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User: ashridah

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Comments · 405

  1. Re:Oh Noes!!! on Windows XP SP2 Support Ends Tomorrow · · Score: 1

    Ugh. i just had a flashback to the keypress virus.

  2. Re:What about flash? on Half of Windows 7 Machines Running 64-Bit Version · · Score: 1

    Yep. Probably the most secure browser in the world is a 64bit one, since you can't run any plugins, and you're using one of the most uncommon stack layouts... :P

  3. Re:Funny story... on Windows XP SP2 Support Ends Tomorrow · · Score: 1

    if (MAJOR_VERSION >= 6 && MINOR_VERSION >= 1)
    {
          DoXPStuff();
    }
    else
    {
          Fail();
    }

    And then we end up with messes like this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/13/72476.aspx

  4. Re:Schools? + Broken link on AU Band Men At Work Owes Royalties On 'Kookaburra' · · Score: 1

    Because when i was growing up, the tune 'kookaburra sits in an old gum tree' was a staple of my primary school activities. And i'm willing to bet we were singing it without a license. And we all know how brain-dead the recording industries are (Australia's is just as bad, if not worse, than the US's, in some respects.)

  5. Re:woohhooo I have an opinion on Microsoft Spurned Researchers Release 0-Day · · Score: 1

    Except that that pressure has already taken place, the game already changed, but not that anyone here would believe that. That's why XP SP2/3 happened. And radical changes in Vista, and even further radical changes in Win7, such that many exploits that get released flat out don't work on Vista/Win7.

    All of this doesn't negate the time-factor. Beating someone for already agreeing with you, saying "hey, this shit takes time and effort, stop beating us, we'll get to it" and then continuing to beat them strikes me as pointless, and i'm not surprised that people who acting in this pointlessly vindictive way are being ignored or blamed for active exploits.

  6. Re:woohhooo I have an opinion on Microsoft Spurned Researchers Release 0-Day · · Score: 1

    Interesting idea, but it's worth pointing out that time is a significant factor, and is not directly inter-changable with money. It's more of an inversely proportional relationship. More money equals less and less time taken.

    Sometimes you're really, REALLY, just out of time, and absolutely have to ship, and then where do you draw the line? You can't find and fix every single bug ever in a finite time frame (I hope I don't need to discuss the halting problem with the Slashdot crowd, here).

    That said, acting the way these researches are is never going to improve the situation for either side in this argument. While it may feel good to the self-righteous slashdot crowd, that's cold comfort to the teams who were planning how to juggle security/features going forward, and had the rug ripped out from under them and now have to rush out a fix with less testing than is normally done. (This is precisely what a HotFix is, an under-tested patch that doesn't meet the full-standard for "we support this 100%"). For a company that prides itself on back-compat, and selling to companies that do their own staged-rollout, a month or two's delay before the release is minor. And some bugs are just less important.

    I wouldn't be surprised if the bugs that had been 'sat on for a year' are some of the more obscure special case bugs, and aren't part of the common configuration, and that there's some grandstanding going on, which ignored prioritization completely, just because it was these researcher's claim to fame.

  7. Re:Fringe market on IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas · · Score: 1

    Right. Except that Windows 7 is selling 30 million units a month, and has already sold 150 million since it released. less than a year ago. IE9 is slated to be released in 2011. By then, XP won't have been purchasable for computers for almost a year, and will be on its way out both in market-share, and support.

    And good riddance, it's 10 years old. Time to move on to newer stuff and get useful things done instead.

  8. Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this on IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas · · Score: 1

    Many? Ati has support. Nvidia has support. Intel has support. For what the browser is doing, you'd have to struggle to find a video chipset that *isn't* supported.

  9. Re:The message this sends me on IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas · · Score: 1

    Not to mention that your average video chipset can do the same job with much less power usage, since it's more heavily optimized for pipe-line based jobs. And since you can set things up in video memory, and then leave it there, you save on system resources, since you're using less of the system's bus to transfer rendered content.

    And let's not forget what we can do with the cpu power since it's now freely available.

    Pushing stuff off to the video card is just an overall win.

  10. Re:Excuse me, make your browser work proper on IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas · · Score: 1

    So... have you tested that in the ie9 tech preview and filed a bug if it hasn't already been fixed, yet? or are you just uselessly shaking your fist from a basement?

  11. Re:Did no-one tell microsoft? on IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas · · Score: 1

    The internet is being viewed on a lot of tablets, phones and netbooks that don't have the hardware support for this. It looks like their share is only going up. I'm sure some dev in a hurry is going to use this feature, but the moment they do they lock out all the new market.

    Uh, Dude. They demoed this working at a convention a few months ago ON A NETBOOK. Popular consumer-grade netbooks have been out for >6 months that support all of this just fine. And, of course, the netbook that can't utilize accelerated graphics for IE9 ALSO cannot do it in flash or anything else with decent performance. Such a netbook is going to be slow no matter what you try to run (as people quickly found out with non-nvidia ion based netbooks.)

  12. Re:just the canvas? on IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas · · Score: 1

    You do realize that that's what Direct2D and DirectWrite essentially are, right? Ways to render lines and fonts using the hardware instead of software rasterisers? There's no point in making the entire thing an opengl surface, however, when you can create APIs that give you finer-grained control over things than that.

  13. Re:I seem to have missed why we'd want this on IE9 Flaunts Hardware-Accelerated Canvas · · Score: 1

    Except that the only way to do so will be to use the standard, w3c provided tags... If other browsers accelerate it to (protip, they're working on that), then that's a win for everyone, no matter what.

    We're not talking silverlight here, just plain ole html(5)

  14. Re:it's the licensing that kills ya on Most Console Gamers Still Prefer Physical Media · · Score: 1

    What's more, when you buy stuff on an XBox, you effectively get two licenses to the content. One belongs to your gamer-tag, and one is a transferrable copy that you can migrate between your 'home' console. If you're not logged in, anyone using that 'home' console can also use the content. and if you're at a friends place, you can use it on their console while you're logged in (but can't as soon as you log out).

    Transferring the license between consoles is a little bit annoying, since you can only do it every 12 months unless there's a repair involved by MS.

  15. Re:We All Wish on Climategate's Final Days · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Right. Which is why we can totally find references to researchers blocking climate change skeptics from publishing in all of those emails that got leaked, amirite?

    Oh, wait. I'm not? There's no reference to them blocking things at all in their personal emails? You'd think you'd at least find some reference to it, wouldn't you... UNLESS THE RELEASE OF THE EMAILS WAS A CONSPIRACY DESIGNED TO HIDE ANOTHER CONSPIRACY!
    [dun-dun-dun!!!!!!!!]

    Or, you know, you could grow the fuck up. The fame one would gain from publishing sound papers showing that everything is A-OK and discrediting a whole bunch of scientists at their own game would be monumental. The problem is, there's nothing to show that climate science isn't right about the changing climate.

    See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg -- this is interesting commentary on the issue (with references, it's not just blind commentary)

  16. Re:Um no... on Microsoft Busting Its Own Browser+OS Myth · · Score: 1

    Sure, except we have/had apps that also embed trident. My RSS reader does. Steam used to, but no longer does. The help system does. Any bugs there can also be exploited via any of those vehicles, depending on how targeted you make your attack.

  17. Re:just assume you will fail on Security For Open Source Web Projects? · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm with this guy. If you can afford to, separate the web tier and the database tier physically. Provide extra layers of security on essential stuff at the database tier (additional validation via procedures, etc). Make sure the app keeps a secure write-once log of every transaction that occurs for all players. I'd direct that off to another machine as well, if you can.

    You might remember some time back that there was a case where EVE players found a way to essentially cheat to create more resources than the game normally allows (they found out that certain factories would keep getting raw material, even though the material was actually being sent to a different factory, for as many factories as they performed the same trick) the EVE people essentially figured it out, and then rolled back all of the in-game corporations to erase the money made. Something like this is only possible with full logs of every item created and used up and the flow of resources throughout the system.

  18. Re:Scratches disc and improved dpads on New Xbox 360 S Uses Less Power, Makes Less Noise · · Score: 1

    b) It's a bad idea to move anything that has a spinning disc in it, from harddisks, to dvd-players, whatever.

    Yeah, so what. Fact remains the Xbox360 is the only console in history that is famous for destroying discs. It was never an issue with any other console, not even with the Xbox1. And Microsoft has known this for the last five years, yet refuses to do anything about it (no, warning sticker doesn't count).

    Actually, there's a better reason to not do anything. The model of drive they use is significantly faster to read data than other more stable models. And since the specs of the system can't change (including data read times for games), then if all other drives are slower, then it can't be changed.

    While it still sucks that you can scratch a disc, what i'd prefer to see is an explicit "do you want to copy this to the hard drive" the first time a disc goes in rather than having it hidden away in a menu that some people still don't know exists.

  19. Re:Is she... on Australia Gets Its First Female Prime Minister · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A nematode would be an upgrade from Pauline Hanson. Julia Gillard is not from an extremely racist part of Queensland. Her seat may be in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and as someone who used to live there, they're not high up on the social scale, but they aren't filled with extremely racist people, either.

  20. Re:I for one... on Australia Gets Its First Female Prime Minister · · Score: 1

    SPF 70+ and a hat.

  21. Re:I for one... on Australia Gets Its First Female Prime Minister · · Score: 1

    I'd have to double-check, but i'm pretty sure her electorate is still in the western suburbs of Melbourne. I don't remember if she actually came from there, however, but that may lead to the accent being thicker if she did.

  22. Re:UT3 on Is LGP Going the Way of Loki Software? · · Score: 1

    No, they weren't. Ryan 'Icculus' Gordon was porting the dedicated server. I don't believe the client was ever promised. (could be wrong there). He's got other paying work to do than work on the UT3 client for no monies, anyway.

  23. Re:Hmmmm on Cheap ADSL Holds Up 802.11n Router Design · · Score: 1

    It's more that a bunch of subsidies that the ISPs were relying on dried up a few years back and weren't renewed. They had to scale back the installation of equipment in rural areas well. Also, Australia has roughly the continental area of the US... but only 20-odd million people (mostly on the coast, fortunately). This makes things a bit more spread out and more expensive. Then there's the $rape charged for data, which the ISPs currently can't control easily.

  24. Re:DO NOT WANT: print server, storage, P2P daemon, on Cheap ADSL Holds Up 802.11n Router Design · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not in Australia there isn't. There's ADSL, and there's only one single ADSL standard (well, two if you consider ADSL/ADSL2+). and there's Cable. (and dialup modems/satellite if you want to be picky, and lets face it, who doesn't!). No one's really investing in cable anymore, since the infrastructure for ADSL already exists, and just requires exchange upgrades and back-haul upgrades, instead of in-street wiring of cable and back-haul upgrades.

    That's several million homes in Australia who all get an adsl modem from their ISP, and if the isp recommends a wireless router/adsl modem, then they're pushing a path that allows them to invest in R&D on newer features. They all still offer the simple ADSL modem, but there's plenty of room for people with multiple computers (something a large fraction if not the majority of australian households now have) to warrant the availability and simplicity of a modem/router pre-configured by the ISP to just work when you plug it in.

  25. Re:WTF on Google Voice Opens To All · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Allow me to introduce you to the concept of "context". This is a US-based, and US-centric site. Surely you can understand this.

    That, for some reason, keeps posting stories about Australia. Riiiight.