Exactly. Daley and his cronies can't pave city streets without massive fraud and horrible delays and plenty of taxpayer waste. Millenium park was 5 years late and hundreds of millions over-budget.
Why does anyone think municipal wi-fi will work at all, especially in Chicago? Corruption and waste will run rampant, just as it does in most other city services. As hard as it is to believe, Federal programs are typically models of efficiency and integrity compared to almost any urban government program - in Chicago or anywhere else.
I still can't figure out how Daley runs basically unopposed every elec... (insert sound of several large South-Side Irish lads hitting someone over the head with a piece of rebar).
Are you aware that any above-average worm-writing criminal has more computational resources at his/her disposal than an an average government agency?
The average government agency, maybe. The average government agency is like the Department of Motor Vehicles - their primary mission does not require lots of bleeding-edge hardware, just a lot of simple databases and paperwork.
But the NSA, DIA, CIA, FBI, etc. have tens of billions to spend each year, and their primary missions basically require them to try to break some encryption now and then if they can. This is Microsoft-size money. Say they spent just $1 billion their budget on cracking hardware, they have enough to buy a compute cluster of one million (or more) Xeons or Opterons.
Even your most elite worm-writer can't compete with that.
But you know what? NSA and their like probably don't even try to crack suspect encrypted traffic unless there's a real value to being able to listen in on the enemy without their knowledge over a long period of time (as in say the Cold War). If there's just one bit of information the government really wants to know - say the time and place of an upcoming terrorist attack - it's much cheaper and faster to snatch someone and get the information through "physical" means.
Don't forget Chicago, Illinois, which is now Boeing's corporate HQ. Mayor Daley and the corrupt downstaters gave out hundreds of millions in tax advantages in exchange for a few hundred local jobs.
As I now pay more in property tax for my two-bedroom condo than Boeing does for its whole skyscraper, I am a bit pissed. Not at Boeing - who simply took a good deal when it was offered - but at my local government.
It's amazing how Daley can require outrageously high property and (local) sales taxes, but give us shitty schools, roads, police, hospitals etc. in return. While he still runs basically unopposed in every election. The corruption and influence of the Chicago "Democratic Party Machine" is astounding.
Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition >9.0 already removes spyware if you choose to enable that feature.
Of course, since we don't let our people be members of Power Users or Administrators groups on thier workstations, and we restrict the "Run..." registry keys in the user hive, we don't see too much spyware. So maybe the feature of Symantec Corporate Edition doesn't work in the real world. I dunno.
Anybody got a known-spyware site I can use to test?
Re:Info on what exactly SHA-1 is ...
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the NSA did try to protect the SHA hash from this sort of attack. After the initial publication of SHA, they quickly suggested a small change that made SHA stronger than the original SHA (now commonly called SHA-0). SHA-0 was found to be vulnerable to this collision-finding attack around the same time MD5 was. The changed algorithm from NSA (commonly called SHA-1) made it less vulnerable - but not invulnerable - to this style of attack.
For example, finding an arbitrary colision in SHA-1 requires 2^69 operations, while finding an arbitrary collision in SHA-0 only requires just 2^40 operations using a similar technique. That makes SHA-1 about 536 million times stronger than SHA-0 with respect to this collision-finding attack. So apparently the NSA really was trying to improve - not weaken - the SHA.
Apparently, you Hate hollywood studios and much of what they produce. Rather than try to justify breaking the law to spite these corporataions, try not buying/copying/watching their content in the first place. You have abosultely no "right" to movies in a DRM-free format. You can either take or leave the studio's license terms. If you don't like DRM, don't buy, watch, or illegaly copy movies from studios that use DRM! If all movie studios choose to use DRM, then "drop out" and stop watching movies entirely. Those are your only legal and moral options.
If DRM really bothers people, studios will change to win back drop-outs. If not, well, you'll be getting a lot more fresh air.
UNIX has had this for over 30 years, and Linux for over 13 years. When you don't give the end-users the root password, the configuration is locked-down.
Umm, no. Things like Group Policies on Windows provide much much more than "lockdown". Software installation, sure. But most importantly, configuration. I need to be able to enforce configurations like, "this group of users automatically point to mail server X, file server Y, and this set of icons and default reports for our financials applications. Also, make plain text their default email format, and set their in-office hours on their calendar to 9-to-5 weedays. Prevent them from changing that stuff, but only if they're not in the help desk group. Finally, hide all of the database integration functions from the spreadsheet program, so they don't get confused."
Many many hours of scripting would be required to replicate this functionality on Linux, if it were possible at all with all the customized configuration files each application has. With Windows, Active Directory, and Group Policies, this sort of mass configutation is just point-n-click.
The closest thing I've ever seen to this on a UNIX-style system was how the University of Notre Dame ran their Solaris workstation clusters on AFS back in the mid-1990s. But there was really no application-level configuration done, just some automatic setup of X, the window manager, and user directories.
If you were really clever, you could even have hustlers on the floor. Guy wins $1000 at a $25 Blackjack table? Cute chick comes over and offers him a drink on the way to the cashier's. Asks him how he did. Points out the conveniently-located row of $100 tables that somehow always have to be walked around before he can get to the cashier's.
Such hustlers are usually called "shills" in Casino parlance, and have been around since the dawn of the modern casino. In Nevada - and probably most other areas where gaming is regulated - the dealer has to tell you if there are any shills working that might be affecting your play. All you have to do is ask.
In my mind, much of the advantage Windows currently gives businesses revolve around change and configuration management tools like Group Policy and Intellimirror. To get equivalent functionality in Linux, much time-consuming scripting is required. Currently, I believe it is far easier to administer clients with Windows servers that it is to administer a large network of Linux clients with Linux servers.
However, I can think of very few other advantages that Windows enjoys over Linux on the server side, especially in the realm of web and file serving. Open-source databases like PostGres and even MySQL"growing up" into real SQL Server alternatives in terms of ACID compliance and replication. And there are even Exchange Server alternatives coming into adolescence.
Will Microsoft adjust to the "commoditazation" of these markets as they did with the low-cost Windows Server 2003 Web server edition? That is, will we see lower costs and/or the elimination of client access licensing to compete with Linux?
How about you get a clue and run the free Software Update Services on your network? Then all you ahve to do is "approve" an update, and it gets applied without you doing anything.
From the articles cited, it certianly sounds like shoddy management and planning caused this project failure, not a particular piece of software. Certainly it would have been reported widely if bugs in the.NET environment made the project flop?
SAIC, like all huge consultancies, deals with just about every technology and platform. SAIC also does huge Java projects. By your logic, why should we not assume that Java at fault for the VCF failure?
Anyway, something as big as VCF almost certainly involved multiple platforms, and I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts there were plenty of non-MS platforms and technologies in the mix.
I've used password safe for years, and it's perfect. It has reduced me to having to remember just two passwords: my Windows domain login, and the password safe password.
What's really cool is how simple it is to make Password Safe usable network-wide. It's so small, we made a quick script to deploy it to each of our user's Application Data directories, and then made startup shortcuts. Because it's in their profile, each user's password safe follows them from machine to machine, so it's always available.
Most users embraced it quickly, although we periodically run across someone who insists on the same password for everyhting. They get a letter from HR explaining that they're violating rules defined in the employee handbook, and they fall into line rather quickly.
Of course, it's Win32 only, and Password Safe will not protect against keyboard sniffers and similar trojans. But it's much better than having your high-value corporate passwords being used on the NY Times website.
Any password over 14 characters will not be stored in the LM Hash so 30 isnt exactly necessary but I understand where your coming from.
Gotta love slashdot... MS-bashing with information dating back to the Win9x era presented as current fact.
First of all, the (very weak) LM hash is only necessary for compatibilty with Win9x clients.
Secondly, the LM hash was unnecessarily transmitted by NT4 clients for compatibility's sake for some time (until NT4SP4). But Windows 2000 and later don't use it at all unless they are servers dealing with a Win9x client. In fact, you can turn off the storage of the LM hash completely on Windows 2000 and later, using only the more-secure NTLM hash which is basically MD4. MD4 has been shown to have some weaknesses in that arbitrary collision pairs can be found, but it is still considered one-way and that is what really matters in a password authentication scheme.
Microsoft also corrected a few other protocols (MS-CHAPv1 for example) that transmitted the used LM hash unnecessarily from the client for compatibility's sake. They made all these fixes back in about 1999, IIRC, when Windows NT 4.0 SP4 was released.
A battle between two for-profit companies over market share adn interoperability. Why is this a headline on Slashdot? I mean, we're all commie pinko Open Source advocates that work soley for charitable organizations.
"Not responding" to an accusation is NOT and admission of anything. Suppose I say "you molested a 5 year old", then hold up a tape recorder. Now I can have tape of you "emphaitcally denying" that you are a child molester, or I can have a tape of you saying "no comment", which looks even worse. Both will generate a lot of media buzz, all negative for you.
The best you can hope for is for me to have a tape of YOU IGNORING me, which doesn't generate much hoopla. This is why Bush didn't respond to the accusations about his Guard duty, other than to say very generally that he met his obligations of service.
You really have a lot to learn about the underhanded ways our Western media (both left- and right-leaning) work.
But wait, I thought there was no proof of that, beacuse the documents that "proved" it were found to be fake. Do you have some better, older documents for us to take a look at? Surely CBS News would have used those documents in its own defense if they existed, right?
Note also that rambling, unverified "recollections" from self-proclaimed witnesses with a demonstrated political bias do not meet the burden of proof, either. Not in a court of law, nor in the court of public opinion.
I mean, I personally think Georgie probably did skip out on or sleep through some Guard duty, based on his frat-boy character at the time. But that's just supposition with out actual proof, isn't it?
it's just that you implied that graphic designers might be good at UI design, which is demonstratably false
Point taken. User interface design is indeed a different (if somewhat related) skillset from graphic design.
However, most of the graphic designers I know currently work on the presentation aspects of websites, and most are fairly good. Far better, in fact, than any programmer I've seen. Most of these people have an education background in news-oriented graphic design or infographics. They specialize in producing logical, informative layouts where color, shape, and white space are used to guide the reader visually to the bits of information sought.
I have never actually met someone (in business or in real life) who had an educational background in software UI design, even though I know at least a few universities offer such programs. That being the case, I choose to lean on the most qualified people I know (graphic designers) for help with UI stuff.
I think Gnome/KDE and distro maintainers should stay as far away as possible from bland blue+white+grey themes and Arial lookalike fonts. Leave that crap to MS, and come up with something at least a little original and distinctive. Like Unbutu Linux has done, for example.
In fact, I always encourage the graphic designers I know to contribute to my favorite OSS projects, although none have so far. I'll try again, but everyone else out there, please do the same... engineers and programmers are generally not good at user interface design.
speed is one of the areas which is always welcome for improvement (until of course it reaches the max interface speed, eg 150mB/sec for SATA)
Latency is actually a far bigger problem with the performance of hard disks than raw read-or-write throughput. Even a very fast 4 ms hard disk seek translates to 12 million processor cycles on a 3 GHz machine. If the processor doesn't have another thread/process to work on during the disk seek, that's a lot of wasted CPU time.
Of course, the only way to drastically improve this situation is to use solid-state storage devices that don't require a mechanical seek. This is currently... expensive.
otherwise presenting them in a manner that is somewhere between misleading and uninformative.
Let's see... I said "you can run Windows Server 2003 without a GUI today." That statement is 100% factually accurate, is therefore not in any way misleading, and is only "uninformative" because I didn't choose to explain how that is done.
But in the context of what exactly is possible and what isn't, especially when compared with the standard toolset of a typical Linux system, those features don't add up to much.
That may be true. And there are certainly strenghts of Windows that are weaknesses of Linux. But that's immaterial. My point was simply that lights-out operation on Windows is quite possible and practical in many scenarious, and the GUI is not married to the kernel at all as the original poster presumed. I never made the assertion that it is somehow "better" than Linux for this particular task.
So where exactly are you coming from? You're obviously a zealous Linux supporter, but why does a factual post debunking incorrect inormation about "limitations" of Windows touch a nerve with you? Is it because I used the term "Linux fanboy" (which is obviously true of ZiZ) and was still modded "+5 informative?" (That, by the way, has GOT to be a first on slashdot!)
And the reason for this is because any glitch with any of Direct technologies immediately brings BSOD, sonny.
No, they really don't, at least in my reasonably large experience with Win2k/XP (a network of 400+ machines of varying hardware running Win2K and XP since 2 months after Win2k's release). I've never seen a BSOD from an exception in a DirectX module. The dump has always points to the 3rd-party device driver as the point of the unhandled exception. Maybe that's MS's way of "fooling" me, but I don't really think it's a conspiracy on their part to make their debuggers falsely point to 3rd-party modules.
What fantasy world do you live in? The WHQL certified drivers for my video card routinely cause a BSOD, often while I'm simply staring at an empty desktop, much less actually doing anything.
I have never seen that secnario in our shop with a WHQL driver. This in ~5 years on over 400 machines, with various 3dfx/ATI/nVidia/integrated cards and drivers. I think you're probably seeing a hardware issue with the card itself (flaky RAM?). Have you tired swapping the card fot the same model? I have seen defectrive cards that work fine in (S)VGA mode, but then fail when run at full resolution/depth with their "native" driver. Replacing the card (not the driver) for a new sample has always cured the issue.
To get a WHQL certification, the driver has to run stably through a test script for several days. Such drivers have proven very reliable for business (non-gaming) use in my experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Daley and his cronies can't pave city streets without massive fraud and horrible delays and plenty of taxpayer waste. Millenium park was 5 years late and hundreds of millions over-budget.
Why does anyone think municipal wi-fi will work at all, especially in Chicago? Corruption and waste will run rampant, just as it does in most other city services. As hard as it is to believe, Federal programs are typically models of efficiency and integrity compared to almost any urban government program - in Chicago or anywhere else.
I still can't figure out how Daley runs basically unopposed every elec... (insert sound of several large South-Side Irish lads hitting someone over the head with a piece of rebar).
The average government agency, maybe. The average government agency is like the Department of Motor Vehicles - their primary mission does not require lots of bleeding-edge hardware, just a lot of simple databases and paperwork.
But the NSA, DIA, CIA, FBI, etc. have tens of billions to spend each year, and their primary missions basically require them to try to break some encryption now and then if they can. This is Microsoft-size money. Say they spent just $1 billion their budget on cracking hardware, they have enough to buy a compute cluster of one million (or more) Xeons or Opterons.
Even your most elite worm-writer can't compete with that.
But you know what? NSA and their like probably don't even try to crack suspect encrypted traffic unless there's a real value to being able to listen in on the enemy without their knowledge over a long period of time (as in say the Cold War). If there's just one bit of information the government really wants to know - say the time and place of an upcoming terrorist attack - it's much cheaper and faster to snatch someone and get the information through "physical" means.
Don't forget Chicago, Illinois, which is now Boeing's corporate HQ. Mayor Daley and the corrupt downstaters gave out hundreds of millions in tax advantages in exchange for a few hundred local jobs.
As I now pay more in property tax for my two-bedroom condo than Boeing does for its whole skyscraper, I am a bit pissed. Not at Boeing - who simply took a good deal when it was offered - but at my local government.
It's amazing how Daley can require outrageously high property and (local) sales taxes, but give us shitty schools, roads, police, hospitals etc. in return. While he still runs basically unopposed in every election. The corruption and influence of the Chicago "Democratic Party Machine" is astounding.
Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition >9.0 already removes spyware if you choose to enable that feature.
Of course, since we don't let our people be members of Power Users or Administrators groups on thier workstations, and we restrict the "Run..." registry keys in the user hive, we don't see too much spyware. So maybe the feature of Symantec Corporate Edition doesn't work in the real world. I dunno.
Anybody got a known-spyware site I can use to test?
Actually, the NSA did try to protect the SHA hash from this sort of attack. After the initial publication of SHA, they quickly suggested a small change that made SHA stronger than the original SHA (now commonly called SHA-0). SHA-0 was found to be vulnerable to this collision-finding attack around the same time MD5 was. The changed algorithm from NSA (commonly called SHA-1) made it less vulnerable - but not invulnerable - to this style of attack.
For example, finding an arbitrary colision in SHA-1 requires 2^69 operations, while finding an arbitrary collision in SHA-0 only requires just 2^40 operations using a similar technique. That makes SHA-1 about 536 million times stronger than SHA-0 with respect to this collision-finding attack. So apparently the NSA really was trying to improve - not weaken - the SHA.
Apparently, you Hate hollywood studios and much of what they produce. Rather than try to justify breaking the law to spite these corporataions, try not buying/copying/watching their content in the first place. You have abosultely no "right" to movies in a DRM-free format. You can either take or leave the studio's license terms. If you don't like DRM, don't buy, watch, or illegaly copy movies from studios that use DRM! If all movie studios choose to use DRM, then "drop out" and stop watching movies entirely. Those are your only legal and moral options.
If DRM really bothers people, studios will change to win back drop-outs. If not, well, you'll be getting a lot more fresh air.
Umm, no. Things like Group Policies on Windows provide much much more than "lockdown". Software installation, sure. But most importantly, configuration. I need to be able to enforce configurations like, "this group of users automatically point to mail server X, file server Y, and this set of icons and default reports for our financials applications. Also, make plain text their default email format, and set their in-office hours on their calendar to 9-to-5 weedays. Prevent them from changing that stuff, but only if they're not in the help desk group. Finally, hide all of the database integration functions from the spreadsheet program, so they don't get confused."
Many many hours of scripting would be required to replicate this functionality on Linux, if it were possible at all with all the customized configuration files each application has. With Windows, Active Directory, and Group Policies, this sort of mass configutation is just point-n-click.
The closest thing I've ever seen to this on a UNIX-style system was how the University of Notre Dame ran their Solaris workstation clusters on AFS back in the mid-1990s. But there was really no application-level configuration done, just some automatic setup of X, the window manager, and user directories.
Such hustlers are usually called "shills" in Casino parlance, and have been around since the dawn of the modern casino. In Nevada - and probably most other areas where gaming is regulated - the dealer has to tell you if there are any shills working that might be affecting your play. All you have to do is ask.
In my mind, much of the advantage Windows currently gives businesses revolve around change and configuration management tools like Group Policy and Intellimirror. To get equivalent functionality in Linux, much time-consuming scripting is required. Currently, I believe it is far easier to administer clients with Windows servers that it is to administer a large network of Linux clients with Linux servers.
However, I can think of very few other advantages that Windows enjoys over Linux on the server side, especially in the realm of web and file serving. Open-source databases like PostGres and even MySQL"growing up" into real SQL Server alternatives in terms of ACID compliance and replication. And there are even Exchange Server alternatives coming into adolescence.
Will Microsoft adjust to the "commoditazation" of these markets as they did with the low-cost Windows Server 2003 Web server edition? That is, will we see lower costs and/or the elimination of client access licensing to compete with Linux?
How about you get a clue and run the free Software Update Services on your network? Then all you ahve to do is "approve" an update, and it gets applied without you doing anything.
Ahh, more unfounded MS-bashing.
From the articles cited, it certianly sounds like shoddy management and planning caused this project failure, not a particular piece of software. Certainly it would have been reported widely if bugs in the .NET environment made the project flop?
SAIC, like all huge consultancies, deals with just about every technology and platform. SAIC also does huge Java projects. By your logic, why should we not assume that Java at fault for the VCF failure?
Anyway, something as big as VCF almost certainly involved multiple platforms, and I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts there were plenty of non-MS platforms and technologies in the mix.
I've used password safe for years, and it's perfect. It has reduced me to having to remember just two passwords: my Windows domain login, and the password safe password.
What's really cool is how simple it is to make Password Safe usable network-wide. It's so small, we made a quick script to deploy it to each of our user's Application Data directories, and then made startup shortcuts. Because it's in their profile, each user's password safe follows them from machine to machine, so it's always available.
Most users embraced it quickly, although we periodically run across someone who insists on the same password for everyhting. They get a letter from HR explaining that they're violating rules defined in the employee handbook, and they fall into line rather quickly.
Of course, it's Win32 only, and Password Safe will not protect against keyboard sniffers and similar trojans. But it's much better than having your high-value corporate passwords being used on the NY Times website.
Gotta love slashdot... MS-bashing with information dating back to the Win9x era presented as current fact.
First of all, the (very weak) LM hash is only necessary for compatibilty with Win9x clients.
Secondly, the LM hash was unnecessarily transmitted by NT4 clients for compatibility's sake for some time (until NT4SP4). But Windows 2000 and later don't use it at all unless they are servers dealing with a Win9x client. In fact, you can turn off the storage of the LM hash completely on Windows 2000 and later, using only the more-secure NTLM hash which is basically MD4. MD4 has been shown to have some weaknesses in that arbitrary collision pairs can be found, but it is still considered one-way and that is what really matters in a password authentication scheme.
Microsoft also corrected a few other protocols (MS-CHAPv1 for example) that transmitted the used LM hash unnecessarily from the client for compatibility's sake. They made all these fixes back in about 1999, IIRC, when Windows NT 4.0 SP4 was released.
Okay, I deserverd that nearly instantaneous Troll mod. It's Monday morning, and I apologize for being a bit cranky.
A battle between two for-profit companies over market share adn interoperability. Why is this a headline on Slashdot? I mean, we're all commie pinko Open Source advocates that work soley for charitable organizations.
"Not responding" to an accusation is NOT and admission of anything. Suppose I say "you molested a 5 year old", then hold up a tape recorder. Now I can have tape of you "emphaitcally denying" that you are a child molester, or I can have a tape of you saying "no comment", which looks even worse. Both will generate a lot of media buzz, all negative for you.
The best you can hope for is for me to have a tape of YOU IGNORING me, which doesn't generate much hoopla. This is why Bush didn't respond to the accusations about his Guard duty, other than to say very generally that he met his obligations of service.
You really have a lot to learn about the underhanded ways our Western media (both left- and right-leaning) work.
But wait, I thought there was no proof of that, beacuse the documents that "proved" it were found to be fake. Do you have some better, older documents for us to take a look at? Surely CBS News would have used those documents in its own defense if they existed, right?
Note also that rambling, unverified "recollections" from self-proclaimed witnesses with a demonstrated political bias do not meet the burden of proof, either. Not in a court of law, nor in the court of public opinion.
I mean, I personally think Georgie probably did skip out on or sleep through some Guard duty, based on his frat-boy character at the time. But that's just supposition with out actual proof, isn't it?
Point taken. User interface design is indeed a different (if somewhat related) skillset from graphic design.
However, most of the graphic designers I know currently work on the presentation aspects of websites, and most are fairly good. Far better, in fact, than any programmer I've seen. Most of these people have an education background in news-oriented graphic design or infographics. They specialize in producing logical, informative layouts where color, shape, and white space are used to guide the reader visually to the bits of information sought.
I have never actually met someone (in business or in real life) who had an educational background in software UI design, even though I know at least a few universities offer such programs. That being the case, I choose to lean on the most qualified people I know (graphic designers) for help with UI stuff.
...Windows 3.1 or NT 3.5.
I think Gnome/KDE and distro maintainers should stay as far away as possible from bland blue+white+grey themes and Arial lookalike fonts. Leave that crap to MS, and come up with something at least a little original and distinctive. Like Unbutu Linux has done, for example.
In fact, I always encourage the graphic designers I know to contribute to my favorite OSS projects, although none have so far. I'll try again, but everyone else out there, please do the same... engineers and programmers are generally not good at user interface design.
Really? The facts support the opposite conclusion, since more than 80% of journalists are democrats.
Latency is actually a far bigger problem with the performance of hard disks than raw read-or-write throughput. Even a very fast 4 ms hard disk seek translates to 12 million processor cycles on a 3 GHz machine. If the processor doesn't have another thread/process to work on during the disk seek, that's a lot of wasted CPU time.
Of course, the only way to drastically improve this situation is to use solid-state storage devices that don't require a mechanical seek. This is currently... expensive.
Let's see... I said "you can run Windows Server 2003 without a GUI today." That statement is 100% factually accurate, is therefore not in any way misleading, and is only "uninformative" because I didn't choose to explain how that is done.
That may be true. And there are certainly strenghts of Windows that are weaknesses of Linux. But that's immaterial. My point was simply that lights-out operation on Windows is quite possible and practical in many scenarious, and the GUI is not married to the kernel at all as the original poster presumed. I never made the assertion that it is somehow "better" than Linux for this particular task.
So where exactly are you coming from? You're obviously a zealous Linux supporter, but why does a factual post debunking incorrect inormation about "limitations" of Windows touch a nerve with you? Is it because I used the term "Linux fanboy" (which is obviously true of ZiZ) and was still modded "+5 informative?" (That, by the way, has GOT to be a first on slashdot!)
No, they really don't, at least in my reasonably large experience with Win2k/XP (a network of 400+ machines of varying hardware running Win2K and XP since 2 months after Win2k's release). I've never seen a BSOD from an exception in a DirectX module. The dump has always points to the 3rd-party device driver as the point of the unhandled exception. Maybe that's MS's way of "fooling" me, but I don't really think it's a conspiracy on their part to make their debuggers falsely point to 3rd-party modules.
Correcting factual inaccuracies by stating the real facts makes me an MS apologist?