoutes these days? It's not a damned "invalid" registration number. It's just an invalid registration number. It's not a foreign concept. It's not something that nobody knows about. It's not a new word. It's not some crazy device only in imagination stage so we have to place air quotes around it when talking about it. It's just a regular everyday word so no need to quote the bloody thing!
Knock off the "quotes" please!!!
Then let them fail or succeed on their own merits rather than trying to sabotage one or the other.
Hmmm....touche. Never thougt about people that don't have to do that. Damn me and posting at /. before going to bed! :)
A file server holding strictly uncompressed video or any type of large files?
"But it's not deceptive, when everybody in the industry does the exact same thing."
Well actually it is deceptive. They're advertising what isn't actually there. Just b/c everybody does it doesn't make it right and/or non-deceptive.
"Anyway, there's lots of these kinds of small annoyances, but consumers have to educate themselves."
Yes but should they be required to know this kind of info just b/c "producers try to deceive us so we should know all the minute details of this purchase"?
"If everybody in a given product category is consistent, it's not such a big deal."
That definitely makes it much easier but the underlying logic here says that each producer should try to deceive the consumer in the same way to make it easier for them. Maybe it's just me but that seems like a strange way of thinking.
"If being annoying was grounds for a suit, we'd all spend the rest of our lives in court."
I think 50% of the population is involved in some form of court action right now and seems to be growing by the minute.
"I don't like what you said! I'm suing for slander!"
"I got deceived! I'm suing for fraud!"
"I tripped b/c I'm a freaking clumsy moron! I'm suing Nike for not providing non-trippable shoes. And I'll sue the sidewalk makers too for making them so damn hard to land on!"
What a world.
Related? Are you sure? So you're saying hard drive size ~= product price labelling??
I think product price labelling without tax is different. Mainly b/c every person knows tax will be added after and understands the concept of tax so can take that into account. Not everybody knows that 1000 MB != 1 GB so can't take that into account during their purchase choice.
Both are minor annoyance but I think one should be dealt with sooner than the other. Guess which one? I'll give you a hint. It has nothing to do with hard drives.
"making the company" should obviously be "making the copy"
:)
There's a preview button???
The downloaders computer is actually making the company. The uploader is simply providing the means to get the copy just like the author stated.
:)
So to put it in the light he's looking at it: The uploader sends the bits (loans the cd) and the downloader copies the bits (burns the cd). The analogy fits when looked at that way.
Of course, this is one of those round and round arguments that could go on forever
This is the best I could find http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/9/46244 .aspx
I didn't try it out to see if it works though.
Seems like a lot of work for what is a pretty standard control....
"but maybe a lot of other human-created docs could be leniant on typos, as long as the word contains all the necessary letters and the first and last letters are in place."
No. Until the actual language itself is changed people should still abide by the rules the language sets out however crazy they may be. Rules tend to be there for a reason.
Awesome post. You forget to mention one thing but I suppose it's slightly related to Defense in Depth as you described it. Using Design by Contract, rather than the function itself validating it's own input, the client code calling that function should have validated it before it called that function.
If that function had documented itself such that client functions know it will return correct results as long as you pass it proper data (multiple of 8, = 16), then it's completely up to the client code to ensure that data is valid before calling the function. If anything goes wrong due to invalid data, the client code is at fault and should be fixed rather than the function itself being modified (as was the case in this fix).
Not to say they were wrong for doing the fix this way. It's probably the quickest and most effective way to get the fix out quickly without having to pour through multiple source code files to ensure all calls to that function (though I can't see there would be very many) and this particular check will not have a great performance penalty.
When will M$ learn that their crappy WinDoze software is just a bug ridden mess of......excuse me, what? Linux....crash??!?! I have dreamed a dream and now that dream is gone....
No no. That was getting married.
3 5&mode=thread&tid=99
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/11/18342
There is an extension to mozilla where it replaces all the flash in a page so you can choose if you want to start it or not.
. xpi
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/flashblock
"Bill Gates must know as well as any programmer (and I use the word 'programmer' in its loosest possible sense)"
I know ol' Bill has gotten quite a bad rep around here but a bad programmer should not be one of them. He was programming computers back when there were no programming languages. Seriously. Like or hate his business ethics, the man is a truly gifted programmer. Any tidbit I have read about his actual programming skills has come up with nothing but aclaim even from people who hate the man.
In life you have to be reasonable. Don't let your emotions blind you. He may be a crooked, deceitful, underhanded (and hugely successful thus far) business man but it sure as hell wasn't being stupid that allowed him to build the world's largest software company.
Other than that, I agree with your post.