How many critical remote execution vulnerabilities have there been in flash? Answer: A lot. A search on the CVE database returns 129 vulnerabilities. Even more if you include badly written flash apps.
From what I can glean from those vulnerabilities Flash does some horrible naughty things that make it very susceptible to buffer overflows and execution of arbitrary code, not to mention all the other nasty insecure things it can do with uPnP devices, webcams etc.
In comparison (although obviously, it's a new product with relatively few users) Silverlight has 0 (zero) known vulnerabilities.
Why don't you go to the microsoft silverlight site? OK, the presentation is a pretty awful case of marketeering, but what's interesting is that it makes a point of being cross platform and supporting a range of browsers, on windows, mac and linux. The presentation highlights mobile internet on phone, which makes me suspect that a silverlight implementation for mobile devices is just around the corner.
The interesting thing is that this research is basically saying that the premature rejection of superstition can cause you to miss something important. Thousands of years ago it might have been a lion; today a premature rejection of the idea the science may not have all the answers can cause you to miss important things, such as the very few homeopathic remedies that may have something to them. It would also cause you to miss God, if He exists.
Get rid of the OEM provided crapware. Sony are particularly guilty of killing vista with their OEM images, but most OEM's are pretty bad too. There was an article somewhere where they compared the performance of a MS install vs an OEM "recovery" disk, and the differences were quite profound.
Really though, the killer app of Linux is. Customization. For MS to get more marketshare, you need to be able to customize everything on it. From the kernel to the GUI.
That's hilarious. So you're suggesting that what the market player with > 90% of the desktop market needs to do to capture more market share is emulate what the player with 1% does?
If linux actually had a killer feature don't you think they'd be making more inroads?
Virtual desktops are of no use to most people, and most likely just confuse people as it doesn't fit into any metaphor of a desktop. I believe that the Microsoft UI labs have tried all kinds of wizzy desktop things, but always end up going with the very conservative, because the usability studies show that's what most people can cope with.
Vista pre-loads commonly used programmes into memory, which is why it looks like it's using so much just to show the desktop, but the truth is, if you have a lot less memory, it won't do that. People have got used to looking at the amount of allocated memory and thinking that they need to keep that down, but the Vista memory manager is much smarter than that. There's no point in having the fastest available storage on your system sitting idle, particularly when it can be cleared almost instantly, so windows puts stuff it thinks it might need there, rather than leaving it on slow hard drives. OK, so now it sounds like your disk is thrashing, and that Vista is using all your RAM to do nothing, but the job of an OS is to launch apps, and vista is doing stuff behind the scenes to make that faster.
Cross platform is still a WIBNI, rather than a real requirement. More than 90% of internet users are on windows, and about.7% on linux, with the vast majority of the rest on mac. The linux users can use Wine, and the mac users have boot camp. If you want to target your software at the largest possible market, write for windows.
How much evidence would you expect to find for the existence of a specific first century carpenter, given his ministry was only about 3 years long? It's remarkable there is as much evidence as there is.
I have only one thing to say to you and your wife. I hope you do go to jail. I know technically you did nothing wrong, but you failed to blow the whistle on illegal practices which have helped to propel the world into financial chaos.
People losing their homes is as much on your heads as if your wife HAD forged those applications.
Oh yeah, I hate apple today. I hate their software, particularly their buggy windows software which doesn't play nice and doesn't pay it's taxes. I hate their apple update which will remind you all the time that you haven't downloaded iTunes and now Safari, just because you chose to install quicktime, and doesn't do the decent thing of offering a "don't ask me again" button. I hate the apple hardware that sacrifices functionality for looks, as if appearance is all that matters, I hate all the apple fanbois lap it up; who've bought their slice of cool, and now think that roll neck sweaters are the in thing.
Most of all I hate that apple appear to have the devil himself working in their marketing department, so people somehow believe that buying a small bit of white plastic can make you a better person.
UAC is a total non issue so long as you're not doing anything unusual. If you're only accessing data in folders you own (as a admin running in a limited mode), then you'll probably not see the UAC prompt. I run Vista 64 at home, and Vista 32 business in a VM at work and I almost never see the UAC prompt unless I'm installing or updating software, or adjusting some system setting, which is exactly when I do expect to see it. Now, if you're doing that all the time then I suspect your not really using the PC so much as exploring windows and tinkering.
Now that the drivers are getting more mature I'm very happy with Vista, and I don't think I have any reason to go back.
I don't know whether you ever read Raymond Chen's blog. He's been a MS developer for many years and he often writes about the hoops they have to jump through to maintain backwards compatability, sometimes even to the extend of reimplementing bugs or implementing special memory allocation modes for specific software because they've broken rules. MS seem to take the view that when a user upgrades their OS and their old app doesn't work they tend to blame windows for breaking their program, even though in fact it may just be their software that relied upon undocumented behaviour, or hardcoded stuff they were supposed to do another way.
For example, one of the big problems they had in vista was that they created a new fast mode of copying files across a network in SMB, but because SAMBA had a buggy implementation which was installed on many NAS boxes and off the shelf storage systems they couldn't rely upon automatic discovery to enable this new feature by default. The effect was that they were prevented from extending their own technology by an unauthorised (and buggy) implementation which they had no control over, but because MS would get the blame if things started failing they held back the new method.
A colleague of mine recently discovered a CD image of an old windows 3.11 drive, which had word for windows 2 on it. He put the CD in his Vista box and double clicked on Word and it just ran. That's binary software from 1989 running unmodified on the latest OS. How much mac or linux software could make the same claim? "It just works"? Don't make me laugh.
Hmm, I use VS 9 (2008) on a 2.8GHz P4 with 1.5GB RAM, with visual assist X, and it's plenty fast enough for me. Certainly I don't really notice any differences between using VS 6 and 9. The only thing which really is much too slow is trying to add COM object references to a C# project. I thought VC++ 2003 was terrible, although admittedly I didn't use it much.
Well, we're just completing the porting of approx 1 million lines of VC++6 to VS 2008, and I have to say it's been so worth it. The new compiler picks up on and warns about many more potential problems, and there's also the issue of whole program optimisation. Also the debugger in VS2008 is much better than the VC6.0 one. I have to say, I think VS2008 is pretty great. A lot of the niggly little problems in VS2005 have now been dealt with, and speaking as someone who is just now starting to write some C# after 9 years writing C++ the LINQ stuff and lambda expressions are just great.
The thing is, even though the laws on weapons are relatively new, it's been a very long time since personal ownership of weapons was commonplace, particularly in cities. I don't think it's been common for people to have that kind of thing around since swords went out of fashion. It's a bit different in rural areas where it's fairly common to have a shotgun for sport or to protect livestock.
The big issue right now is knife crime. It seems hardly a week goes by without another story of some poor inner city kid getting stabbed and killed by other young kids.
I think the revolution argument is pretty pathetic though. Just how bad does the US.gov have to get before this so called militia will rise up to overthrow it?
Revolutions are a really bad way to go about changing bad governments. They're nasty, bloody and bad for business. Far better to have a system in place which means revolutions will never be required, A.K.A democracy
Washington D.C. is a bad example, because you're talking about a place where the laws have got tougher quickly, and where you're in close proximity to places where firearms ARE available, so there are a lot weapons out there. As a comparison, countries like Australia and the UK have a long history of restrictions on private ownership on firearms, so the pool of weapons is much, much smaller. In 2004/05 there were 73 homicides by firearm in the UK. In the US it was 10500.
Of course, you can't shut the stable door once the horse has bolted, and in the US that is certainly the case, but if the horse is still secure you don't let it escape.
so what you're saying is that the death caused by our western greed is only 1 spanish inquisition per day rather than 10? Oh that's OK then. I'll sleep much sounder in bed tonight knowing that!
I really think that actually the reason we don't do anything about it is that we simple care more about looking good and having more stuff than those around us than we do about people who are dying half a world away. Fundamentally its that our greed overrules our compassion, and if we really did follow the teachings of Jesus, then we'd not let that happen.
I think any reasonably dispassionate view of history would show that those institutions that paid least respect to the actual teachings religion, at least with respect to Christianity, are those responsible for most suffering. Sure, there are many who pay lip-service to the teachings and those who co-opt the religious organisations for their own purposes, but the only real examples we have of totally irreligious bodies with the kind of power that could be used that way are the communist states of the 20th Century, and they were almost universally terrible. There have been thousands upon thousands of religious bodies and kingdoms with religious contexts, and only a few of those have been really horrible, but there have only been a few examples of anti-theist governments and they have been much worse as a proportion.
You say that religions have proven incapable of controlling greed, but I think they're still better than any alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
How many critical remote execution vulnerabilities have there been in flash? Answer: A lot. A search on the CVE database returns 129 vulnerabilities. Even more if you include badly written flash apps.
From what I can glean from those vulnerabilities Flash does some horrible naughty things that make it very susceptible to buffer overflows and execution of arbitrary code, not to mention all the other nasty insecure things it can do with uPnP devices, webcams etc.
In comparison (although obviously, it's a new product with relatively few users) Silverlight has 0 (zero) known vulnerabilities.
Why don't you go to the microsoft silverlight site? OK, the presentation is a pretty awful case of marketeering, but what's interesting is that it makes a point of being cross platform and supporting a range of browsers, on windows, mac and linux. The presentation highlights mobile internet on phone, which makes me suspect that a silverlight implementation for mobile devices is just around the corner.
You should read the article. That's exactly what the good reverend had in mind.
The interesting thing is that this research is basically saying that the premature rejection of superstition can cause you to miss something important. Thousands of years ago it might have been a lion; today a premature rejection of the idea the science may not have all the answers can cause you to miss important things, such as the very few homeopathic remedies that may have something to them. It would also cause you to miss God, if He exists.
for virtual desktops, check out MS Virtual Desktop Manager
All the usability studies show virtual desktops confuse people, so Microsoft rejected the idea.
Get rid of the OEM provided crapware. Sony are particularly guilty of killing vista with their OEM images, but most OEM's are pretty bad too. There was an article somewhere where they compared the performance of a MS install vs an OEM "recovery" disk, and the differences were quite profound.
Three words. Group Policy Editor
Really though, the killer app of Linux is. Customization. For MS to get more marketshare, you need to be able to customize everything on it. From the kernel to the GUI.
That's hilarious. So you're suggesting that what the market player with > 90% of the desktop market needs to do to capture more market share is emulate what the player with 1% does?
If linux actually had a killer feature don't you think they'd be making more inroads?
Virtual desktops are of no use to most people, and most likely just confuse people as it doesn't fit into any metaphor of a desktop. I believe that the Microsoft UI labs have tried all kinds of wizzy desktop things, but always end up going with the very conservative, because the usability studies show that's what most people can cope with.
Vista pre-loads commonly used programmes into memory, which is why it looks like it's using so much just to show the desktop, but the truth is, if you have a lot less memory, it won't do that. People have got used to looking at the amount of allocated memory and thinking that they need to keep that down, but the Vista memory manager is much smarter than that. There's no point in having the fastest available storage on your system sitting idle, particularly when it can be cleared almost instantly, so windows puts stuff it thinks it might need there, rather than leaving it on slow hard drives. OK, so now it sounds like your disk is thrashing, and that Vista is using all your RAM to do nothing, but the job of an OS is to launch apps, and vista is doing stuff behind the scenes to make that faster.
Cross platform is still a WIBNI, rather than a real requirement. More than 90% of internet users are on windows, and about .7% on linux, with the vast majority of the rest on mac. The linux users can use Wine, and the mac users have boot camp. If you want to target your software at the largest possible market, write for windows.
How much evidence would you expect to find for the existence of a specific first century carpenter, given his ministry was only about 3 years long? It's remarkable there is as much evidence as there is.
I have only one thing to say to you and your wife. I hope you do go to jail. I know technically you did nothing wrong, but you failed to blow the whistle on illegal practices which have helped to propel the world into financial chaos.
People losing their homes is as much on your heads as if your wife HAD forged those applications.
VS2008 has this, as does the Visual Assist VS plugin for all previous VS versions
Oh yeah, I hate apple today. I hate their software, particularly their buggy windows software which doesn't play nice and doesn't pay it's taxes. I hate their apple update which will remind you all the time that you haven't downloaded iTunes and now Safari, just because you chose to install quicktime, and doesn't do the decent thing of offering a "don't ask me again" button. I hate the apple hardware that sacrifices functionality for looks, as if appearance is all that matters, I hate all the apple fanbois lap it up; who've bought their slice of cool, and now think that roll neck sweaters are the in thing.
Most of all I hate that apple appear to have the devil himself working in their marketing department, so people somehow believe that buying a small bit of white plastic can make you a better person.
busy-wait loops? Really?!?! I find it hard to believe they'd do anything so crap, but then I guess it is adobe we're talking about. Proof?
UAC is a total non issue so long as you're not doing anything unusual. If you're only accessing data in folders you own (as a admin running in a limited mode), then you'll probably not see the UAC prompt. I run Vista 64 at home, and Vista 32 business in a VM at work and I almost never see the UAC prompt unless I'm installing or updating software, or adjusting some system setting, which is exactly when I do expect to see it. Now, if you're doing that all the time then I suspect your not really using the PC so much as exploring windows and tinkering.
Now that the drivers are getting more mature I'm very happy with Vista, and I don't think I have any reason to go back.
I don't know whether you ever read Raymond Chen's blog. He's been a MS developer for many years and he often writes about the hoops they have to jump through to maintain backwards compatability, sometimes even to the extend of reimplementing bugs or implementing special memory allocation modes for specific software because they've broken rules. MS seem to take the view that when a user upgrades their OS and their old app doesn't work they tend to blame windows for breaking their program, even though in fact it may just be their software that relied upon undocumented behaviour, or hardcoded stuff they were supposed to do another way.
For example, one of the big problems they had in vista was that they created a new fast mode of copying files across a network in SMB, but because SAMBA had a buggy implementation which was installed on many NAS boxes and off the shelf storage systems they couldn't rely upon automatic discovery to enable this new feature by default. The effect was that they were prevented from extending their own technology by an unauthorised (and buggy) implementation which they had no control over, but because MS would get the blame if things started failing they held back the new method.
A colleague of mine recently discovered a CD image of an old windows 3.11 drive, which had word for windows 2 on it. He put the CD in his Vista box and double clicked on Word and it just ran. That's binary software from 1989 running unmodified on the latest OS. How much mac or linux software could make the same claim? "It just works"? Don't make me laugh.
Hmm, I use VS 9 (2008) on a 2.8GHz P4 with 1.5GB RAM, with visual assist X, and it's plenty fast enough for me. Certainly I don't really notice any differences between using VS 6 and 9. The only thing which really is much too slow is trying to add COM object references to a C# project. I thought VC++ 2003 was terrible, although admittedly I didn't use it much.
Well, we're just completing the porting of approx 1 million lines of VC++6 to VS 2008, and I have to say it's been so worth it. The new compiler picks up on and warns about many more potential problems, and there's also the issue of whole program optimisation. Also the debugger in VS2008 is much better than the VC6.0 one. I have to say, I think VS2008 is pretty great. A lot of the niggly little problems in VS2005 have now been dealt with, and speaking as someone who is just now starting to write some C# after 9 years writing C++ the LINQ stuff and lambda expressions are just great.
The thing is, even though the laws on weapons are relatively new, it's been a very long time since personal ownership of weapons was commonplace, particularly in cities. I don't think it's been common for people to have that kind of thing around since swords went out of fashion. It's a bit different in rural areas where it's fairly common to have a shotgun for sport or to protect livestock.
.gov have to get before this so called militia will rise up to overthrow it?
The big issue right now is knife crime. It seems hardly a week goes by without another story of some poor inner city kid getting stabbed and killed by other young kids.
I think the revolution argument is pretty pathetic though. Just how bad does the US
Revolutions are a really bad way to go about changing bad governments. They're nasty, bloody and bad for business. Far better to have a system in place which means revolutions will never be required, A.K.A democracy
Washington D.C. is a bad example, because you're talking about a place where the laws have got tougher quickly, and where you're in close proximity to places where firearms ARE available, so there are a lot weapons out there. As a comparison, countries like Australia and the UK have a long history of restrictions on private ownership on firearms, so the pool of weapons is much, much smaller. In 2004/05 there were 73 homicides by firearm in the UK. In the US it was 10500.
Of course, you can't shut the stable door once the horse has bolted, and in the US that is certainly the case, but if the horse is still secure you don't let it escape.
so what you're saying is that the death caused by our western greed is only 1 spanish inquisition per day rather than 10? Oh that's OK then. I'll sleep much sounder in bed tonight knowing that!
I really think that actually the reason we don't do anything about it is that we simple care more about looking good and having more stuff than those around us than we do about people who are dying half a world away. Fundamentally its that our greed overrules our compassion, and if we really did follow the teachings of Jesus, then we'd not let that happen.
I think any reasonably dispassionate view of history would show that those institutions that paid least respect to the actual teachings religion, at least with respect to Christianity, are those responsible for most suffering. Sure, there are many who pay lip-service to the teachings and those who co-opt the religious organisations for their own purposes, but the only real examples we have of totally irreligious bodies with the kind of power that could be used that way are the communist states of the 20th Century, and they were almost universally terrible. There have been thousands upon thousands of religious bodies and kingdoms with religious contexts, and only a few of those have been really horrible, but there have only been a few examples of anti-theist governments and they have been much worse as a proportion.
You say that religions have proven incapable of controlling greed, but I think they're still better than any alternative.