The game ran on the 32k BBC B (although you only got speech on the 128k Master) *without* doing any multi-loading. Once the game was loaded, it was loaded and never touched the disk again.
Because of the limitation of the hardware, Exile had no in-game menus. If you wanted to save your game, you hit a weird combination of keys, which wrote the save game into a weird part of memory, then hard-booted the BBC. When you reloaded the pre-game menu, it found the save game (probably stored in the printer buffer or something) and you could save to disk. Mental.
In fact, the game even overwrote the video buffer with game data during loading, thus corrupting the screen as it booted, but giving the developers a few extra bytes to use:-)
How about:
- make sure your users don't work as administrator but under an unprivileged user account
- setup the system so that this unprivileged user account cannot write in %windir% and %ProgramFiles%
- build the network in such a way that programs cannot directly "connect home" but can connect to the Internet only via well-defined proxy servers
- setup mail so that incoming office documents opened from mail do not open in Office but in the free Office viewers instead
...and after you do this, how long, exactly, would it be before you were lynched by your users and then sacked by your boss for stopping people from working?
Microsoft stuff ain't good, but seeing as how many, many applications still rely on being able to write to their %ProgramFiles% folder, I think this is going to make your life tricky. Unless you are personally volunteer to keep going back and fixing their PCs everytime they want a new app to run...?
Oh, but your only going to let them run the apps that *you* say they can. They'll love you for that...
Got any remote workers? Going to force them to connect through your managed proxies too? Even when not hooked to the VPN? Again, you can lock them down, but you ain't going to make any friends...
I like the idea of opening incoming docs in a viewer, but who's to say that won't have the same flaw. Oh, and what if the reviewer wants to make a quick change and email it back - pain in the arse if they have to close the viewer, save the file, open in word, edit, save, email. Much easier if you can do it straight from the original viewer...
I do understand your frustration. I really do. But for those of us that live in the real world, you've just got to grit your teeth and work with what you've got. Oh, and make sure that Microsoft feel your pain, of course...:-)
Have you considered that it might also take quite a lot of resource to do simultaneous releases? I'm not saying that is the *only* reason why games get released on one platform before another, but don't be too quick to blame...
GTA has always (well, since the more recent versions) been released first on consoles and then on PCs. I suspect that this is largely because a) the console market is much bigger - get it out there first and b) it's the same developers that work on both.
I'd say MS, is the one holding all the cards, is really the only one who can fix this and thus should be the one to bear the lion's share of the blame.
Hmmm, blame? Well, yes. If Windows 95 was a pukka multi-user O/S with decent (well, any) security, then we would not be in this mess. I would argue, perhaps, that if Win95 *was* like this, it would have never run on my 486 with 4MB of RAM...and it would have been another 2 years late!
As for fixing it, MS are (by their own admission) stuck in a vicious circle. They *have* sorted the security in XP, as far as not running everything as "root", but because many apps only work when the user is an admin, MS (and admins) have been forced to leave users running as admin my default, thus developers don't bother to develop for non-admins and so on...
Vista started out by running everyone as non-admin, but way too many apps didn't work, so MS introduced the idea of a protected admin account. It's a horrid idea, and nasty to work with, but I can see their argument for doing it
For the record, I soooo wish that all apps ran properly as non-admins so that users don't have to permenantly run with admin rights. I forced a group of my laptop users to run as regular "users" on their machines for a few months to see how it went. Frankly, it was awful. I would attribute that to: 20% Microsoft (making certain things very awkward if you are not an admin) and 80% apps (I needed to make too many tweaks to get even basic apps working under a non-admin acct). In the end, I'm afraid to say that we gave up and now rely on a combination of firewall, A/V, patches and Firefox to reduce the risk from having users running as admin.
I logged into my "Root" account, and installed Chessmaster 9000...
The point of the story is this: Linux doesn't have the problems that Windows has...
So what you are saying is that you installed a poorly designed application which places its game data somewhere where it shouldn't (i.e. the user's own My Docs) so therefore Windows is awful and we should all use Linux? Hmmm, don't think much of your logic.
Windows developers are Microsoft's worst enemy and this harks back from Windows 95. Unfortunately, people still develop applications for NT/XP as though they were developing for 95, and don't seem to realise that we're not still in the mid-90s. As a result, apps don't work as non-admins, so users run as root and get infected badly. Microsoft got it wrong with Win95, but NT has always been right in this regard and has always been able to run under restrictive access rights...if the users don't choose to do it this way, it's their problem.
Anyway, we don't like to be harsh here at/., so here's some real advice from a real Windows admin: try runas/noprofile, which allows you to elevate your credentials without using the profile of the admin user. Give it a try and best of luck:-)
Like many corporates, we run internal AV and it's very interesting to note that the only viruses that have made it past our corporate filters in the last three years came in through one of two routes:
* POP3 / IMAP personal email * Web-based email services
I know it sounds mean and cruel, but these are now blocked by rule at our business...after all, which is more important: checking your Hotmail, or maintaining secure systems...?
Thank goodness OSS doesn't emulate Exchange.. My Linux mail server has up-times exceeding a year (would be longer but our company moved) while I know several individuals that are running Exchange and well.. they WISH they had the stability and uptime my system has.. They told me as much as they were busy restoring the system, or when they got back on-line after the Exchange server went down for the 10th time in two months.. Glad they are a MS Enterprise customer with support.. heh Two other admins I know, manage nothing but MS Exchange Full-Time and they both work at the same company.
I'm certainly NOT jealous of Exchange.. Plenty happy to use a different product to handle groupware functionality and email.
Yes I run mostly Windows Servers, but not for a function as critical as email.. I simply don't have that much time to spend coddling a mail server.
IME, EX2003 is exceedingly stable when managed by compentent admins. Unfortunately, few Windows admins are...:-(
I have never had to reboot Ex2003 to fix it. In fact, it's never gone wrong in the 2 years since we migrated from Ex5.5. Oh, and that didn't go wrong either, but it did take much more effort to keep it that way.
Exchange really isn't a bad product. Remember that 90% of the anti-MS crowd on this website have never managed Exchange in an enterprise environment;-)
I've been running this for a few weeks now, so I can give some real feedback:
It will actually sync inbox, contacts, calendar and tasks OTA from Exchange
It requires Ex2003 SP2 (SP2 required for the "push" functionality)
Only device support required is WM5 with the MSFP update, which will become generally and freely available in the next few weeks.
Support will suck, because generally you'll implement it yourself. But as you already have an Ex2003/AD infrastructure, you will know how it works and be able to fix it if you have problems. (You *do* know how it works, don't you? You didn't just stick the CD in and press "next" a few times...?)
It requires an SSL certificate on the Ex2003 front-end server. You don't have to buy one if you have a PKI infrastructure in place - you can self-sign and deploy the root cert
It works. Really. It's superb. It's not missed a beat in the few weeks I've been using it.
Other people have commented that this "version 1" product will fail. In fact, Exchange Activesync is nothing new. This is just a new version with the stalled-polling support.
Why not use the IMAP4 IDLE command? This is the standard mechanism for making mail appear instantly over IMAP. Microsoft in this case writes both the client and the server, so they should be able to add support if it doesn't already exist.
Good idea. The only problem is that IMAP is not optimised for use over narrow-band / charge-per-byte networks, and will cost you more, or be slower...
...and the funny thing is that Apple inviting people to steal Windows would *still* be a bad thing for Apple. After all, every stolen copy of Windows is one more person not using a Mac, and one more person using applications that will only be produced for Windows.
...that Longhorn (now Vista) is completly new design... from scratsh... none of the earlier flaws would be ported to it ? Do I remember wrong ?...or are they full of shit as usual ?
Why didn't they fix the vulnerable function in the first place (is there a specific reason)? Sure, adding validation seems like a quick and valid fix, but a company the size of MS should have known in the long run, fix the function instead.
One possible reason is that changing the code to make it "safe" would have broken application compatability. I would be very surprised if this was not the reason...
This would explain why, instead of fixing the underlying problem, they chose to wrap it in validation to reduce the risk. It sounds like they did not do a complete analysis of the problem, but I think that's a method problem rather than a rundamental flaw in how they fixed it.
And how will their IT people and/or management continue to justify said choices in the wake of this?
This is the sort of thing that needs "big iron". Machines that have uptimes measured in decades. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that they're running it all on a bunch of commodity PCs (or the like) with off-the-shelf software?
Sounds more like a comment about platforms and hosting to me, rather than any comment on how the software itself is built. You can build the world's finest solution on Windows if you do it right and you can also build the world's worst solution on "big iron" if you don't involve the end users when you are developing it. How you "host" a solutions (O/S, hardware etc.) is the easy bit of any solution...
And forgive me for assuming that the original poster was bashing Windows. If he wasn't, I apologise, but given where the comment was made, it was an understandable mistake...;-)
Why does this matter? It's much more likely that the problems are down to poorly specified, poorly designed or poorly implemented software, which is by no means an exclusive preserve of Windows...
Too many large scale software projects fail because of poor development methodologies and a failure to interact with users during development and when this happens, it's hardly surprising that the users don't like working with the new system.
Funnily enough, the people who own the rights to the London Underground map, which is arguably one of the world's best recognised maps, also protect it fiercely, so I'd be surprised if another cease and desist letter wasn't in the post as we speak...
They wont make the same mistake as with Windows XP and 2000: They were so stable that there was no demand for windows 2003. Some people dont even know 2003 exists!!
...whereas some people can't tell the difference between consumer and enterprise (server) releases of software.
People who need to know about Windows 2003 know about it. My mum doesn't need to know, so she is blissfully ignorant.
Undoubtedly the most useful thing for fixing dead boxes is a USB / FW IDE interface that allows you to quickly slave up suspect disks and drag data off them in double-quick time.
Reading the article it would appear that the Scottish Police Force admins are too incompetent to set up the systems properly. Perhaps they would rather use Microsoft's brain dead 3 clicks and you're configured interface, but they sacrifice security in doing so.
I am so glad that *you* are so clever and everyone else is so stupid. That makes the world a better place.
Oh, by the way, have you ever seen a Microsoft based infrastructure that has been setup by a non-Windows "guru"? I have. In fact, I've had to rip out and replace more than one of them, where the OSS advocate had installed systems using the "I know Linux, so I know everything" approach to IT.
The parent post is quite clear, He turns on his GF's new laptop.
...and as he said quite clearly, he was slamming rubbish system builders that *should* know how to build a PC image that installs correctly.
As he said in the article (and it still staggers me how often this attitude prevails in the *nix world) just because Windows has a nice GUI and installs without needing to breakout a console and hack X into life, it doesn't mean that it's simple to administer.
Delivering a quality OEM Windows image is a skilled task. Delivering a half-baked one that "just works" is much easier, and much more common, even amongst the major manufacturers. Even externally contracted specialists brought in to major corporates to build and support these images for bulk deployment get it wrong more often than they get it right...
An up to date Windows image should only require one or maybe two reboots to install the auto updates and typically will only require a single reboot during the initial startup phase. Anything more and they're making a mess of it - and probably contravening Microsoft's strict OEM requirements which exist to make sure that the end user gets a decent experience and not "10 reboots"!
And don't get me started on third party apps! Microsoft have made many changes that should make it possible for the majority of applications (and drivers) to be installed without rebooting. Unfortunately, many don't use these new features and continue to require multiple reboots (*and* write to \Program Files. Bah!)
Microsoft COULD make it easier on their partners by providing non-production 'test' licenses to compliment production licenses... but if you're using Microsoft, that's par for the course.
That's a very good point and I think it's an area that they could work on. Personally, I'm licensed MSDN Universal, which allows me, personally, to run more-or-less any Microsoft software for "non-production use", which I take to include testing. As a part-time developer, this use is really a bonus for me, but it's only a few hundred dollars per IT person, per year, so if you have a decent amount of Microsoft software, it will probably pay off.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely, one of the finest games ever, in gameplay, longevity and use of the hardware:
:-)
http://www.exile.acornarcade.com/
The game ran on the 32k BBC B (although you only got speech on the 128k Master) *without* doing any multi-loading. Once the game was loaded, it was loaded and never touched the disk again.
Because of the limitation of the hardware, Exile had no in-game menus. If you wanted to save your game, you hit a weird combination of keys, which wrote the save game into a weird part of memory, then hard-booted the BBC. When you reloaded the pre-game menu, it found the save game (probably stored in the printer buffer or something) and you could save to disk. Mental.
In fact, the game even overwrote the video buffer with game data during loading, thus corrupting the screen as it booted, but giving the developers a few extra bytes to use
Nothing has ever come close.
Daern
Anyone one else got it working yet? Maybe you can get your story posted to Slashdot too.
Works fine here.
Well, you did ask...
How about: - make sure your users don't work as administrator but under an unprivileged user account - setup the system so that this unprivileged user account cannot write in %windir% and %ProgramFiles% - build the network in such a way that programs cannot directly "connect home" but can connect to the Internet only via well-defined proxy servers - setup mail so that incoming office documents opened from mail do not open in Office but in the free Office viewers instead
...and after you do this, how long, exactly, would it be before you were lynched by your users and then sacked by your boss for stopping people from working?
Microsoft stuff ain't good, but seeing as how many, many applications still rely on being able to write to their %ProgramFiles% folder, I think this is going to make your life tricky. Unless you are personally volunteer to keep going back and fixing their PCs everytime they want a new app to run...?
Oh, but your only going to let them run the apps that *you* say they can. They'll love you for that...
Got any remote workers? Going to force them to connect through your managed proxies too? Even when not hooked to the VPN? Again, you can lock them down, but you ain't going to make any friends...
I like the idea of opening incoming docs in a viewer, but who's to say that won't have the same flaw. Oh, and what if the reviewer wants to make a quick change and email it back - pain in the arse if they have to close the viewer, save the file, open in word, edit, save, email. Much easier if you can do it straight from the original viewer...
I do understand your frustration. I really do. But for those of us that live in the real world, you've just got to grit your teeth and work with what you've got. Oh, and make sure that Microsoft feel your pain, of course... :-)
Classy.
Have you considered that it might also take quite a lot of resource to do simultaneous releases? I'm not saying that is the *only* reason why games get released on one platform before another, but don't be too quick to blame...
GTA has always (well, since the more recent versions) been released first on consoles and then on PCs. I suspect that this is largely because a) the console market is much bigger - get it out there first and b) it's the same developers that work on both.
I'd say MS, is the one holding all the cards, is really the only one who can fix this and thus should be the one to bear the lion's share of the blame.
Hmmm, blame? Well, yes. If Windows 95 was a pukka multi-user O/S with decent (well, any) security, then we would not be in this mess. I would argue, perhaps, that if Win95 *was* like this, it would have never run on my 486 with 4MB of RAM...and it would have been another 2 years late!
As for fixing it, MS are (by their own admission) stuck in a vicious circle. They *have* sorted the security in XP, as far as not running everything as "root", but because many apps only work when the user is an admin, MS (and admins) have been forced to leave users running as admin my default, thus developers don't bother to develop for non-admins and so on...
Vista started out by running everyone as non-admin, but way too many apps didn't work, so MS introduced the idea of a protected admin account. It's a horrid idea, and nasty to work with, but I can see their argument for doing it
For the record, I soooo wish that all apps ran properly as non-admins so that users don't have to permenantly run with admin rights. I forced a group of my laptop users to run as regular "users" on their machines for a few months to see how it went. Frankly, it was awful. I would attribute that to: 20% Microsoft (making certain things very awkward if you are not an admin) and 80% apps (I needed to make too many tweaks to get even basic apps working under a non-admin acct). In the end, I'm afraid to say that we gave up and now rely on a combination of firewall, A/V, patches and Firefox to reduce the risk from having users running as admin.
Errrr
I logged into my "Root" account, and installed Chessmaster 9000...
The point of the story is this: Linux doesn't have the problems that Windows has...
So what you are saying is that you installed a poorly designed application which places its game data somewhere where it shouldn't (i.e. the user's own My Docs) so therefore Windows is awful and we should all use Linux? Hmmm, don't think much of your logic.
Windows developers are Microsoft's worst enemy and this harks back from Windows 95. Unfortunately, people still develop applications for NT/XP as though they were developing for 95, and don't seem to realise that we're not still in the mid-90s. As a result, apps don't work as non-admins, so users run as root and get infected badly. Microsoft got it wrong with Win95, but NT has always been right in this regard and has always been able to run under restrictive access rights...if the users don't choose to do it this way, it's their problem.
Anyway, we don't like to be harsh here at /., so here's some real advice from a real Windows admin: try runas /noprofile, which allows you to elevate your credentials without using the profile of the admin user. Give it a try and best of luck :-)
Like many corporates, we run internal AV and it's very interesting to note that the only viruses that have made it past our corporate filters in the last three years came in through one of two routes:
* POP3 / IMAP personal email
* Web-based email services
I know it sounds mean and cruel, but these are now blocked by rule at our business...after all, which is more important: checking your Hotmail, or maintaining secure systems...?
Anything declared as "Enterprise" that runs on the JET database engine meets the definition of a "bad" product. Not if it works...
Thank goodness OSS doesn't emulate Exchange.. My Linux mail server has up-times exceeding a year (would be longer but our company moved) while I know several individuals that are running Exchange and well.. they WISH they had the stability and uptime my system has.. They told me as much as they were busy restoring the system, or when they got back on-line after the Exchange server went down for the 10th time in two months.. Glad they are a MS Enterprise customer with support.. heh Two other admins I know, manage nothing but MS Exchange Full-Time and they both work at the same company. I'm certainly NOT jealous of Exchange.. Plenty happy to use a different product to handle groupware functionality and email. Yes I run mostly Windows Servers, but not for a function as critical as email.. I simply don't have that much time to spend coddling a mail server.
IME, EX2003 is exceedingly stable when managed by compentent admins. Unfortunately, few Windows admins are... :-(
I have never had to reboot Ex2003 to fix it. In fact, it's never gone wrong in the 2 years since we migrated from Ex5.5. Oh, and that didn't go wrong either, but it did take much more effort to keep it that way.
Exchange really isn't a bad product. Remember that 90% of the anti-MS crowd on this website have never managed Exchange in an enterprise environment ;-)
I've been running this for a few weeks now, so I can give some real feedback:
Why not use the IMAP4 IDLE command? This is the standard mechanism for making mail appear instantly over IMAP. Microsoft in this case writes both the client and the server, so they should be able to add support if it doesn't already exist.
Good idea. The only problem is that IMAP is not optimised for use over narrow-band / charge-per-byte networks, and will cost you more, or be slower...
...and the funny thing is that Apple inviting people to steal Windows would *still* be a bad thing for Apple. After all, every stolen copy of Windows is one more person not using a Mac, and one more person using applications that will only be produced for Windows.
Make sense?
Do I remember wrong ?
No, you remember quite wrong.
Rebooting Solves 90% of Windows problems.
...and 90% of Windows problems are caused by admins / users who don't know what they are doing ;-)
Why didn't they fix the vulnerable function in the first place (is there a specific reason)? Sure, adding validation seems like a quick and valid fix, but a company the size of MS should have known in the long run, fix the function instead.
One possible reason is that changing the code to make it "safe" would have broken application compatability. I would be very surprised if this was not the reason...
This would explain why, instead of fixing the underlying problem, they chose to wrap it in validation to reduce the risk. It sounds like they did not do a complete analysis of the problem, but I think that's a method problem rather than a rundamental flaw in how they fixed it.
Errr, are you sure? Quoted for your pleasure:
What OS do they run?
What software do they use?
And how will their IT people and/or management continue to justify said choices in the wake of this?
This is the sort of thing that needs "big iron". Machines that have uptimes measured in decades. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that they're running it all on a bunch of commodity PCs (or the like) with off-the-shelf software?
Sounds more like a comment about platforms and hosting to me, rather than any comment on how the software itself is built. You can build the world's finest solution on Windows if you do it right and you can also build the world's worst solution on "big iron" if you don't involve the end users when you are developing it. How you "host" a solutions (O/S, hardware etc.) is the easy bit of any solution...
And forgive me for assuming that the original poster was bashing Windows. If he wasn't, I apologise, but given where the comment was made, it was an understandable mistake... ;-)
What OS do they run?
Why does this matter? It's much more likely that the problems are down to poorly specified, poorly designed or poorly implemented software, which is by no means an exclusive preserve of Windows...
Too many large scale software projects fail because of poor development methodologies and a failure to interact with users during development and when this happens, it's hardly surprising that the users don't like working with the new system.
Wankel or not, that's a funny looking RX8...
Funnily enough, the people who own the rights to the London Underground map, which is arguably one of the world's best recognised maps, also protect it fiercely, so I'd be surprised if another cease and desist letter wasn't in the post as we speak...
They wont make the same mistake as with Windows XP and 2000: They were so stable that there was no demand for windows 2003. Some people dont even know 2003 exists!!
...whereas some people can't tell the difference between consumer and enterprise (server) releases of software.
People who need to know about Windows 2003 know about it. My mum doesn't need to know, so she is blissfully ignorant.
Undoubtedly the most useful thing for fixing dead boxes is a USB / FW IDE interface that allows you to quickly slave up suspect disks and drag data off them in double-quick time.
Reading the article it would appear that the Scottish Police Force admins are too incompetent to set up the systems properly. Perhaps they would rather use Microsoft's brain dead 3 clicks and you're configured interface, but they sacrifice security in doing so.
I am so glad that *you* are so clever and everyone else is so stupid. That makes the world a better place.
Oh, by the way, have you ever seen a Microsoft based infrastructure that has been setup by a non-Windows "guru"? I have. In fact, I've had to rip out and replace more than one of them, where the OSS advocate had installed systems using the "I know Linux, so I know everything" approach to IT.
The only thing was, that they didn't.
Now that's a fine lady you have. When there's nothing on TV, she sends you to the video shop for porn!
The parent post is quite clear, He turns on his GF's new laptop.
...and as he said quite clearly, he was slamming rubbish system builders that *should* know how to build a PC image that installs correctly.
As he said in the article (and it still staggers me how often this attitude prevails in the *nix world) just because Windows has a nice GUI and installs without needing to breakout a console and hack X into life, it doesn't mean that it's simple to administer.
Delivering a quality OEM Windows image is a skilled task. Delivering a half-baked one that "just works" is much easier, and much more common, even amongst the major manufacturers. Even externally contracted specialists brought in to major corporates to build and support these images for bulk deployment get it wrong more often than they get it right...
An up to date Windows image should only require one or maybe two reboots to install the auto updates and typically will only require a single reboot during the initial startup phase. Anything more and they're making a mess of it - and probably contravening Microsoft's strict OEM requirements which exist to make sure that the end user gets a decent experience and not "10 reboots"!
And don't get me started on third party apps! Microsoft have made many changes that should make it possible for the majority of applications (and drivers) to be installed without rebooting. Unfortunately, many don't use these new features and continue to require multiple reboots (*and* write to \Program Files. Bah!)
Ends rant.Microsoft COULD make it easier on their partners by providing non-production 'test' licenses to compliment production licenses... but if you're using Microsoft, that's par for the course.
That's a very good point and I think it's an area that they could work on. Personally, I'm licensed MSDN Universal, which allows me, personally, to run more-or-less any Microsoft software for "non-production use", which I take to include testing. As a part-time developer, this use is really a bonus for me, but it's only a few hundred dollars per IT person, per year, so if you have a decent amount of Microsoft software, it will probably pay off.