No, but the MSDN video presentation on the Vista kernel shows that many things were "inherited from XP." It is based on XP.. do you honestly think MS could rewrite windows from scratch in the few years they've had with Vista since XP was released? Remember how long it took for 95 to get released.. it was postponed for years. Even when 95 shipped, it had a 16bit audio subsystem, etc.
The vista kernel isn't even 100% new.. they just seperated logical sections of the kernel, etc. Its quite different, but not all new. Watch that video and you'll see that Microsoft did make security minded changes, and other choices because they screwed up in the past. ini files coming back (in a form) to replace the registry is another example. I learned more from that video than i did from any other source.
You are correct that the WINE hole and the Apple Quicktime hole that are all similar to Microsoft's prove that it might not be the same codebase, but then again it might be as well. Netscape had a gif or jpeg issue similar years ago too.. (netscape 2 or 3?) Security holes happen to everyone. Microsoft is no worse than OSS software and no better either. I'm sure someone can point to 10 projects (or more) that have a great security history and I can point to many more that don't. I can't think of a commercial OS thats not vulnerable to something thats current. Even openbsd had a remote hole. My boss had a windows server get hit by that WMF hole and yet i had trouble convincing him to upgrade quicktime on our clients for the same reason. (idiot surfs on servers)
I was thinking along the lines of emulators, games, and things of that nature with the assembly comment.
Apache developers must be hacks then. In the past i've had a lot of portability issues with some of their code, especially the modjk/modjk2 connectors for apache to tomcat. I've had difficultly getting dependancies of apps like ethereal installed in OSX. I admit I haven't tried to build KDE or gnome lately and was going on the fact they aren't available in Fink.
I was using apple's X11 distro because its there. My mac is a laptop and my space is quite limited due to a large iTunes collection. (18gb) I'm too cheap to buy a new hard drive and don't want to void my warrenty putting it in.
Microsoft only makes players for Windows. The mac player was discontinued and the quicktime codec doesn't count. Even when MS did make a mac build, it never supported 10 series streams or many DRM'd files. At least real player runs on OSX and you can get one for linux. iTunes runs on windows and mac os, therefore apple is ever so slightly less evil than MS on this front.
When microsoft ships equivalent players for other operating systems, you can tell me its great. No one would ever bitch about the codec, just the compatibility with OSes. Plus remember most people HAVE ipods as they are NUMBER 1. That means the winning team is apple right now just as the world runs windows on their desktops. So hardware compatibility is weak for MS players even though there are several vendors. Several people made sparc and POWER chips in the past.. that doesn't mean they outsold intel.
And don't bring up OSS software like VLC. It does not play all Windows media files.
While I agree blizzard needs to do work, quite a bit IS ON THE CLIENT. In general, WoW is faster in terms of FPS on a Windows box and the ping is better on a Mac. Here's some real life data. My wife and I both play WoW at home on different computers.
Hers: PowerMac G4 Dual 867mhz 1.25gb ram ATI Radeon 9800 AGP 4x 128mb (aftermarket) 160gb IDE hdd (upgraded) OSX 10.4.4
Mine: Dell Precision 650 dual xeon 2.0ghz 1gb ECC ram ATI AIW 9600 xt 128mb AGP 8x U160 SCSI 73gb seagate hdd Windows XP Pro SP2 + all patches
Her ping is up to 10 times better than mine. Usually she has a ping less than 100ms, often in the 60s. Connecting to the same server, I get 200-300ms ping. On bad days, she gets 100ms and i've gotten over 1000ms. However, my average frame rate with the same settings is 60fps while hers is 12fps!!!! Her laptop (an iBook G4 1.2 ghz) gets about 5-10fps on very low settings but her ping is about the same as her desktop. I've talked to other windows users and they also report similar pings to mine in the area.
Now why is there such a difference between the two systems on the same network. Both machines have a gigabit ethernet connection to our switch which runs into a freebsd router thats connected to my cable modem. Her computer is actually on an older ethernet cable that is 25 feet long (vs mine on 6ft). I have an intel onboard card on the pci-x bus and she has the apple built in POS network card.
Its either the game network code or the underlying OS network stack that is the difference. I find the framerate difference rediculous as well. Both machines can run enemy territory at 60fps or higher at 1024 x 768 even with the cpu differences. The ping is very similar on ET for both machines to the same server.
How do you *KNOW* that you don't have a virus, spyware, etc? You admitted not using software to detect them. Granted there are only a few viruses for OSX and not typically in the wild. There are spyware programs though. Besides, viruses aren't the only problem in the real world. If you have macs running in corporate environments, this story might be important to you. At work I administer 2 xserve's and 35 mac workstations. The computers are spread over 3 departments including a newspaper, radio station and marketing department at my university. Due to various factors, I'm not allowed to patch machines or have access to them often. We've had the older xserve DOS attacked using old flaws in samba (10.2.8 server) which resulted in the machine crashing and a little data loss. Things happen to macs too. Apple does not patch older OS versions and while 10.2 is two versions behind, its not that old either. When you consider Microsoft has done 1 server release and preparing to do vista this year, its rediculous that apple doesn't patch 10.2. Occasionally really bad holes are patched if the patch is valid on newer versions as well but its not often.
If you want to criticize apple, do it because they don't have a good policy for older software versions or keeping older software available for those versions. Thats a far bigger problem than some hole they might have picked up from NEXTSTEP. Auditing the software might be a big help, but most of the bsd subsystem is either freebsd code or GNU licensed stuff like vim, gcc, gnumake, etc. That stuff gets patched. I worry more about my 10.2.8 desktops running safari 1.0 or old quicktime versions when surfing. I did install firefox, but not all users will use it. The idiots don't conform to the apple "you must buy OSX over and over to be safe policy". I'm just stuck.
And in reality, many open source apps DO NOT run on OSX. Sometimes its assembly code which the intel macs will help with, but other times the develop wrote code specifically for linux. Heck try to get a recent kde or gnome install in OSX on their build of X11. You may ask why anyone would want to do that, well there are a lot of nice OSS apps out there.
On a personal note, I love my mac for surfing, web design and iTunes but I also love a CLI once in awhile. terminal.app is not the same as a full screen virtual terminal in freebsd or linux.
I can guarantee that I'd triple boot a new mac if it were possible with OSX, FreeBSD and Windows. I may even want linux for homework assignments at my university.
I'm sure you are right, but I'd like to see xp boot. I have a pc now for gaming and.net programming (web apps). If I could consolidate down to one machine, it woudl be quite nice. Of course vista will do.net, but i have a bad feeling about games running. I mean they ditched the registry, pulled open gl out, etc. I figure i have to dual boot either way to play my games so it might as well be OSX.
Apple's shipped quite a few units that can lock up in sleep mode. My first mac, an iMac DV 400, would lock up constantly in sleep mode after upgrading it to 9.1-9.21 and later with 10.1. Eventually by late in 10.1.x, i was able to use it again. Similarly, my iBook locked up with several revisions of 10.3 although usually the problem seems to be related to third party drivers and kernel modules. ATI drivers and Logitech mouse drivers seemed to cause most of my ibook trouble. (ibook g4 800mhz)
I hope the battery life is comparable though. I can get 3 hours out of my ibook g4 (first gen) with wireless on! That computer is over 2 years old i think.
You are right, but then again a windows client relies on the win32 api doesn't it. (or.NET which relies on win32) All gui toolkits require some base libraries. Java is frickin' big and so is.NET. Most pcs have one or the other installed by now though anyway. If you're going to count the size of a jre or.net framework in your calculations, count the size of the OS you run too. (or in the case of unix/linux x11 + libraries to run your wm + whatever the app needs in libraries) win32 or cocoa or whatever is part of the "bloat too". The only case its safe to count the size of the executable is when you know most of the potential userbase don't have the libraries installed. When vista ships, everyone will have.NET that runs it. With OSX, everyone has java built in. The other problem is that if i download a java or.net app, the first time i have to get the runtime but after that i have it. I can download updates or other.net apps at the 125 kb or whatever. If you run kde, you must have gtk libraries to run firefox, etc.
You have that backwards. iPods work on pcs and macs. Other players usually only work with Windows. Your kids will need a new computer anyway when vista ships, unless you bought them a radeon 9800 last year for christmas. All there software won't run. So decide if you want to support MS or Apple or go OSS and here them bitch there are no games.
Yes, but most linux distros ship with an X11 desktop environment. I can't think of too many besides gentoo that don't come with either KDE or gnome. Its also a very common add-on to distros without one or bsd's that run in desktop mode. And if you think about it, running a gui is a comparable was to look at windows. Windows = command interpreter + kernel + gui Linux distro = command interpreter (login shell) + kernel (linux itself) + gui (x11 & window manager or desktop)
In order to compare Windows and Linux from a desktop point of view, you must look at the whole package. An end user would.
Of course you are right that its not a linux specific issue. It can affect linux distros, *bsd, or UNIX distros that include or have the environment installed. But, think of it this way.. it can affect all *nix installs that have KDE which is very popular.
As for his list, I found it quite amusing. I'm not MS fanboy, but you have to admit that many people have this perception that MS has a lot more bugs. I think Microsoft screws up patching quite a bit. If you look at original vulnerabilities though, its no different than a full linux distro with gui (redhat for example), or OSX. I've had to patch my mac and freebsd machine just as much as my windows box lately. (freebsd has has 5 holes in the core os recently plus any ports like firefox or KDE)
I think its about time to realize that open source has grown up. It has just as many holes as closed source software. People are starting to find them more often. Look at firefox. I no longer use firefox because i feel safer. I use it because I like the UI. The difference is that most OSS holes don't cause code to run as root since *nix developers are more likely to run code as a user vs system (root).
Security minded people often forget that programmers are NOT taught about security in college and its not like the local BN has a book called "learn to code safely and check your input." There are a few security books out there, but they often are not written for everyday programmers. In college, I was taught what a buffer overflow is and told to check input. I've never been given an example besides a simple x > 2 check example in any class. Once a professor mentioned regular expressions, but didn't describe what they did. Its quite sad. I don't see how we can expect closed or open source developers to code securely if we don't teach them.
I can explain why many mac users don't use safari. When it was first released, it did not support many websites. You still had to use netscape/mozilla or IE. By mac os 10.3, it got good. Most sites worked unless they used a microsoft centric technology. (like including windows media 10 series streams, etc) Thats not apple's fault. Then the dark times came.. apple released mac os 10.4. Safari is now broken. Most sites relying on cookies are broken. They introduced a faster rendering engine that actually screws up more often. (white screens!) Many of the bugs are annoying like session cookies don't stay or long term cookies expire on you after the browser is closed. Some sites using sessions/cookies don't work at all. In some cases images do not appear if they are dynamically generated (schwab.com's customer interface) Most people only take so much before they go to another browser.
Personally when using my mac, I surf about 60 percent in safari and 40 percent in firefox 1.5. At work, I administer all the macs. One department uses safari on all their macs (3), while another department uses firefox (30/35). I give users the option to use safari, firefox or IE (only on 10.2 or lower systems).
The windows admin only allows IE usage and as such everyone is on IE6 w/ XP SP2 on that end.
Its probably not worth it for small businesses to go with Linux. They don't have devlopers or dedicated admins and Dell doesn't support Linux. Another words, no personal to help with the switch or using the new software. Small businesses want quickbooks and office so they can play with the big boys.
That's a great idea. Does anyone know of example code to do this in java or.NET? I often find it difficult to wrap my mind around writing good validation code for complex data. (like blog entries) I have a blog site setup, but it has terrible data validation. I'd love to handle html safely.
You might be mistaken. Switching to intel HURT NeXT. Apple == NeXT since they are now on intel using OSX (NEXTSTEP), etc. History is repeating itself. This might explain if it was a bad idea the first time or simply bad timing like the apple newton.
Well there are a lot of loose RSS validators. They are part of the problem.
For example, livejournal.com and sun's java developer RSS feeds are both invalid from an XML perspective. I can't parse sun's feed IN JAVA using the XML parser. Now thats sad. Some guy probably created a servlet (intern?) that does like out.println or something.. No validator should probably display either feed since its not XML friendly. That would mean the feed fails when the developer tests it and then this can never happen. Apple's safari implementation is VERY loose on invalid RSS feeds which in turn causes their developers to make this invalid feed. I think its safe to say apple tested it with their own browser. Wouldn't you?
Obviously, one could write their own parser for an RSS feed without relying on the fact its XML and treat it like an HTML 2.0 document. You know.. write your own parser, don't assume documents are valid.. everything XML was supposed to save us from.
I don't know about others, but when i generate XML documents I often find it difficult to know what characters are safe to escape, etc. & for example is a pain in the ass as are . If you escape them like the suggested escape for iso latin1 < then you are using an ampersand. Oh no... Sometimes parsers react to ' and " as well.
Xcode includes 4.0.1 of GCC but apple was using GCC 3.x to compile the kernel in 10.4. Kernel modules are C++, so it wasn't possible to use GCC 4.0 yet. (since GCC 4 tried to be more compliant.. even KDE 3.x didn't compile on it) Apple said they used intel compilers for the testing though I believe on the intel macs and ibm's compiler for the ppc build. I wish they would have used GCC since its more fair in a way. If anything its optimized for the x86 platform more, but its more apples to apples.:)
Only intel zealots would think that an intel chip would be 3 times faster anyway. POWER isn't that bad or Microsoft wouldn't have put them in xbox 360s. Another factor is that the software "optimized" for x86 hasn't been out long. Sure apple's been keeping the old nextstep port alive all these years (it ran on intel and 68k), but making it run and tuning it for the latest pentium chip are two different things.
Its great that the NYC subway system will allow cell phones to work. I can't use my cell phone from my apartment which is 4 miles from a university. Before you think its entirely the building, consider that outside I only get 2 bars on a good day. Its not just my cell phone. I miss analog phones...
Your logic makes sense, but that is not what happens. Look at how many drugs were pulled from the shelf or were said to have risks. Hell look at one company.. pfizer last year. Most of their key drugs were found to be bad for one reason or another. Those drugs mostly came from a company they bought. In theory, a LOT of tests should have been done on those drugs. It obviously didn't help or didn't happen.
The other problem is there are a lot of things we could cure today if we didn't have to deal with large companies worrying about profits. What is more important: curing cancer or making old me get laid? Growing hair or helping people with illnesses that kill them at 25? I think our society doesn't have its priorities straight.
When Pfizer bought Pharmacia, many people lost their jobs. The government let it go through because they like monopolies. (doj vs MS case or the recent AT&T/SBC merger) It created a huge company that only gets new drugs by buying other companies. They don't do research. They don't innovate. Pfizer closed down most of the research facilities right away after that merger. They didn't keep the people that developed the drugs. Think about that.
NT4 SP3 added AGP support and by SP4 there was that optional command to increase the encryption level in the registry for password hashes. I forget what it was called. Thats a feature. I did have to install the option pack to get IIS 4 installed on NT server. It seems like IE had to be installed to use later service packs. I seem to remember having to install IE 3 or 4 to get SP6a to work. If it were included as part of the service pack, I would not need to install IE to get it to install.
Parent was modded funny, but in all seriousness if MS ever drops the Mac business unit of microsoft you know damn well apple will grab all of them. Think about it.. put Office people on iWork and you already solved the "problem" in 6 months.
I was under the impression that Akamai's service was under a DDOS attack for the past few years. Was that issue ever resolved?
I understand that akamai sets up caches of data for various companies and uses "local" dns points to distribute the content. How is that different than hotmail? Microsoft runs servers all over the world for their mail services to provide a fast user experience to their customers and they manage to sync email and not "static" content like videos, images or html sites. I do know that akamai could stream live content using tricks like quicktime broadcaster forwarding to various servers, etc. I also know they do have some dynamic product offerings. I don't see how its a lot more difficult than Microsoft's task. I don't know what MS actually does, but I bet its more than just setting up multiple mx's for several mail servers. They have a distributed web application that needs to keep large amounts of data synced across several endpoints.
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No, but the MSDN video presentation on the Vista kernel shows that many things were "inherited from XP." It is based on XP.. do you honestly think MS could rewrite windows from scratch in the few years they've had with Vista since XP was released? Remember how long it took for 95 to get released.. it was postponed for years. Even when 95 shipped, it had a 16bit audio subsystem, etc.
The vista kernel isn't even 100% new.. they just seperated logical sections of the kernel, etc. Its quite different, but not all new. Watch that video and you'll see that Microsoft did make security minded changes, and other choices because they screwed up in the past. ini files coming back (in a form) to replace the registry is another example. I learned more from that video than i did from any other source.
You are correct that the WINE hole and the Apple Quicktime hole that are all similar to Microsoft's prove that it might not be the same codebase, but then again it might be as well. Netscape had a gif or jpeg issue similar years ago too.. (netscape 2 or 3?) Security holes happen to everyone. Microsoft is no worse than OSS software and no better either. I'm sure someone can point to 10 projects (or more) that have a great security history and I can point to many more that don't. I can't think of a commercial OS thats not vulnerable to something thats current. Even openbsd had a remote hole. My boss had a windows server get hit by that WMF hole and yet i had trouble convincing him to upgrade quicktime on our clients for the same reason. (idiot surfs on servers)
what if its a kernel module? Top won't show you that.
I was thinking along the lines of emulators, games, and things of that nature with the assembly comment.
Apache developers must be hacks then. In the past i've had a lot of portability issues with some of their code, especially the modjk/modjk2 connectors for apache to tomcat. I've had difficultly getting dependancies of apps like ethereal installed in OSX. I admit I haven't tried to build KDE or gnome lately and was going on the fact they aren't available in Fink.
I was using apple's X11 distro because its there. My mac is a laptop and my space is quite limited due to a large iTunes collection. (18gb) I'm too cheap to buy a new hard drive and don't want to void my warrenty putting it in.
How do you do that?
Microsoft only makes players for Windows. The mac player was discontinued and the quicktime codec doesn't count. Even when MS did make a mac build, it never supported 10 series streams or many DRM'd files. At least real player runs on OSX and you can get one for linux. iTunes runs on windows and mac os, therefore apple is ever so slightly less evil than MS on this front.
When microsoft ships equivalent players for other operating systems, you can tell me its great. No one would ever bitch about the codec, just the compatibility with OSes. Plus remember most people HAVE ipods as they are NUMBER 1. That means the winning team is apple right now just as the world runs windows on their desktops. So hardware compatibility is weak for MS players even though there are several vendors. Several people made sparc and POWER chips in the past.. that doesn't mean they outsold intel.
And don't bring up OSS software like VLC. It does not play all Windows media files.
Cingular is SBC which is AT&T now after the merger.
While I agree blizzard needs to do work, quite a bit IS ON THE CLIENT. In general, WoW is faster in terms of FPS on a Windows box and the ping is better on a Mac. Here's some real life data. My wife and I both play WoW at home on different computers.
Hers:
PowerMac G4 Dual 867mhz 1.25gb ram ATI Radeon 9800 AGP 4x 128mb (aftermarket) 160gb IDE hdd (upgraded) OSX 10.4.4
Mine:
Dell Precision 650 dual xeon 2.0ghz 1gb ECC ram ATI AIW 9600 xt 128mb AGP 8x U160 SCSI 73gb seagate hdd Windows XP Pro SP2 + all patches
Her ping is up to 10 times better than mine. Usually she has a ping less than 100ms, often in the 60s. Connecting to the same server, I get 200-300ms ping. On bad days, she gets 100ms and i've gotten over 1000ms. However, my average frame rate with the same settings is 60fps while hers is 12fps!!!! Her laptop (an iBook G4 1.2 ghz) gets about 5-10fps on very low settings but her ping is about the same as her desktop. I've talked to other windows users and they also report similar pings to mine in the area.
Now why is there such a difference between the two systems on the same network. Both machines have a gigabit ethernet connection to our switch which runs into a freebsd router thats connected to my cable modem. Her computer is actually on an older ethernet cable that is 25 feet long (vs mine on 6ft). I have an intel onboard card on the pci-x bus and she has the apple built in POS network card.
Its either the game network code or the underlying OS network stack that is the difference. I find the framerate difference rediculous as well. Both machines can run enemy territory at 60fps or higher at 1024 x 768 even with the cpu differences. The ping is very similar on ET for both machines to the same server.
How do you *KNOW* that you don't have a virus, spyware, etc? You admitted not using software to detect them. Granted there are only a few viruses for OSX and not typically in the wild. There are spyware programs though. Besides, viruses aren't the only problem in the real world. If you have macs running in corporate environments, this story might be important to you. At work I administer 2 xserve's and 35 mac workstations. The computers are spread over 3 departments including a newspaper, radio station and marketing department at my university. Due to various factors, I'm not allowed to patch machines or have access to them often. We've had the older xserve DOS attacked using old flaws in samba (10.2.8 server) which resulted in the machine crashing and a little data loss. Things happen to macs too. Apple does not patch older OS versions and while 10.2 is two versions behind, its not that old either. When you consider Microsoft has done 1 server release and preparing to do vista this year, its rediculous that apple doesn't patch 10.2. Occasionally really bad holes are patched if the patch is valid on newer versions as well but its not often.
If you want to criticize apple, do it because they don't have a good policy for older software versions or keeping older software available for those versions. Thats a far bigger problem than some hole they might have picked up from NEXTSTEP. Auditing the software might be a big help, but most of the bsd subsystem is either freebsd code or GNU licensed stuff like vim, gcc, gnumake, etc. That stuff gets patched. I worry more about my 10.2.8 desktops running safari 1.0 or old quicktime versions when surfing. I did install firefox, but not all users will use it. The idiots don't conform to the apple "you must buy OSX over and over to be safe policy". I'm just stuck.
And in reality, many open source apps DO NOT run on OSX. Sometimes its assembly code which the intel macs will help with, but other times the develop wrote code specifically for linux. Heck try to get a recent kde or gnome install in OSX on their build of X11. You may ask why anyone would want to do that, well there are a lot of nice OSS apps out there.
On a personal note, I love my mac for surfing, web design and iTunes but I also love a CLI once in awhile. terminal.app is not the same as a full screen virtual terminal in freebsd or linux.
I can guarantee that I'd triple boot a new mac if it were possible with OSX, FreeBSD and Windows. I may even want linux for homework assignments at my university.
I'm sure you are right, but I'd like to see xp boot. I have a pc now for gaming and .net programming (web apps). If I could consolidate down to one machine, it woudl be quite nice. Of course vista will do .net, but i have a bad feeling about games running. I mean they ditched the registry, pulled open gl out, etc. I figure i have to dual boot either way to play my games so it might as well be OSX.
Apple's shipped quite a few units that can lock up in sleep mode. My first mac, an iMac DV 400, would lock up constantly in sleep mode after upgrading it to 9.1-9.21 and later with 10.1. Eventually by late in 10.1.x, i was able to use it again. Similarly, my iBook locked up with several revisions of 10.3 although usually the problem seems to be related to third party drivers and kernel modules. ATI drivers and Logitech mouse drivers seemed to cause most of my ibook trouble. (ibook g4 800mhz)
I hope the battery life is comparable though. I can get 3 hours out of my ibook g4 (first gen) with wireless on! That computer is over 2 years old i think.
You are right, but then again a windows client relies on the win32 api doesn't it. (or .NET which relies on win32) All gui toolkits require some base libraries. Java is frickin' big and so is .NET. Most pcs have one or the other installed by now though anyway. If you're going to count the size of a jre or .net framework in your calculations, count the size of the OS you run too. (or in the case of unix/linux x11 + libraries to run your wm + whatever the app needs in libraries) win32 or cocoa or whatever is part of the "bloat too". The only case its safe to count the size of the executable is when you know most of the potential userbase don't have the libraries installed. When vista ships, everyone will have .NET that runs it. With OSX, everyone has java built in. The other problem is that if i download a java or .net app, the first time i have to get the runtime but after that i have it. I can download updates or other .net apps at the 125 kb or whatever. If you run kde, you must have gtk libraries to run firefox, etc.
You have that backwards. iPods work on pcs and macs. Other players usually only work with Windows. Your kids will need a new computer anyway when vista ships, unless you bought them a radeon 9800 last year for christmas. All there software won't run. So decide if you want to support MS or Apple or go OSS and here them bitch there are no games.
Yes, but most linux distros ship with an X11 desktop environment. I can't think of too many besides gentoo that don't come with either KDE or gnome. Its also a very common add-on to distros without one or bsd's that run in desktop mode. And if you think about it, running a gui is a comparable was to look at windows. Windows = command interpreter + kernel + gui
Linux distro = command interpreter (login shell) + kernel (linux itself) + gui (x11 & window manager or desktop)
In order to compare Windows and Linux from a desktop point of view, you must look at the whole package. An end user would.
Of course you are right that its not a linux specific issue. It can affect linux distros, *bsd, or UNIX distros that include or have the environment installed. But, think of it this way.. it can affect all *nix installs that have KDE which is very popular.
As for his list, I found it quite amusing. I'm not MS fanboy, but you have to admit that many people have this perception that MS has a lot more bugs. I think Microsoft screws up patching quite a bit. If you look at original vulnerabilities though, its no different than a full linux distro with gui (redhat for example), or OSX. I've had to patch my mac and freebsd machine just as much as my windows box lately. (freebsd has has 5 holes in the core os recently plus any ports like firefox or KDE)
I think its about time to realize that open source has grown up. It has just as many holes as closed source software. People are starting to find them more often. Look at firefox. I no longer use firefox because i feel safer. I use it because I like the UI. The difference is that most OSS holes don't cause code to run as root since *nix developers are more likely to run code as a user vs system (root).
Security minded people often forget that programmers are NOT taught about security in college and its not like the local BN has a book called "learn to code safely and check your input." There are a few security books out there, but they often are not written for everyday programmers. In college, I was taught what a buffer overflow is and told to check input. I've never been given an example besides a simple x > 2 check example in any class. Once a professor mentioned regular expressions, but didn't describe what they did. Its quite sad. I don't see how we can expect closed or open source developers to code securely if we don't teach them.
I can explain why many mac users don't use safari. When it was first released, it did not support many websites. You still had to use netscape/mozilla or IE. By mac os 10.3, it got good. Most sites worked unless they used a microsoft centric technology. (like including windows media 10 series streams, etc) Thats not apple's fault. Then the dark times came.. apple released mac os 10.4. Safari is now broken. Most sites relying on cookies are broken. They introduced a faster rendering engine that actually screws up more often. (white screens!) Many of the bugs are annoying like session cookies don't stay or long term cookies expire on you after the browser is closed. Some sites using sessions/cookies don't work at all. In some cases images do not appear if they are dynamically generated (schwab.com's customer interface) Most people only take so much before they go to another browser.
Personally when using my mac, I surf about 60 percent in safari and 40 percent in firefox 1.5. At work, I administer all the macs. One department uses safari on all their macs (3), while another department uses firefox (30/35). I give users the option to use safari, firefox or IE (only on 10.2 or lower systems).
The windows admin only allows IE usage and as such everyone is on IE6 w/ XP SP2 on that end.
Its probably not worth it for small businesses to go with Linux. They don't have devlopers or dedicated admins and Dell doesn't support Linux. Another words, no personal to help with the switch or using the new software. Small businesses want quickbooks and office so they can play with the big boys.
That's a great idea. Does anyone know of example code to do this in java or .NET? I often find it difficult to wrap my mind around writing good validation code for complex data. (like blog entries) I have a blog site setup, but it has terrible data validation. I'd love to handle html safely.
You might be mistaken. Switching to intel HURT NeXT. Apple == NeXT since they are now on intel using OSX (NEXTSTEP), etc. History is repeating itself. This might explain if it was a bad idea the first time or simply bad timing like the apple newton.
Well there are a lot of loose RSS validators. They are part of the problem.
For example, livejournal.com and sun's java developer RSS feeds are both invalid from an XML perspective. I can't parse sun's feed IN JAVA using the XML parser. Now thats sad. Some guy probably created a servlet (intern?) that does like out.println or something.. No validator should probably display either feed since its not XML friendly. That would mean the feed fails when the developer tests it and then this can never happen. Apple's safari implementation is VERY loose on invalid RSS feeds which in turn causes their developers to make this invalid feed. I think its safe to say apple tested it with their own browser. Wouldn't you?
Obviously, one could write their own parser for an RSS feed without relying on the fact its XML and treat it like an HTML 2.0 document. You know.. write your own parser, don't assume documents are valid.. everything XML was supposed to save us from.
I don't know about others, but when i generate XML documents I often find it difficult to know what characters are safe to escape, etc. & for example is a pain in the ass as are . If you escape them like the suggested escape for iso latin1 < then you are using an ampersand. Oh no... Sometimes parsers react to ' and " as well.
Xcode includes 4.0.1 of GCC but apple was using GCC 3.x to compile the kernel in 10.4. Kernel modules are C++, so it wasn't possible to use GCC 4.0 yet. (since GCC 4 tried to be more compliant.. even KDE 3.x didn't compile on it) Apple said they used intel compilers for the testing though I believe on the intel macs and ibm's compiler for the ppc build. I wish they would have used GCC since its more fair in a way. If anything its optimized for the x86 platform more, but its more apples to apples. :)
Only intel zealots would think that an intel chip would be 3 times faster anyway. POWER isn't that bad or Microsoft wouldn't have put them in xbox 360s. Another factor is that the software "optimized" for x86 hasn't been out long. Sure apple's been keeping the old nextstep port alive all these years (it ran on intel and 68k), but making it run and tuning it for the latest pentium chip are two different things.
Its great that the NYC subway system will allow cell phones to work. I can't use my cell phone from my apartment which is 4 miles from a university. Before you think its entirely the building, consider that outside I only get 2 bars on a good day. Its not just my cell phone. I miss analog phones...
Your logic makes sense, but that is not what happens. Look at how many drugs were pulled from the shelf or were said to have risks. Hell look at one company.. pfizer last year. Most of their key drugs were found to be bad for one reason or another. Those drugs mostly came from a company they bought. In theory, a LOT of tests should have been done on those drugs. It obviously didn't help or didn't happen.
The other problem is there are a lot of things we could cure today if we didn't have to deal with large companies worrying about profits. What is more important: curing cancer or making old me get laid? Growing hair or helping people with illnesses that kill them at 25? I think our society doesn't have its priorities straight.
When Pfizer bought Pharmacia, many people lost their jobs. The government let it go through because they like monopolies. (doj vs MS case or the recent AT&T/SBC merger) It created a huge company that only gets new drugs by buying other companies. They don't do research. They don't innovate. Pfizer closed down most of the research facilities right away after that merger. They didn't keep the people that developed the drugs. Think about that.
NT4 SP3 added AGP support and by SP4 there was that optional command to increase the encryption level in the registry for password hashes. I forget what it was called. Thats a feature. I did have to install the option pack to get IIS 4 installed on NT server. It seems like IE had to be installed to use later service packs. I seem to remember having to install IE 3 or 4 to get SP6a to work. If it were included as part of the service pack, I would not need to install IE to get it to install.
Parent was modded funny, but in all seriousness if MS ever drops the Mac business unit of microsoft you know damn well apple will grab all of them. Think about it.. put Office people on iWork and you already solved the "problem" in 6 months.
I was under the impression that Akamai's service was under a DDOS attack for the past few years. Was that issue ever resolved?
I understand that akamai sets up caches of data for various companies and uses "local" dns points to distribute the content. How is that different than hotmail? Microsoft runs servers all over the world for their mail services to provide a fast user experience to their customers and they manage to sync email and not "static" content like videos, images or html sites. I do know that akamai could stream live content using tricks like quicktime broadcaster forwarding to various servers, etc. I also know they do have some dynamic product offerings. I don't see how its a lot more difficult than Microsoft's task. I don't know what MS actually does, but I bet its more than just setting up multiple mx's for several mail servers. They have a distributed web application that needs to keep large amounts of data synced across several endpoints.