There is no question that it was more functional and stable than IE4.
I would question that assertion.
As for functionality, IE4 introduced the modern DOM and added the native COM integration.
IE4 was definitely more stable than Navigator 4. Whatever problems you had with IE4, I'm sure you're talking about the Platform Preview releases. Navigator 4 crashes are what drove me to IE, and I've never looked back.
Remember Netscape layers? Me neither. The IE4 CSS and DOM support made them virtually obsolete.
Netscape may have survived if they had released Navigator 5 instead of stubbornly waiting for the gecko engine to be completed. They allowed MS to take the market with its superior browser. MS would not have even needed to release IE5 (which was mostly CSS2 and better international support.)
Sony would be foolish to discount Microsoft's resolve to be successful in Japan. Read up on the failure of Word 6.0 in Japan, followed by the success of Word 95.
You can't just type "excel" because excel.exe is not in the path, and it's considered bad form on Windows to pollute up the path for every installed app.
But you can type "start excel" which uses shell extensions in the registry to find and launch the executable. This works for most apps with modern installers.
I think this is just like the straw that broke IIS's back on the server side. Big holes, no solutions.
One solution is to stay patched. The RPC bug they are using to infect IIS sites was fixed some time back (update 04-11). Only sites that have not patched are vulnerable. Seems this solution is necessary for Apache too.
The minimum budget during the "gravy days" was about $10 million per car per year. Fernandez Racing spent $20 million per year. Penske, Ganassi, and likely Green and Newman-Haas spent much more than that. Michael Andretti himself made $8 million a year. $50 million was certainly not out of the question for the top teams.
The Champ car machines are all standardised. They use the same Lola/Reynard chassis and Ford V8 engine. They're more like Formula 3000.
Until three years ago there was alot of interesting comptetion in CART - engines from Toyota, Honda, Ford, and Mercedes - chassis from Reynard, Lola, and Swift - tires from Firestone and Goodyear - big budgets.
It was a poor mans Formula 1, with great drivers, some great tracks, and the frightening spectacle of the super speedways. I mean a world record 246MPH qualifying lap! And the horsepower they used to run!
Unfortunately, the money is gone now, and Champ car is surviving with as a spec type series. It still has some great drivers, great tracks, and a good fan base -- especially in Mexico and Canada. It's still serves as a feeder series to F1 along with F3000. Let's hope Honda and Toyota come to their senses and bring their money back to Champ cars.
Let's also hope the same thing doesn't happen to F1.
Actually that not a fair assessment. CART was first with HANS (head and neck restraints), pit lane speed limits, wheel tethers, monocock crash test requirements. Before the money disappeared, CART had a huge budget for safety R&D. They were the model in the racing industry for proactive safety programs.
F1 still doesn't have a traveling trauma team or safety team. They rely on local authorities for medical response. If CART had run that way, Alex Zanardi would be dead today.
F1's biggest advantage in safety is improved track design to prevent the deadly crashes to start with - run off areas, etc. That's great, and Champ cars are catching up by wisely abandoning oval tracks.
These two examples do different things. One must do a proper conversion from int to string, and the other is a simple math operation to cast from int to char.
I think the point you were trying to make is that the C++ stream library is slower than the C file I/O library. Yes, genius, it generally is, but only by a small amount.
You miss the point about the duality of C++ - it's both low level and high level. I can use classes when I want object oriented designs that encourage reuse and are easy to maintain, but I can still use C coding techniques when I really need extreme performance.
nothing in the OS was ever really meant to be scriptable
That's not really true. Most OS functions are available through COM interfaces. VBScript and JScript interact with any COM interface through the Windows Scripting Host, either in a windowed enviornment (wscript) or a command line environment (cscript). You can manage users, files, ACLs, the registry, network configurations, IIS, application deployment (MSI), multimedia, services, etc. And's it's all done with a nice component paradigm of methods, collections, and properties. Those same COM interfaces are also available for application development to VB6 (native), C++ and.NET.
We've had this COM environment for 10 years with Windows. In my opinion it's more powerful than the "everything's a pipe" approach.
I wonder what % of that is forced to move due to the unpatchability of NT4 against recent worms like Sasser?
and from a child post
Doh. NT isn't vulnerable to Sasser.
Shimbo, NT is vulnerable - you're just completely wrong. You shouldn't post unless you have your facts straight.
EvilGrin666, NT is patchable. Now if you are referring to the problems with patching NT systems with system partitions larger than 7.8GB, you are hal'f right. Just remember that these configurations were never recommended or supported by MS. It is a real problem though.
With interbuilding cables, only earth-ground one end of the shield. Earth potential can vary by several hundred volts between buildings, even without the storms. If you ground both ends, you are creating a dangerous high voltage ground loop.
Fiber is definitly one of the best solutions for eliminating ground loops on inter-building runs.
Technologies like Linux, Mozilla (XUL+++), etc. came not from the desire to do something that could lure _others_ away from somebody elses technology, but to enable the developer to use hard and software they way he wanted to and the way he thinks others may want to use it.
You chose a poor example with Mozilla/Gecko. It was developed primarily by Netscape (yes, they did the heavy lifting) to compete in the marketplace against Microsoft. Other contrary examples would be the backbones of much the open software movement, mySQL and Java - both developed by corporations and released as open source loss-leaders to lock users into their technology. Even the Apache HTTP Server home page displays the project's sensitivity to market position by headlining with "The Number One HTTP Server On The Internet"
Competition, in the marketplace and in other venues, is the backbone of a capitalist society. You can rest assured that many successful open-source projects have owners that feel tremendous pressure to compete against for-profit companies, other developers, or other OSS projects.
There is very little altruism in the world. The open source microcosm is no exception.
ASP.NET data binding to SQL has built-in protections to avoid SQL injections and other common SQL security problems. In general, the.NET security model is quite effective and useful for web programming.
When I got my first CD player in 1985, the average price of a new CD in a record store was $12. In 2004, the average price of a new CD in a record store is $18. Now, granted there are bargain-basement $5.99 CDs these days, as well as sale-priced new releases at the $12 or $13 price point, but as a whole, CDs aren't cheaper today than they were nearly 20 years ago.
From 1985 to 2004 we've seen the consumer price index rise about 70%. That would make your $12 1985 CD cost about $20.40 today. So even if the average price was $18 as you say, they are cheaper than they were in 1985. In reality, NPD MusicWatch says the average price of CDs in 2003 was $13.42, down 2% from 2002.
apple allows you to register as a developer for free, and they give away all their tools and docs, unlike microsoft who charges you a few grand for the privilege of developing windows software.
Microsoft does give away a fairly complete set of tools including compilers and debuggers, and docs. It's just the premuim IDE (Visual Studio) that they charge for, and that runs about $800, not "a few grand."
to build similar UI's on a PC is very tedious. You want text boxes that expand with the window, tie a text box to one corner, place a button so it is always in the bottom right hand corner of a window. All of these things are a simple click away. No complex code to get all these things moving around.
While this used to be tedious in VB6, and certainly in dialogs,.NET has two new features, docking and anchoring, that solve the problem. Give 'em a try.
Re:Have you tried the latest Acrobat reader?
on
Real Problems
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· Score: 1
Look at the acrobat reader - it's free, easy, multi-platform and does what it is supposed to and nothing more
Have you tried version 6? It's getting to be an annoying nagware product. It uses up 38MB on load, displays ads in the upper right, nags me (on occasion) to download new components that I don't want (Adobe Atmosphere Player? Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition?).
Cable does not have a monopoly on content delivery. Cable has about 70 million subscribers, compared to 20 million for the two major satellite providers. Nearly all consumers, even apartment dwellers, have a choice between cable and satellite television.
If you look at how the market has changed in the last five years, cable rates have gone up, but quality and quantity of channels have also improved. Cable improved their product to meet competition from the satellite guys, which traditionally have offered better quality and more channels - appearantly what most consumers want.
The satellite guys experimented with a la carte a few years ago, but it didn't sell. People wanted the 150 channel package. "Super size it. I want the best value."
The government should stay out of this particular fight. Market forces are working. The thing regulators need to watch is the mega-mergers between the content providers (News Corp, Time Warner, Disney, etc). It's these guys who have the power now. The cable and satellite guys are nearing a commodity status for delivery.
No, Windows doesn't have chroot(), largely because of the legacy of drive letters, which means we don't have a single controllable root on Windows.
But chroot is really just a nifty short cut for restricting file system access - meaning you're probably using root for your process - bad. And it certainly isn't unbreakable if you're using root for your processes. ACLs can achieve the same effect, but with more work for the Admin.
I agree that 98% of Windows boxes are not adequately secured. My guess is that 85% of Linux boxes are also not adequately secured. I think XP SP2 and Server 2003 are great steps in the right direction toward good default configurations. I think Automatic Windows Update is a huge part of the solution. I think Windows app developers need to be flogged when Admin rights are required to run their app.
Chances are really good that DOS-based machines would have simply succumbed to the Mac paradigm, and Amiga might even still be alive today.
Don't you think IBM might have succeeded with OS/2 in Microsoft's place. Maybe Apple would have had a shot, but there was no OS vacancy on x86. OS/2 was an upcoming GUI OS, and the real threat to Microsoft at the time. x86 would still have ruled, with a possible switch to PowerPC since IBM would have been in control of the game.
Of course IBM was in control with the ISA bus until the Microchannel blunder allowed VESA, and then PCI to take over. So the PowerPC switch probably would have failed as well thanks to Intel, Compaq, and the rest of the clone market.
there is simply more you CAN do to secure Linux, versus Windows, in which almost all security has to be installed seperately.
You can massively limit the damage done by a worm in Linux simply by running all processes that leave a port open in a chroot jail, or by doing so as a lesser privledeged user. This is one of the many simple solutions avaliable, while in Windows, its not so easy.
It's very easy to to manage security for service processes under Windows. Different users can be created for the services, allowing whatever ACL restriction you'd like. For other processes, the "run as" option can provide the same function.
If you're having problems determining which services (or other process) are opening what ports, check out netstat -o.
This stuff is actually "easy" under Windows - maybe not Aunt Millie easy, but any power user can handle it. No MSCE required. The tools (and documentation) are there. There's even a fancy gee-wiz UI way to do it - no regedit necessary.
If you're a fan of software firewalls (I'm not), then yes, generally you have to buy these separately. But then software firewalls aren't really the answer, are they. Why do I need a separate piece of software to filter inbound connections. I can do that with the IPSECurity, or if I want redundancy, with a dedicated hardware firewall.
Call me over-confident, but I've had a Win 2000 Server on the net for 4 years, with no firewall of any kind, no NAT, no real-time anti-virus, and with open IIS ports. I run Outlook, IE6, VS.NET, SQL Server, and lots of other "notorious" MS software. The only illness this system has suffered was a code-red triggered DOS on my unpatched Cisco 675 router, and some nasty spyware installed with BearShare back before I knew what AdAware was. It's not magic - I just keep up with Windows Update and MBSA, and I try to be careful about what binaries I trust. Also, I back up religously. To be honest, the hardest part has been keeping up with mySQL, PHP, and ActiveState revs.
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If you've learned nothing else about Microsoft over the years, you should at least know that they haven't grown by being "better" at anything.
Microsoft has plenty of technical victories:
There is no question that it was more functional and stable than IE4.
I would question that assertion.
As for functionality, IE4 introduced the modern DOM and added the native COM integration.
IE4 was definitely more stable than Navigator 4. Whatever problems you had with IE4, I'm sure you're talking about the Platform Preview releases. Navigator 4 crashes are what drove me to IE, and I've never looked back.
Remember Netscape layers? Me neither. The IE4 CSS and DOM support made them virtually obsolete.
Netscape may have survived if they had released Navigator 5 instead of stubbornly waiting for the gecko engine to be completed. They allowed MS to take the market with its superior browser. MS would not have even needed to release IE5 (which was mostly CSS2 and better international support.)
Sony would be foolish to discount Microsoft's resolve to be successful in Japan. Read up on the failure of Word 6.0 in Japan, followed by the success of Word 95.
You can't just type "excel" because excel.exe is not in the path, and it's considered bad form on Windows to pollute up the path for every installed app.
But you can type "start excel" which uses shell extensions in the registry to find and launch the executable. This works for most apps with modern installers.
I was referring to the general practice of patching to avoid vulnerabilities.
I think this is just like the straw that broke IIS's back on the server side. Big holes, no solutions.
One solution is to stay patched. The RPC bug they are using to infect IIS sites was fixed some time back (update 04-11). Only sites that have not patched are vulnerable. Seems this solution is necessary for Apache too.
The open bug is on the browser side.
The minimum budget during the "gravy days" was about $10 million per car per year. Fernandez Racing spent $20 million per year. Penske, Ganassi, and likely Green and Newman-Haas spent much more than that. Michael Andretti himself made $8 million a year. $50 million was certainly not out of the question for the top teams.
The Champ car machines are all standardised. They use the same Lola/Reynard chassis and Ford V8 engine. They're more like Formula 3000.
Until three years ago there was alot of interesting comptetion in CART - engines from Toyota, Honda, Ford, and Mercedes - chassis from Reynard, Lola, and Swift - tires from Firestone and Goodyear - big budgets.
It was a poor mans Formula 1, with great drivers, some great tracks, and the frightening spectacle of the super speedways. I mean a world record 246MPH qualifying lap! And the horsepower they used to run!
Unfortunately, the money is gone now, and Champ car is surviving with as a spec type series. It still has some great drivers, great tracks, and a good fan base -- especially in Mexico and Canada. It's still serves as a feeder series to F1 along with F3000. Let's hope Honda and Toyota come to their senses and bring their money back to Champ cars.
Let's also hope the same thing doesn't happen to F1.
Actually that not a fair assessment. CART was first with HANS (head and neck restraints), pit lane speed limits, wheel tethers, monocock crash test requirements. Before the money disappeared, CART had a huge budget for safety R&D. They were the model in the racing industry for proactive safety programs.
F1 still doesn't have a traveling trauma team or safety team. They rely on local authorities for medical response. If CART had run that way, Alex Zanardi would be dead today.
F1's biggest advantage in safety is improved track design to prevent the deadly crashes to start with - run off areas, etc. That's great, and Champ cars are catching up by wisely abandoning oval tracks.
These two examples do different things. One must do a proper conversion from int to string, and the other is a simple math operation to cast from int to char.
I think the point you were trying to make is that the C++ stream library is slower than the C file I/O library. Yes, genius, it generally is, but only by a small amount.
You miss the point about the duality of C++ - it's both low level and high level. I can use classes when I want object oriented designs that encourage reuse and are easy to maintain, but I can still use C coding techniques when I really need extreme performance.
nothing in the OS was ever really meant to be scriptable
That's not really true. Most OS functions are available through COM interfaces. VBScript and JScript interact with any COM interface through the Windows Scripting Host, either in a windowed enviornment (wscript) or a command line environment (cscript). You can manage users, files, ACLs, the registry, network configurations, IIS, application deployment (MSI), multimedia, services, etc. And's it's all done with a nice component paradigm of methods, collections, and properties. Those same COM interfaces are also available for application development to VB6 (native), C++ and .NET.
We've had this COM environment for 10 years with Windows. In my opinion it's more powerful than the "everything's a pipe" approach.
Actually you weren't completely wrong, but instead completely right. I feel like an ass.
I wonder what % of that is forced to move due to the unpatchability of NT4 against recent worms like Sasser? and from a child post
Doh. NT isn't vulnerable to Sasser.
Shimbo, NT is vulnerable - you're just completely wrong. You shouldn't post unless you have your facts straight.
EvilGrin666, NT is patchable. Now if you are referring to the problems with patching NT systems with system partitions larger than 7.8GB, you are hal'f right. Just remember that these configurations were never recommended or supported by MS. It is a real problem though.
With interbuilding cables, only earth-ground one end of the shield. Earth potential can vary by several hundred volts between buildings, even without the storms. If you ground both ends, you are creating a dangerous high voltage ground loop.
Fiber is definitly one of the best solutions for eliminating ground loops on inter-building runs.
Their keyboards and mice are, of course, made by Logitech. They are simply branded as Microsoft
Microsoft Keyboards are supplied by Keytronic. The mice are manufactured by Flextronics.
Logitech considers Microsoft their number one competitor in keyboards and mice.
Technologies like Linux, Mozilla (XUL+++), etc. came not from the desire to do something that could lure _others_ away from somebody elses technology, but to enable the developer to use hard and software they way he wanted to and the way he thinks others may want to use it.
You chose a poor example with Mozilla/Gecko. It was developed primarily by Netscape (yes, they did the heavy lifting) to compete in the marketplace against Microsoft. Other contrary examples would be the backbones of much the open software movement, mySQL and Java - both developed by corporations and released as open source loss-leaders to lock users into their technology. Even the Apache HTTP Server home page displays the project's sensitivity to market position by headlining with "The Number One HTTP Server On The Internet"
Competition, in the marketplace and in other venues, is the backbone of a capitalist society. You can rest assured that many successful open-source projects have owners that feel tremendous pressure to compete against for-profit companies, other developers, or other OSS projects.
There is very little altruism in the world. The open source microcosm is no exception.
ASP.NET data binding to SQL has built-in protections to avoid SQL injections and other common SQL security problems. In general, the .NET security model is quite effective and useful for web programming.
When I got my first CD player in 1985, the average price of a new CD in a record store was $12. In 2004, the average price of a new CD in a record store is $18. Now, granted there are bargain-basement $5.99 CDs these days, as well as sale-priced new releases at the $12 or $13 price point, but as a whole, CDs aren't cheaper today than they were nearly 20 years ago.
From 1985 to 2004 we've seen the consumer price index rise about 70%. That would make your $12 1985 CD cost about $20.40 today. So even if the average price was $18 as you say, they are cheaper than they were in 1985. In reality, NPD MusicWatch says the average price of CDs in 2003 was $13.42, down 2% from 2002.
apple allows you to register as a developer for free, and they give away all their tools and docs, unlike microsoft who charges you a few grand for the privilege of developing windows software.
Microsoft does give away a fairly complete set of tools including compilers and debuggers, and docs. It's just the premuim IDE (Visual Studio) that they charge for, and that runs about $800, not "a few grand."
to build similar UI's on a PC is very tedious. You want text boxes that expand with the window, tie a text box to one corner, place a button so it is always in the bottom right hand corner of a window. All of these things are a simple click away. No complex code to get all these things moving around.
While this used to be tedious in VB6, and certainly in dialogs, .NET has two new features, docking and anchoring, that solve the problem. Give 'em a try.
Look at the acrobat reader - it's free, easy, multi-platform and does what it is supposed to and nothing more
Have you tried version 6? It's getting to be an annoying nagware product. It uses up 38MB on load, displays ads in the upper right, nags me (on occasion) to download new components that I don't want (Adobe Atmosphere Player? Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition?).
I should have never upgraded from version 5.
Cable does not have a monopoly on content delivery. Cable has about 70 million subscribers, compared to 20 million for the two major satellite providers. Nearly all consumers, even apartment dwellers, have a choice between cable and satellite television.
If you look at how the market has changed in the last five years, cable rates have gone up, but quality and quantity of channels have also improved. Cable improved their product to meet competition from the satellite guys, which traditionally have offered better quality and more channels - appearantly what most consumers want.
The satellite guys experimented with a la carte a few years ago, but it didn't sell. People wanted the 150 channel package. "Super size it. I want the best value."
The government should stay out of this particular fight. Market forces are working. The thing regulators need to watch is the mega-mergers between the content providers (News Corp, Time Warner, Disney, etc). It's these guys who have the power now. The cable and satellite guys are nearing a commodity status for delivery.
No, Windows doesn't have chroot(), largely because of the legacy of drive letters, which means we don't have a single controllable root on Windows.
But chroot is really just a nifty short cut for restricting file system access - meaning you're probably using root for your process - bad. And it certainly isn't unbreakable if you're using root for your processes. ACLs can achieve the same effect, but with more work for the Admin.
I agree that 98% of Windows boxes are not adequately secured. My guess is that 85% of Linux boxes are also not adequately secured. I think XP SP2 and Server 2003 are great steps in the right direction toward good default configurations. I think Automatic Windows Update is a huge part of the solution. I think Windows app developers need to be flogged when Admin rights are required to run their app.
Chances are really good that DOS-based machines would have simply succumbed to the Mac paradigm, and Amiga might even still be alive today.
Don't you think IBM might have succeeded with OS/2 in Microsoft's place. Maybe Apple would have had a shot, but there was no OS vacancy on x86. OS/2 was an upcoming GUI OS, and the real threat to Microsoft at the time. x86 would still have ruled, with a possible switch to PowerPC since IBM would have been in control of the game.
Of course IBM was in control with the ISA bus until the Microchannel blunder allowed VESA, and then PCI to take over. So the PowerPC switch probably would have failed as well thanks to Intel, Compaq, and the rest of the clone market.
there is simply more you CAN do to secure Linux, versus Windows, in which almost all security has to be installed seperately.
You can massively limit the damage done by a worm in Linux simply by running all processes that leave a port open in a chroot jail, or by doing so as a lesser privledeged user. This is one of the many simple solutions avaliable, while in Windows, its not so easy.
It's very easy to to manage security for service processes under Windows. Different users can be created for the services, allowing whatever ACL restriction you'd like. For other processes, the "run as" option can provide the same function.
If you're having problems determining which services (or other process) are opening what ports, check out netstat -o.
This stuff is actually "easy" under Windows - maybe not Aunt Millie easy, but any power user can handle it. No MSCE required. The tools (and documentation) are there. There's even a fancy gee-wiz UI way to do it - no regedit necessary.
If you're a fan of software firewalls (I'm not), then yes, generally you have to buy these separately. But then software firewalls aren't really the answer, are they. Why do I need a separate piece of software to filter inbound connections. I can do that with the IPSECurity, or if I want redundancy, with a dedicated hardware firewall.
Call me over-confident, but I've had a Win 2000 Server on the net for 4 years, with no firewall of any kind, no NAT, no real-time anti-virus, and with open IIS ports. I run Outlook, IE6, VS.NET, SQL Server, and lots of other "notorious" MS software. The only illness this system has suffered was a code-red triggered DOS on my unpatched Cisco 675 router, and some nasty spyware installed with BearShare back before I knew what AdAware was. It's not magic - I just keep up with Windows Update and MBSA, and I try to be careful about what binaries I trust. Also, I back up religously. To be honest, the hardest part has been keeping up with mySQL, PHP, and ActiveState revs.