Microsoft limits OEMs to a maximum of 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage in order to purchase reduced price licenses of Windows
I have a tablet that has 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. It runs Windows 10 and Android as well - dual boot. It's a Chinese device, even by brand. If that is a limitation imposed by Microsoft then this tablet maker doesn't seem to care.
That said, Windows 10 on a tablet is mediocre at best. I much preferred Windows 8.x for touch devices. I use the Android side almost exclusively.
I was initially a little wary of Windows 10 but when I started using it I was all right with it - for a while. It seemed to be stable, it ran the applications I needed (Pinnacle Studio and PaintShop Pro) and it seemed to be faster than Windows 7. Seemed like a good move for me.
But then I got a new computer with Windows 10 pre-installed. I thought, "great, now I can move my old computer to Linux like I planned and still run my important applications on the new one." Things were fine, until I realized that I was connected to the network without having entered my network password. And it knew my passwords on various websites that I had accessed with Edge. It knew how to access my bank, my social media - everything. Now, I am not a big fish by any means, but I do not like the idea of my passwords and keys being stashed on a server over which I have zero control.
Do I believe Microsoft will do Bad Things with that information? No, I don't. It's convenient to have it know what I need for me so I don't have to look it up. But, it's unnerving that they harvested that info without my knowledge. It also is unsettling to think that it's on a network computer somewhere.
On this basis alone I hesitate to recommend Windows 10.
NewEgg still sells Windows 7 laptops. Go into the laptops/notebooks section and enter Windows 7 as a keyword. Some of the units that come back are refurbs, but some are brand new.
I have had good success with wxWidgets on both Windows and Linux. That said, it's the *only* cross-platform GUI development library I have used and I am used to it. Rather than use anchors for placing window components it uses something called sizers which are a lot harder to work with until you get used to them. It can be used with a variety of languages (C++ and Python are the two big ones, though there is support for hooking into Java as well) and the licensing is sane.
Though I do favor wxWidgets (as it's all I really know) I believe QT is a lot more complete as a library. Depending on what you're doing, QT may be a better fit for your needs.
I ran OS/2 for a year or so, back in the early 90's. It was a nice system and I had no real issues with it except that the Windows support was very slow. The system was stable and easy to use, and of course I liked the multi-tasking at the time. When 32-bit Windows came out and MS refused to license the Windows support stuff to IBM like it did for 16-bit application support, that was pretty much the end of the line.
However, with a new Linux core, IBM could in theory use X and with it use WINE (after some licensing magic). If Big Blue did that, OS/2 could suddenly have a pretty large application base, commercial support, and very likely could garner some market share. Sure, that's a hefty amount of change and would mean a complete revamp of WPS but if they replaced the core OS anyway there's little reason to go whole-hog.
It's very unlikely that IBM would do this but it's possible (if expensive).
Security used to be the programmer's responsibility, yes. The shift in language design has been to move the responsibility from the coder to the language. When you have an enforcing language doing the checking, the theory is that it reduces costs in the maintenance phase.
Ada is a prime example of this. To get code to even compile is a real chore, but once you have it compiling there's a strong chance that it will be relatively free of careless errors that would drive up costs when in maintenance. It doesn't fix logic errors, of course, but it makes it a lot harder to have memory errors and conversion issues.
Java also does some of this through the JVM. The Java developer cannot *directly* manipulate pointers, as the language designer[s] decided that free access to memory was too risky and was the cause of a lot of strangeness at runtime. Also, it enforces conversion checking and even exception definitions.
Little by little, the responsibility of security is being taken away from developers.
You could pursue being a sysadmin. There is a little bit of shell-scripting involved but *typically* little coding of software.
Another possibility is to go into system securtity and hardening. There is a market for people who know how to lock down systems and keep out the riff-raff.
Still another is to find a job as a white hat. We have a few of them where I work, and their job it to try to violate the network and tell the systems folks how they broke through (and how to fix it).
There *are* non-coding jobs that pay. For an entry level position, it will depend on where you are and who hires you as well as sector of the market.
Until recently, I had subscriptions to both DDJ and CUJ, and I finally decided a few months ago that when DDJ was up for renewal, I would drop it. I have had a subscription for it since the summer of 1994, and like you I have seen it dropping in quality. So, I figured I would keep CUJ and dump DDJ. To find out that I will be getting DDJ *instead* of CUJ was frustrating to say the very least. They told me they would simply extend my DDJ subscription by the balance of what remained on my CUJ subscription - which I recently paid another year for. Unpleasant surprise.
For DDJ to cover the C++ stuff that CUJ covered will require a lot more paper and a lot more effort, effort I cannot see them making. They have gone so far into the Java world that I can't see them pulling back for those of us that didn't come alone for the ride. They quit doing an annual C++ issue a while ago, I doubt that will be coming back.
My only point is that it is certainly possible for an OS to be both popular and secure
I wholeheartedly agree. That MS has made a career of NOT doing this (and has allowed many of their other applications to be equally exploitable, e.g OutLook), is as you've stated, a good case study of what not to do.
Popularity is not the cause of security vulnerabilities, shoddy programming is. If software is not popular, you can get away with it not causing many problems because it is a small target (literally security by obscurity). But if it is popular, then poor programming will become evident and it will be a security problem.
While what you have said is correct, one thing that you have not addressed is that, for some virus writers, getting their spooge to spread as far and as wide as possible is the goal. If you wanted to have your creation on as many systems as possible, would you target a less popular system that is as air-tight as a collander, or would you take the time to find a hole in the most in-use system? Now, if the OS is coded correctly, it would be a LOT harder to find security holes in it.
Even the most well-designed and built OSes have some holes and security flaws. Once in a while you hear about a gash in the Linux kernel. Solaris caught hell a while back too. They've tightened up, but you are fooling yourself if you think they are bulletproof. My argument is that, if some system other than Windows were dominant, there would be a lot more focus on finding those flaws. Windows would be no more secure than it is now, but it would not be the primary focus. Attention would be on the bigger target.
Popularity has nothing to do with the security of a system, you're correct there. However, it has a lot to do with how many exploits are found that would not be noticed if someone were not specifically looking for them.
I will state for the record that I am not an MS fan. Now that I have that out of the way:
If MS Windows were not the dominant OS on desktop PCs, would it be as big of a target for virus writers? Let's suppose that the Mac had made it big and held 70% of the market (work with me, here). It stands to reason that there would be a whole lot more Mac exploits, as it would be a bigger target and under the microscope a lot more. Windows might still be more insecure, but it would be getting a lot less attention.
The case workers in the US Patent Office are under the gun to make certain quotas. Failure to make the quota for one quarter will put you under probation. Screw up again in a certain time frame and you're gone. The threat of losing the job is an incentive to rush along with little regard for the absurdity of the patent.
The privacy issue of customers and employees alike takes an interesting spin when you factor in outsourcing. Suddenly, all of your personal data is in someone's database overseas. That's ok, until there's a political problem. When you have a government who doesn't give a rat's butt about privacy laws in other countries, and someone decides to sell your data, you're screwed.
reuse the old one as an MP3 server on your home network
If your network is then compromised and your MP3 server becomes visible to the outside, even in a limited capacity, do you then get zapped for sharing your MP3s? That would suck if you didn't even know it was happening and suddenly you get a summons.
My experiences with eMachines have generally been negative. I hope Gateway will fix what's broken there, or they will really screw the pooch and end up hurting themselves more than helping.
A few weeks ago I noticed a HUGE spike in the number of trojan scans against my firewall. I found that the scans were coming from pretty much everywhere (world-wide), and seem to start up almost as quickly as I connect to the net. I have been wondering what was behind such a spike in trojan scan activity; I guess this is my answer.
Fortunately, there are no known trojans on my system, the firewall and the virus checker are doing their jobs.
I worked for a large retailer until recently and the hard drive of choice for our proprietary systems was an IBM drive of some sort. This drives were not the specific drive in question, but IBM nevertheless, and we had an unusually high and consistent number of failures with them. We finally switched to Seagate drives and the issue vanished.
The idea tat IBM might have a drive that fails even more than the drives we had in our stores is unnerving.
Anyone else get the feeling that this particular distribution will end up being the 800-lb gorilla just because of the name change? I would almost be willing to wager that the forced name change will drive people to it, not from it (even though the name is dumb).
About the time the first version of this virus set sail, I noticed a huge spike in the number of Backdoor/Subseven probes against my firewall (still ongoing). Is this little bastard responsible for that, or is this caused by another issue altogether?
Program authors who set up this kind of trojan horse (think about it, it is like a trojan horse), should be publicly flogged and hung from the gallows at dawn.
I have lost hours cleaning up spyware messes. It would totally piss me off to have the tool I use be spyware-infested. That's akin to using a vaccine that is full of contaminants.
...revealing a surreal, dark landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars...
This statement wins points for profoundness. Unlike any ever seen on Mars? I thought that was the idea of the mission, to see what's actually up there!
It would be interesting to see if mining on Mars would be a feasible (and cost-effective) venture. With the apparent iron content of the soil (hence the rust-red color), it may be a good source of mineral content for mining operations. The hard (and expensive) part would be the transport of mined material back to Earth. Could the cost be overcome by the benefits?
'SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own'
I hope so. I have seen Novell buy and ruin several software packages. Probably the most notable (in my memory) was WordPerfect. WP was not as good as it should have been to start with, but it was awful after Novell got done with it.
Another was DR-DOS. DR-DOS never really recovered from Novell's influence (which was before Windows 95 came out, so there was time to undo the damage).
The idea of Novell owning SuSE makes me uneasy. Right now, I like SuSE - been my distro for a while. Might have to change distros, however, if Novell starts playing with it.
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I have a tablet that has 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. It runs Windows 10 and Android as well - dual boot. It's a Chinese device, even by brand. If that is a limitation imposed by Microsoft then this tablet maker doesn't seem to care.
That said, Windows 10 on a tablet is mediocre at best. I much preferred Windows 8.x for touch devices. I use the Android side almost exclusively.
I was initially a little wary of Windows 10 but when I started using it I was all right with it - for a while. It seemed to be stable, it ran the applications I needed (Pinnacle Studio and PaintShop Pro) and it seemed to be faster than Windows 7. Seemed like a good move for me.
But then I got a new computer with Windows 10 pre-installed. I thought, "great, now I can move my old computer to Linux like I planned and still run my important applications on the new one." Things were fine, until I realized that I was connected to the network without having entered my network password. And it knew my passwords on various websites that I had accessed with Edge. It knew how to access my bank, my social media - everything. Now, I am not a big fish by any means, but I do not like the idea of my passwords and keys being stashed on a server over which I have zero control.
Do I believe Microsoft will do Bad Things with that information? No, I don't. It's convenient to have it know what I need for me so I don't have to look it up. But, it's unnerving that they harvested that info without my knowledge. It also is unsettling to think that it's on a network computer somewhere.
On this basis alone I hesitate to recommend Windows 10.
NewEgg still sells Windows 7 laptops. Go into the laptops/notebooks section and enter Windows 7 as a keyword. Some of the units that come back are refurbs, but some are brand new.
I have had good success with wxWidgets on both Windows and Linux. That said, it's the *only* cross-platform GUI development library I have used and I am used to it. Rather than use anchors for placing window components it uses something called sizers which are a lot harder to work with until you get used to them. It can be used with a variety of languages (C++ and Python are the two big ones, though there is support for hooking into Java as well) and the licensing is sane.
Though I do favor wxWidgets (as it's all I really know) I believe QT is a lot more complete as a library. Depending on what you're doing, QT may be a better fit for your needs.
I ran OS/2 for a year or so, back in the early 90's. It was a nice system and I had no real issues with it except that the Windows support was very slow. The system was stable and easy to use, and of course I liked the multi-tasking at the time. When 32-bit Windows came out and MS refused to license the Windows support stuff to IBM like it did for 16-bit application support, that was pretty much the end of the line.
However, with a new Linux core, IBM could in theory use X and with it use WINE (after some licensing magic). If Big Blue did that, OS/2 could suddenly have a pretty large application base, commercial support, and very likely could garner some market share. Sure, that's a hefty amount of change and would mean a complete revamp of WPS but if they replaced the core OS anyway there's little reason to go whole-hog.
It's very unlikely that IBM would do this but it's possible (if expensive).
Security used to be the programmer's responsibility, yes. The shift in language design has been to move the responsibility from the coder to the language. When you have an enforcing language doing the checking, the theory is that it reduces costs in the maintenance phase.
Ada is a prime example of this. To get code to even compile is a real chore, but once you have it compiling there's a strong chance that it will be relatively free of careless errors that would drive up costs when in maintenance. It doesn't fix logic errors, of course, but it makes it a lot harder to have memory errors and conversion issues.
Java also does some of this through the JVM. The Java developer cannot *directly* manipulate pointers, as the language designer[s] decided that free access to memory was too risky and was the cause of a lot of strangeness at runtime. Also, it enforces conversion checking and even exception definitions.
Little by little, the responsibility of security is being taken away from developers.
You could pursue being a sysadmin. There is a little bit of shell-scripting involved but *typically* little coding of software.
Another possibility is to go into system securtity and hardening. There is a market for people who know how to lock down systems and keep out the riff-raff.
Still another is to find a job as a white hat. We have a few of them where I work, and their job it to try to violate the network and tell the systems folks how they broke through (and how to fix it).
There *are* non-coding jobs that pay. For an entry level position, it will depend on where you are and who hires you as well as sector of the market.
Until recently, I had subscriptions to both DDJ and CUJ, and I finally decided a few months ago that when DDJ was up for renewal, I would drop it. I have had a subscription for it since the summer of 1994, and like you I have seen it dropping in quality. So, I figured I would keep CUJ and dump DDJ. To find out that I will be getting DDJ *instead* of CUJ was frustrating to say the very least. They told me they would simply extend my DDJ subscription by the balance of what remained on my CUJ subscription - which I recently paid another year for. Unpleasant surprise.
For DDJ to cover the C++ stuff that CUJ covered will require a lot more paper and a lot more effort, effort I cannot see them making. They have gone so far into the Java world that I can't see them pulling back for those of us that didn't come alone for the ride. They quit doing an annual C++ issue a while ago, I doubt that will be coming back.
I wholeheartedly agree. That MS has made a career of NOT doing this (and has allowed many of their other applications to be equally exploitable, e.g OutLook), is as you've stated, a good case study of what not to do.
While what you have said is correct, one thing that you have not addressed is that, for some virus writers, getting their spooge to spread as far and as wide as possible is the goal. If you wanted to have your creation on as many systems as possible, would you target a less popular system that is as air-tight as a collander, or would you take the time to find a hole in the most in-use system? Now, if the OS is coded correctly, it would be a LOT harder to find security holes in it.
Even the most well-designed and built OSes have some holes and security flaws. Once in a while you hear about a gash in the Linux kernel. Solaris caught hell a while back too. They've tightened up, but you are fooling yourself if you think they are bulletproof. My argument is that, if some system other than Windows were dominant, there would be a lot more focus on finding those flaws. Windows would be no more secure than it is now, but it would not be the primary focus. Attention would be on the bigger target.
Popularity has nothing to do with the security of a system, you're correct there. However, it has a lot to do with how many exploits are found that would not be noticed if someone were not specifically looking for them.
I will state for the record that I am not an MS fan. Now that I have that out of the way:
If MS Windows were not the dominant OS on desktop PCs, would it be as big of a target for virus writers? Let's suppose that the Mac had made it big and held 70% of the market (work with me, here). It stands to reason that there would be a whole lot more Mac exploits, as it would be a bigger target and under the microscope a lot more. Windows might still be more insecure, but it would be getting a lot less attention.
The case workers in the US Patent Office are under the gun to make certain quotas. Failure to make the quota for one quarter will put you under probation. Screw up again in a certain time frame and you're gone. The threat of losing the job is an incentive to rush along with little regard for the absurdity of the patent.
The privacy issue of customers and employees alike takes an interesting spin when you factor in outsourcing. Suddenly, all of your personal data is in someone's database overseas. That's ok, until there's a political problem. When you have a government who doesn't give a rat's butt about privacy laws in other countries, and someone decides to sell your data, you're screwed.
reuse the old one as an MP3 server on your home network
If your network is then compromised and your MP3 server becomes visible to the outside, even in a limited capacity, do you then get zapped for sharing your MP3s? That would suck if you didn't even know it was happening and suddenly you get a summons.
With all the offers for free food on the internet how can a hungry person differitiate between the bogus ones and the ones that fill the tummy?
This takes cockroaching to a new level, dude...
My experiences with eMachines have generally been negative. I hope Gateway will fix what's broken there, or they will really screw the pooch and end up hurting themselves more than helping.
A few weeks ago I noticed a HUGE spike in the number of trojan scans against my firewall. I found that the scans were coming from pretty much everywhere (world-wide), and seem to start up almost as quickly as I connect to the net. I have been wondering what was behind such a spike in trojan scan activity; I guess this is my answer.
Fortunately, there are no known trojans on my system, the firewall and the virus checker are doing their jobs.
I worked for a large retailer until recently and the hard drive of choice for our proprietary systems was an IBM drive of some sort. This drives were not the specific drive in question, but IBM nevertheless, and we had an unusually high and consistent number of failures with them. We finally switched to Seagate drives and the issue vanished.
The idea tat IBM might have a drive that fails even more than the drives we had in our stores is unnerving.
Anyone else get the feeling that this particular distribution will end up being the 800-lb gorilla just because of the name change? I would almost be willing to wager that the forced name change will drive people to it, not from it (even though the name is dumb).
About the time the first version of this virus set sail, I noticed a huge spike in the number of Backdoor/Subseven probes against my firewall (still ongoing). Is this little bastard responsible for that, or is this caused by another issue altogether?
Program authors who set up this kind of trojan horse (think about it, it is like a trojan horse), should be publicly flogged and hung from the gallows at dawn.
I have lost hours cleaning up spyware messes. It would totally piss me off to have the tool I use be spyware-infested. That's akin to using a vaccine that is full of contaminants.
From the site, it almost sounds like Orkut is a more personalized version of TalkCity... Or perhaps another weird spin on messaging.
This statement wins points for profoundness. Unlike any ever seen on Mars? I thought that was the idea of the mission, to see what's actually up there!
It would be interesting to see if mining on Mars would be a feasible (and cost-effective) venture. With the apparent iron content of the soil (hence the rust-red color), it may be a good source of mineral content for mining operations. The hard (and expensive) part would be the transport of mined material back to Earth. Could the cost be overcome by the benefits?
'SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own'
I hope so. I have seen Novell buy and ruin several software packages. Probably the most notable (in my memory) was WordPerfect. WP was not as good as it should have been to start with, but it was awful after Novell got done with it.
Another was DR-DOS. DR-DOS never really recovered from Novell's influence (which was before Windows 95 came out, so there was time to undo the damage).
The idea of Novell owning SuSE makes me uneasy. Right now, I like SuSE - been my distro for a while. Might have to change distros, however, if Novell starts playing with it.