Actually all the episodes of Heroes from the first season were streamed for free from the NBC web site. There were some limitations; they forced you to sit through maybe 2 minutes of ads throughout the episode, and I suspect it only worked on Windows, but hey, it was free.
Since the Intel switch, the prices for midrange Apple machines have definitely become much more palatable. However this is still not true for the very low end machines like the one I have. You're right of course that "the Inspiron line can't spec up to the MacBook", but that doesn't change the fact that my Inspiron laptop is more than enough for me, and unfortunately no Mac laptop can match that $800-ish price point.
*Absolutely shocked* You're like... not serious right? My 550MHz G4 with 1GiB of RAM PowerBook runs Leopard significantly better than my Pentium 4 3.8GHz with 2.5GiB of RAM Dell Desktop (about 2 years old). And significantly better than the Dell Desktop 2.8GHz with 512MiB of RAM...
And I don't even want to address the P4 3.8GHz running in 64-bit mode with 1GiB of RAM... Vista at boot consumed about 1060 some megabytes of RAM after a clean reboot. This meant that just to run the OS it was paging everything like crazy. I've not been on such a slow computer since back in the days of 3.1! Do you mean Tiger? Leopard isn't out yet, and according to its Wikipedia page it requires at least an 800 MHz G4. And I don't know what OS you're running on the first Pentium 4 (I'm assuming Vista), but, with all due respect, you must be doing something wrong for a G4 with 40% the RAM to run "significantly better". I can at least understand performance problems you may be having on the other two machines, though I feel obligated to point out that I have a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GiB RAM in my office running 64-bit Vista Ultimate. At boot, the OS and all the annoying IT/antivirus scripts combine to take up 730 MiB of RAM. Obviously everyone's setup is a little different, but that is a pretty drastic gap.
Regardless, the point of the original post was that no special characteristic of a cheap Dell machine (as opposed to an old Mac) requires the owner to throw it away after just three years of use.
That's why I'm baffled by the spurrious price comparisons between Macs and Windows PCs. Sure my PowerBook cost 25% more than your Dell. But in three years, when you send your Dell off to laptop heaven (or more likely, if it's Dell, laptop hell) my PowerBook will still have at least three years of useful life left. Making your 25% "savings" actually a loss. I'm not sure about this. My primary machine at home is a 3-year-old Dell Inspiron 700m. It cost me $800 when I bought it — much less than any comparably powered Apple laptop at the time — and is still going strong. The laptop still does all it did three years ago; it browses the Web, plays music and DVDs, burns CDs, and handles some light development work. I upgraded the hard drive and the RAM more than two years ago, but that's because I bought a low end laptop to begin with. You'd do the same with an iBook that shipped with a 30 GB hard drive and 512 MB RAM. All the other hardware is stock and works just as well as it did when I bought it.
The point is that I don't see how a Mac laptop inherently has three more years of life. From what I hear anecdotally the internal hardware is pretty much the same these days. As far as the software goes, my laptop will run Vista adequately if not well, and you could say the same of a three-year-old Apple laptop and Leopard.
We have something similar, but a little less cumbersome. All the lights and office climate controls go out at 9 PM. For each block of a few (four or five) offices there is an override switch that you can hit to turn everything in that block back on for the next two hours.
You have to run an EXE that is attached to a spam e-mail. If you're running executables attached to spam, God help you -- this is the least of your worries.
"But Microsoft hasn't taken this principle entirely to heart, either. The first user defined during installation is automatically granted administrative privileges. Worse yet, the reserved account named Administrator is not required to have a password to log into the machine!"
Did they fix this?
AFAIK the reserved "Administrator" account is disabled until a password is specified. The user created during installation is still an administrator by default, but the theory is that UAC will prevent them from doing anything stupid to their computer.
I work at Microsoft, and the production Exchange servers are pretty reliable. There are outages occasionally (as in once every few months), but they are almost always short and announced beforehand. Obviously Microsoft IT has as a whole lot of experience with keeping Exchange running. The Office team usually "dogfoods" the beta of the next version of Exchange, and I've heard that it's (understandably) a little less stable, but still very usable.
In that case this is a trojan, not a worm. It doesn't exploit any vulnerability other than the willingness of users to double-click on EXEs. See the Panda Software advisory (which incidentally lists the Threat Level as low).
This worm has nothing to do with "videos/pictures stream[ing] through the chat box". The worm spreads by sending a URL to an executable. Victims run the executable (which is cleverly "disguised" by having the extension ".avi.exe") and get infected. Clearly this attack has nothing to do with GAIM or MSN Messenger, and contrary to what the summary says ("distributes itself to all your MSN contacts by sending a video"), the worm does not send any video at all. It displays some image when it first runs, but that's it.
So this has nothing to do with software bloat or WMP vulnerabilities or MSN Messenger being integrated with the OS (which it's not, by the way — you're thinking of Windows Messenger, which is different and will be removed in Vista IIRC) or software being "married to the kernel" (I have no idea what you mean by this). In fact Windows does its best to mitigate this type of attack — when you download an executable from the Web, it gets an Internet zone identifier attached that says the file came from the Internet zone. Running the file shows a warning dialog with the application name and the publisher before it will let the file run. I don't know what else Windows can do here.
This whole thing is just fulfilling the 1337 h4x0r fantasies of some kid who knows a little Visual Basic, and effectively posting his name on lights on Slashdot is completely counterproductive. If he'd done something remotely clever I could understand, but there are millions of these stupid worms floating around everywhere. There really is nothing to see here.
Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing.
on
Web 2.0, Meet .Net 3.0
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· Score: 5, Informative
You should have to change almost nothing to get a.NET 2.0 app working in.NET 3.0. The new version is essentially.NET 2.0 plus WinFx.
The specification is available here.
Keep in mind that I am very much not a lawyer. I can't (and shouldn't) answer any questions about what the license means.
Sorry, I didn't intend to sidestep anything. According to the XPS specification, XML content in XPS documents can't contain DTDs because they have a history of enabling denial of service attacks. The XML schema is available on the same licensing terms as the rest of the specification, and I think that's what vendors are expected to use to parse the XML.
We (as in Microsoft) have demoed XPS printing at several events with Fuji Xerox, and their printers use some sort of Java runtime. Miraculously enough, Windows CE isn't the only embedded OS that can parse well-formed XML.
There is a "Documents and Settings\Default User" (or, more accurately, "\Users\Default User") directory in Vista IIRC whose contents get copied to the profiles of any new users created.
I own Jedi Starfighter for the PS2 and its cooperative mode is one of the better ones I've played. Most of the time you and your partner control two different ships but on occasionone of you is the pilot and the other is the gunner on the same ship. Definitely very cool.
Yes, I guess I am being a bit narrow-minded when I'm assuming they've always taught cursive in schools everywhere. Our elementary school drilled cursive into our heads from second to fifth grade or so, as did the different schools in my area attended by some of my friends. But your point is taken, and seconded -- cursive isn't all that great... Still, I don't think the author's ominous foreboding that people will stop learning how to hold pencils is warranted. BR
-- shayborg
Last I checked, almost every elementary school, at least in the US, requires handwriting classes, and every school all the way up to university requires at least some handwritten homework or exams. It's not hard to learn cursive, and even harder to forget it.
That said, cursive looks nice and all, but it's a lot more difficult to read it than it is to read plain print. I still remember my cursive (for thank you notes and letters to grandparents, etc.) but when writing anything by hand I just use print -- and of course it's not as if I never need to write anything. A sticky note on my alarm clock is much more useful than a sticky note on my computer desktop. Either way, I don't think there's going to be a mass exodus away from use of the pencil anytime soon.
First, this isn't a code cleaning initiative, as someone above noted -- the article says that the new group will "establish new software development processes and create tools for its programmers so that future Microsoft products will have fewer security flaws." So it looks like their job is to just improve the programming methodology at our favorite software company.
Second, there are only ten people on this task force. Will they have enough time to fix the programming methodology for all Microsoft software? Somehow, I doubt it -- and it doesn't take much imagination to guess that the Mac products, for example, aren't likely to be the primary targets, as well as any spyware that Microsoft finds convenient (*cough*WMP;-)*cough*).
So it's a step in the right direction but I think they need to use more manpower to solve this problem. God knows they have plenty of it. Until they do, across the board, I don't think many of us will ever trust Microsoft's security. (I'll leave the question of trusting Microsoft itself to another discussion.)
Um -- I think your logic is flawed. I do use OS X on my Mac, but I also do own more than one PC. If you could inform me how to get the OS X interface onto my Linux machine I'd be very much obliged. Until then I don't think wishing for a better UI consitutes bitching about everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually all the episodes of Heroes from the first season were streamed for free from the NBC web site. There were some limitations; they forced you to sit through maybe 2 minutes of ads throughout the episode, and I suspect it only worked on Windows, but hey, it was free.
Since the Intel switch, the prices for midrange Apple machines have definitely become much more palatable. However this is still not true for the very low end machines like the one I have. You're right of course that "the Inspiron line can't spec up to the MacBook", but that doesn't change the fact that my Inspiron laptop is more than enough for me, and unfortunately no Mac laptop can match that $800-ish price point.
And I don't even want to address the P4 3.8GHz running in 64-bit mode with 1GiB of RAM... Vista at boot consumed about 1060 some megabytes of RAM after a clean reboot. This meant that just to run the OS it was paging everything like crazy. I've not been on such a slow computer since back in the days of 3.1! Do you mean Tiger? Leopard isn't out yet, and according to its Wikipedia page it requires at least an 800 MHz G4. And I don't know what OS you're running on the first Pentium 4 (I'm assuming Vista), but, with all due respect, you must be doing something wrong for a G4 with 40% the RAM to run "significantly better". I can at least understand performance problems you may be having on the other two machines, though I feel obligated to point out that I have a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GiB RAM in my office running 64-bit Vista Ultimate. At boot, the OS and all the annoying IT/antivirus scripts combine to take up 730 MiB of RAM. Obviously everyone's setup is a little different, but that is a pretty drastic gap.
Regardless, the point of the original post was that no special characteristic of a cheap Dell machine (as opposed to an old Mac) requires the owner to throw it away after just three years of use.
The point is that I don't see how a Mac laptop inherently has three more years of life. From what I hear anecdotally the internal hardware is pretty much the same these days. As far as the software goes, my laptop will run Vista adequately if not well, and you could say the same of a three-year-old Apple laptop and Leopard.
We have something similar, but a little less cumbersome. All the lights and office climate controls go out at 9 PM. For each block of a few (four or five) offices there is an override switch that you can hit to turn everything in that block back on for the next two hours.
You have to run an EXE that is attached to a spam e-mail. If you're running executables attached to spam, God help you -- this is the least of your worries.
AFAIK the reserved "Administrator" account is disabled until a password is specified. The user created during installation is still an administrator by default, but the theory is that UAC will prevent them from doing anything stupid to their computer.
I work at Microsoft, and the production Exchange servers are pretty reliable. There are outages occasionally (as in once every few months), but they are almost always short and announced beforehand. Obviously Microsoft IT has as a whole lot of experience with keeping Exchange running. The Office team usually "dogfoods" the beta of the next version of Exchange, and I've heard that it's (understandably) a little less stable, but still very usable.
In that case this is a trojan, not a worm. It doesn't exploit any vulnerability other than the willingness of users to double-click on EXEs. See the Panda Software advisory (which incidentally lists the Threat Level as low).
This worm has nothing to do with "videos/pictures stream[ing] through the chat box". The worm spreads by sending a URL to an executable. Victims run the executable (which is cleverly "disguised" by having the extension ".avi.exe") and get infected. Clearly this attack has nothing to do with GAIM or MSN Messenger, and contrary to what the summary says ("distributes itself to all your MSN contacts by sending a video"), the worm does not send any video at all. It displays some image when it first runs, but that's it.
So this has nothing to do with software bloat or WMP vulnerabilities or MSN Messenger being integrated with the OS (which it's not, by the way — you're thinking of Windows Messenger, which is different and will be removed in Vista IIRC) or software being "married to the kernel" (I have no idea what you mean by this). In fact Windows does its best to mitigate this type of attack — when you download an executable from the Web, it gets an Internet zone identifier attached that says the file came from the Internet zone. Running the file shows a warning dialog with the application name and the publisher before it will let the file run. I don't know what else Windows can do here.
This whole thing is just fulfilling the 1337 h4x0r fantasies of some kid who knows a little Visual Basic, and effectively posting his name on lights on Slashdot is completely counterproductive. If he'd done something remotely clever I could understand, but there are millions of these stupid worms floating around everywhere. There really is nothing to see here.
You should have to change almost nothing to get a .NET 2.0 app working in .NET 3.0. The new version is essentially .NET 2.0 plus WinFx.
The specification is available here. Keep in mind that I am very much not a lawyer. I can't (and shouldn't) answer any questions about what the license means.
Sorry, I didn't intend to sidestep anything. According to the XPS specification, XML content in XPS documents can't contain DTDs because they have a history of enabling denial of service attacks. The XML schema is available on the same licensing terms as the rest of the specification, and I think that's what vendors are expected to use to parse the XML.
We (as in Microsoft) have demoed XPS printing at several events with Fuji Xerox, and their printers use some sort of Java runtime. Miraculously enough, Windows CE isn't the only embedded OS that can parse well-formed XML.
There is a "Documents and Settings\Default User" (or, more accurately, "\Users\Default User") directory in Vista IIRC whose contents get copied to the profiles of any new users created.
The exploit concept demo GreyMagic has on their site works in IE6 as well -- a less comforting 71%+ of the market.
... though I guess it's not because of lack of money.
-- shayborg
Look here for a couple pictures of the Mac as well as the iSight.
-- shayborg
I own Jedi Starfighter for the PS2 and its cooperative mode is one of the better ones I've played. Most of the time you and your partner control two different ships but on occasionone of you is the pilot and the other is the gunner on the same ship. Definitely very cool.
-- shayborg
So, where does this all leave consumers - the wide-eyed masses, yearning for their content to breathe free? In Microsoft we trust. Ouch.
Heh.
Yes, I guess I am being a bit narrow-minded when I'm assuming they've always taught cursive in schools everywhere. Our elementary school drilled cursive into our heads from second to fifth grade or so, as did the different schools in my area attended by some of my friends. But your point is taken, and seconded -- cursive isn't all that great... Still, I don't think the author's ominous foreboding that people will stop learning how to hold pencils is warranted.
BR -- shayborg
Last I checked, almost every elementary school, at least in the US, requires handwriting classes, and every school all the way up to university requires at least some handwritten homework or exams. It's not hard to learn cursive, and even harder to forget it.
That said, cursive looks nice and all, but it's a lot more difficult to read it than it is to read plain print. I still remember my cursive (for thank you notes and letters to grandparents, etc.) but when writing anything by hand I just use print -- and of course it's not as if I never need to write anything. A sticky note on my alarm clock is much more useful than a sticky note on my computer desktop. Either way, I don't think there's going to be a mass exodus away from use of the pencil anytime soon.
-- shayborg
I have been waiting for a very long time now for Apple to upgrade the 15'' PB to an AI Model with Bluetooth and Airport Extreme ...
... ;-) (I think you meant Al with a small letter L, not AI.)
The HalBook? Might be interesting
-- shayborg
First, this isn't a code cleaning initiative, as someone above noted -- the article says that the new group will "establish new software development processes and create tools for its programmers so that future Microsoft products will have fewer security flaws." So it looks like their job is to just improve the programming methodology at our favorite software company.
;-)*cough*).
Second, there are only ten people on this task force. Will they have enough time to fix the programming methodology for all Microsoft software? Somehow, I doubt it -- and it doesn't take much imagination to guess that the Mac products, for example, aren't likely to be the primary targets, as well as any spyware that Microsoft finds convenient (*cough*WMP
So it's a step in the right direction but I think they need to use more manpower to solve this problem. God knows they have plenty of it. Until they do, across the board, I don't think many of us will ever trust Microsoft's security. (I'll leave the question of trusting Microsoft itself to another discussion.)
-- shayborg
Um -- I think your logic is flawed. I do use OS X on my Mac, but I also do own more than one PC. If you could inform me how to get the OS X interface onto my Linux machine I'd be very much obliged. Until then I don't think wishing for a better UI consitutes bitching about everything.
-- shayborg