The delay the articles talk about wasn't for nothing - "the delay" means that Vista is better than it would have been if it had been released early in the year.
How do you know that they didn't do the DRM and product activation parts last ?
'I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry,' Genes said.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
What isn't quite so obvious is which side should be considered more malicious here: the malware industry, which looks for security holes to profit the Russian mafia and other zombie network controllers but may also end up compromising Vista's DRM - by, say, find an arbitrary code execution hole from Media Player - or the security industry which will inevitably end up defending the integrity of Vista's DRM as well.
Oh well. I'm just thankful that if the whole civilized world is going to be put into chains, they are made by Microsoft.
Going back to my OP, how is that any different than someone throwing a TV remote at the screen in frusturation? That's probably not any more uncommon than these incidents with the Wiimote. The tube explosion is unintended in either case, though the reasons for throwing the device are quite different.
Since the tube contains a vacuum, if it gets cracked there's going to be an implosion, not explosion.
I argue that the extra 0.005 (!) seconds you saved by avoiding the cat is worthless when compared against the loss of abstraction.
How is giving a filename to cat and then piping the output to grep any clearer (or more abstract) than just giving grep the filename directly ? If anything, it's harder to figure out, since you need to know two programs (cat and grep) instead of just one (grep) to determine the outcome.
Abstraction only makes sense if it hides some underlaying details or allows you to apply the same code to a multitude of problems; simply adding complexity for complexity's sake is stupid.
The crux of the matter is that Microsoft tried to program in this inane backward compatibility into the operating system itself. He was commenting on the "mind-numbingly complicated" bit because that's what MS did (tried to do?) without making it a separate application.
The original poster gave the need to support legacy software - specifically old 16-bit DOS applications - as a reason for Windows's instability, and claimed that Linux has no such support. Linux is able to run old 16-bit DOS applications, either in pure emulation mode or in the VM86 mode of the host processor (for those processors that are capable of it, meaning the x86 family). I pointed out his error and gave links as support for my claims.
So no, he didn't say that Microsoft did a stupid thing not making legacy support a separate application (which could be registered as filetype viewer for old DOS programs, so it's not like the user would notice); he tried to excuse Windows's instability with that support, and implied that Linux doesn't have such support (which is demonstratably false).
In other words, he's a Microsoft apologist who makes demonstratably false statements of other operating system(s) while at it.
Part of the reason why their job is mind-numbingly complicated is because they need to support legasy software. A whole lot of 16-bit DOS apps written 15 years ago still run on current versions of Windows. These are not ports, or recompilations, but the same binaries. I doubt the same can be said of Linux or MacOS, especially with the latter so efficient at cutting off support of applications with major release.
I guess you've never heard of DOSEMU, a program that uses the Linux kernel call "vm86" to run 16-bit DOS programs in the vm86 mode of 386-compatible processors ? Most 16-bit DOS applications I've tried on it have worked just fine.
Or you could use DOSBox, which is a complete emulator (meaning it emulates the processor too, unlike DOSEMU). The odd DOS app that didn't work under DOSEMU works fine under DOSBox.
It's the support for Windows applications (via Wine) that is less than perfect under Linux, but it is improving. Then again, it could hardly be getting worse;).
The believers think that there is a voice-in-the-sky without any evidence (rather, with circular evidence -- believe and you will know, and since you do not believe you will not know).
Um, no. Take a classic example: Saul/Paul. The guy converted to Christianity after being spoken to by ascended Christ - which, of course, was sufficient evidence for both the existence and position of said entity. So he had been shown evidence. Does that mean he could show the evidence to anyone else ? Of course not. How could he ? He had no way of proving that he had actually seen Jesus, afte all.
"Scientific evidence" is a subset of "evidence". Lack of scientific evidence does not mean lack of evidence. This is something many atheists seem to have trouble understanding.
The atheists insist that there is no voice-in-the-sky (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and all that) without sufficient proof.
Unfortunately, many atheists go far beyond this and start claiming that the existence of God has been scientifically disproved (which it can't be, since it is impossible to experimentally test the matter) or resort to appeal to ridicule (Spaghetti Monster) or other logical fallacies, as shown by yoursef above (equivocation, using "evidence" and "scientific evidence" as synonyms).
It will definitely address the problem of Joe Blow bringing in his laptop from home full of virii.
No it won't. The viruses will simply take over the TCP/IP stack and say "Yep, we're fully patched and running AV, no viruses here, no sir!" to the DHCP server.
So the government has nothing to do with it, nor is it in any sense a product of an overarching regulatory action. It's one MMO that's using "our girls are REALLY girls" as a selling point.
I'm a man with beard and all, but I doubt I'd have any trouble fooling a shitty webcam (or whatever they're using) to think that I'm a woman; if all else fails, show it a video of a woman playing a game (hey, can I sense a new bestselling MMO ebay item ?-). Given that, this is going to do absolutely nothing to stop anyone playing whatever they want.
Of course they could require you to strip to prove that you're really a woman... I think we've found the true motive;).
Maybe I'm off track here, but I could certainly understand MySQL not wanting to offer an enterprise-level product for a platform that wasn't also enterprise-level.
Is MySQL "enterprise-level" nowadays ? Every time there's been a story about databases, people have told horror stories about MySQL quietly corrupting data in database.
And just what does "enterprise-level" mean, anyway ? Scales to infinity ? Reliable ? Costly ? Doesn't get the IT manager fired when the CEO find out he bought it ?-)
Now that being said, I think it doesn't quite compute. So a lot of stuff that was produced (ie, cost money to make) was cut out of the game. In that way, aren't you actually hurting the bottom line?
If you can enjoy a game for a month, it takes a month before you'll start looking for a new one. If the game only lasts 8 hours, you'll start looking for a new game the next day.
Planned obsolescence - it's the sign of a mature industry.
And of course it also doesn't help that every game has to be 3D nowadays and have orchestral soundtrack, voice acting and sound effects recorded from real particle beam weapons in a state-of-the-art sound studio. Chrome costs money. The longer the game, the more chrome it takes to keep it the same overall visual and aural quality. And as 3D cards become more and more powerful, the 3D models and textures needed to look "good" become more complex too, and require even more time and effort (read: money) to make. It's a death spiral, and it will end with the game industry collapsing, sooner or later. Constantly rising production costs coupled with about level sales and per-unit price can't really end any other way. 8-hour games are just a symptom of that.
Then again, the industry collapsing isn't neccessarily a bad thing. There's plenty of independent game makers, so gaming isn't going anywhere, even if natural selection gets rid of dinosaurs. If history is any indication, such events mean opportunity for us mammals:).
Nature stores it's hydrogen in all kinds of sugar. Pretty harmless and pretty efficient way of transporting hydrogen through a large system.
Sugar is not harmless. A few teaspoons is enough to make you feel ill, and that's assuming your insuling system works perfectly to start with. If anything, sugar is far more poisonous than ethanol, with greater chances for long-term consequences (diabetes) too.
Humankind has come from arena fights with lions and bears to a super technological race in 2000 years.
And used that technology to recreate those arena fights with special effects - ever watched "Rome" or "Gladiator" ?-) Or any action movie for that matter. We aren't really any different from a bloodthirsty Roman mob, we've just become good at making convincing fake blood. Kinda depressing, when you think of it...
Last time I checked, network packets get built in main memory by your Berkley/Winsock stack and the final packets with headers and checksums get transferred to your NIC by DMA for transmission down the wire. In a modern gaming machine we're talking a (typically) 800MHz/128-bit memory bus, versues a 33MHz/32-bit PCI bus. How does having a Killer NIC improve this situation?
Isn't it obvious ? The driver runs BZIP2 on them before sending them over the PCI bus, and the NIC unzips them. Do'h !
An old P100 with 64MB RAM running shorewall is practically invulnerable. No ports need to be open, excepting for SSH from the internal network, or not even that. You can run it from CompactFlash and have it with no moving parts at all.
Or you could just boot from a hard disk as normal, and as part of the boot process create a RAM disk, copy everything there, and use hdparm to set the disk to spin down 1 minute after the last access. Would propably require a custom init that would chroot to the RAM disk before continuing a boot process, thought.
Yep, a disk that has nothing but LILO, the kernel image, a disk image and a custom static-compiled init that just creates the RAMDISK, copies the disk image there, mounts it, chroots there, and execs the real init there (which spins down the original disk). Would that work ?
At absolute worst, you could do what at least one paper calls a non-control-data attack and corrupt some other piece of data that was next to it in the heap. Except every malloc implementation I know puts a header struct at the beginning of each block, so even if two pieces of heap data ended next to each other you wouldn't be able to reach the actual data with just a 4 byte overflow, and the best you could hope for is to corrupt the header. This is very unlikely to have any exploitable effects, and is just likely to kill the process.
Can you corrupt the blobl length indicator ? Because if you can, you can make the next memory blob larger than it was before it was when it was allocated, so that when free is called on it, the resulting free memory area (as seen by malloc) actually overlaps the next blob. Then when something gets put there, it (may) overwrite parts of the next blob, and if it had things like function pointers, they are now replaced with new values - possibly read from the file itself.
Now, obviously I'm assuming quite a lot about how malloc, free and WMP work, and even if I was correct, this is not an easy exploit to do... But it's not impossible either.
As a side note I have to admit I kinda like all these new exploits coming out. With DRM in Vista it's comforting to know that the chains and locks are being made by the village idiot.
People who take my money in an effort to make things fair for the poor/retired/whatever. I have a job and am saving money for retirement. Why should I pay for those who fucked up?
Thank you for demonstrating why Social Security needs to be enforced by force and the State, rather than left for voluntary charity.
Now please answer my question: if "Sucks to be you, the world's not fair" is your answer to those less fortunate or wise as you, then what grounds do you have to complain when you perceive it being unfair against you ? Maybe it sucks to pay for those who fucked up - or were fucked over - but hey, the world's not fair, right ?
And the world would be a lot less unfair if people stopped using the perceived unfairness as an excuse to behave in ways that make it even more unfair.
Not that I'd ever advocate anyone doing anything illegal, of course. But I just can't seem to be able to shed any tears for Mr. Kashnir. I doubt many are.
Social Security - it's better than Social Darwinism.
Sure, but "Honor thy father and thy mother" and "love thy neighbor as thyself" trump them both.
Since Social Security in no way stops you from honoring or loving anyone, I'm a bit uncertain what's your point. After all, all Social Security does is ensures that even those of us who don't have children or rich friends won't starve when we become too old or sick to work.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that it's good to have people starve on the streets so you can look good by giving them a few bread crumbs ? That particular line is what I've heard some people use to argue against Social Security...
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How do you know that they didn't do the DRM and product activation parts last ?
So it can store The Microsoft Sound in all its symphonic glory with the bitrate it deserves.
What isn't quite so obvious is which side should be considered more malicious here: the malware industry, which looks for security holes to profit the Russian mafia and other zombie network controllers but may also end up compromising Vista's DRM - by, say, find an arbitrary code execution hole from Media Player - or the security industry which will inevitably end up defending the integrity of Vista's DRM as well.
Oh well. I'm just thankful that if the whole civilized world is going to be put into chains, they are made by Microsoft.
Since the tube contains a vacuum, if it gets cracked there's going to be an implosion, not explosion.
How is giving a filename to cat and then piping the output to grep any clearer (or more abstract) than just giving grep the filename directly ? If anything, it's harder to figure out, since you need to know two programs (cat and grep) instead of just one (grep) to determine the outcome.
Abstraction only makes sense if it hides some underlaying details or allows you to apply the same code to a multitude of problems; simply adding complexity for complexity's sake is stupid.
The original poster gave the need to support legacy software - specifically old 16-bit DOS applications - as a reason for Windows's instability, and claimed that Linux has no such support. Linux is able to run old 16-bit DOS applications, either in pure emulation mode or in the VM86 mode of the host processor (for those processors that are capable of it, meaning the x86 family). I pointed out his error and gave links as support for my claims.
So no, he didn't say that Microsoft did a stupid thing not making legacy support a separate application (which could be registered as filetype viewer for old DOS programs, so it's not like the user would notice); he tried to excuse Windows's instability with that support, and implied that Linux doesn't have such support (which is demonstratably false).
In other words, he's a Microsoft apologist who makes demonstratably false statements of other operating system(s) while at it.
I guess you've never heard of DOSEMU, a program that uses the Linux kernel call "vm86" to run 16-bit DOS programs in the vm86 mode of 386-compatible processors ? Most 16-bit DOS applications I've tried on it have worked just fine.
Or you could use DOSBox, which is a complete emulator (meaning it emulates the processor too, unlike DOSEMU). The odd DOS app that didn't work under DOSEMU works fine under DOSBox.
It's the support for Windows applications (via Wine) that is less than perfect under Linux, but it is improving. Then again, it could hardly be getting worse ;).
Um, no. Take a classic example: Saul/Paul. The guy converted to Christianity after being spoken to by ascended Christ - which, of course, was sufficient evidence for both the existence and position of said entity. So he had been shown evidence. Does that mean he could show the evidence to anyone else ? Of course not. How could he ? He had no way of proving that he had actually seen Jesus, afte all.
"Scientific evidence" is a subset of "evidence". Lack of scientific evidence does not mean lack of evidence. This is something many atheists seem to have trouble understanding.
Unfortunately, many atheists go far beyond this and start claiming that the existence of God has been scientifically disproved (which it can't be, since it is impossible to experimentally test the matter) or resort to appeal to ridicule (Spaghetti Monster) or other logical fallacies, as shown by yoursef above (equivocation, using "evidence" and "scientific evidence" as synonyms).
Actually it says to love your neighbours as much as yourself, not more.
Apparently still too complex ;).
No it won't. The viruses will simply take over the TCP/IP stack and say "Yep, we're fully patched and running AV, no viruses here, no sir!" to the DHCP server.
I'm a man with beard and all, but I doubt I'd have any trouble fooling a shitty webcam (or whatever they're using) to think that I'm a woman; if all else fails, show it a video of a woman playing a game (hey, can I sense a new bestselling MMO ebay item ?-). Given that, this is going to do absolutely nothing to stop anyone playing whatever they want.
Of course they could require you to strip to prove that you're really a woman... I think we've found the true motive ;).
Is MySQL "enterprise-level" nowadays ? Every time there's been a story about databases, people have told horror stories about MySQL quietly corrupting data in database.
And just what does "enterprise-level" mean, anyway ? Scales to infinity ? Reliable ? Costly ? Doesn't get the IT manager fired when the CEO find out he bought it ?-)
If you can enjoy a game for a month, it takes a month before you'll start looking for a new one. If the game only lasts 8 hours, you'll start looking for a new game the next day.
Planned obsolescence - it's the sign of a mature industry.
And of course it also doesn't help that every game has to be 3D nowadays and have orchestral soundtrack, voice acting and sound effects recorded from real particle beam weapons in a state-of-the-art sound studio. Chrome costs money. The longer the game, the more chrome it takes to keep it the same overall visual and aural quality. And as 3D cards become more and more powerful, the 3D models and textures needed to look "good" become more complex too, and require even more time and effort (read: money) to make. It's a death spiral, and it will end with the game industry collapsing, sooner or later. Constantly rising production costs coupled with about level sales and per-unit price can't really end any other way. 8-hour games are just a symptom of that.
Then again, the industry collapsing isn't neccessarily a bad thing. There's plenty of independent game makers, so gaming isn't going anywhere, even if natural selection gets rid of dinosaurs. If history is any indication, such events mean opportunity for us mammals :).
Sugar is not harmless. A few teaspoons is enough to make you feel ill, and that's assuming your insuling system works perfectly to start with. If anything, sugar is far more poisonous than ethanol, with greater chances for long-term consequences (diabetes) too.
Why ? What do they have to lose ? What do they gain from not going to debt ?
And used that technology to recreate those arena fights with special effects - ever watched "Rome" or "Gladiator" ?-) Or any action movie for that matter. We aren't really any different from a bloodthirsty Roman mob, we've just become good at making convincing fake blood. Kinda depressing, when you think of it...
With the additional benefit that with FLOSS, once you have one very nice barn, everyone can get a copy of it with a push of a button.
Isn't it obvious ? The driver runs BZIP2 on them before sending them over the PCI bus, and the NIC unzips them. Do'h !
Or you could just boot from a hard disk as normal, and as part of the boot process create a RAM disk, copy everything there, and use hdparm to set the disk to spin down 1 minute after the last access. Would propably require a custom init that would chroot to the RAM disk before continuing a boot process, thought.
Yep, a disk that has nothing but LILO, the kernel image, a disk image and a custom static-compiled init that just creates the RAMDISK, copies the disk image there, mounts it, chroots there, and execs the real init there (which spins down the original disk). Would that work ?
Why are you using malloc here ? This is a function-local buffer, so just get it from the stack: "char holder[50]".
Can you corrupt the blobl length indicator ? Because if you can, you can make the next memory blob larger than it was before it was when it was allocated, so that when free is called on it, the resulting free memory area (as seen by malloc) actually overlaps the next blob. Then when something gets put there, it (may) overwrite parts of the next blob, and if it had things like function pointers, they are now replaced with new values - possibly read from the file itself.
Now, obviously I'm assuming quite a lot about how malloc, free and WMP work, and even if I was correct, this is not an easy exploit to do... But it's not impossible either.
As a side note I have to admit I kinda like all these new exploits coming out. With DRM in Vista it's comforting to know that the chains and locks are being made by the village idiot.
Thank you for demonstrating why Social Security needs to be enforced by force and the State, rather than left for voluntary charity.
Now please answer my question: if "Sucks to be you, the world's not fair" is your answer to those less fortunate or wise as you, then what grounds do you have to complain when you perceive it being unfair against you ? Maybe it sucks to pay for those who fucked up - or were fucked over - but hey, the world's not fair, right ?
Then what are you complaining about ?
And the world would be a lot less unfair if people stopped using the perceived unfairness as an excuse to behave in ways that make it even more unfair.
One down, 124 to go.
Not that I'd ever advocate anyone doing anything illegal, of course. But I just can't seem to be able to shed any tears for Mr. Kashnir. I doubt many are.
Since Social Security in no way stops you from honoring or loving anyone, I'm a bit uncertain what's your point. After all, all Social Security does is ensures that even those of us who don't have children or rich friends won't starve when we become too old or sick to work.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that it's good to have people starve on the streets so you can look good by giving them a few bread crumbs ? That particular line is what I've heard some people use to argue against Social Security...