Bonzi Buddy's pretty high on my list; not only that, I don't even have to ask to install it! Friendly lil thing ends up there on its own.
Or an uncle installs it. One day a year or so ago my uncle came to visit and excitedly described this talking purple monkey that helped with various computer activities. He's a computer fanatic, meaning he'll spend lots of money on computer components, but not really a geek since he doesn't know much about computer maintenance and usage. Anyway, I was instantly suspicious of the program, and this was back when spyware was relatively obscure.
I later confirmed my spyware suspicions. Back then I wasn't too strict on security, and freaked out when I saw the purple monkey--the same monkey described as bad bad bad on web pages--on my sister's computer.
That was the last time I ever let my uncle install stuff on one of my computers. I guess I made a big deal out of it because my siblings sometimes refer to one of our pets as Bonzi just to annoy me. Yes, I literally cringe whenever I hear that name.
I use 7-zip, it is free (speech and beer) and reads and writes most archive formats, including zip, rar, tar, tgz, etc.
It might seem strange but I use command-line zip from the Unix Utilities package, which contains Win32 ports of common Unix utilities such as grep, zip, and... unrar, although I don't recall ever seeing unrar in Linux.
I'm not a heavy Linux user, but some of those utilities are incredibly useful to have on Windows.
How about the first 10 things you UNinstall from a fresh WinXP install?
2) System Restore Service
I used to wonder what System Restore does, but apparently it saves backups of your registry on your hard drive when various things happen, such as installing a hotfix or Windows Installer package. This has saved me a couple times when the registry got corrupted; a simple boot into recovery mode and copying over the HKLM registry file fixed things (of course, the problem of corruption still remains). Keep that in mind when you disable System Restore.
Just because you don't do it everyday doesn't mean other people don't have a use for embedding animations or other objects. I've seen videos embedded in PowerPoint presentations, and while it might not be the most efficient way of doing things, the fact is that that person chose to embed a video. It doesn't matter if you don't do it; there are others who do.
Install the.NET Framework (run Windows Update). It will install one at %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\csc.exe
You can compile this with csc/out:DrDRMS.exe *.cs
And if you're on Linux, you can download Mono and compile with mcs DeDRMS.cs.
We need to inovate, not litigate. Spyware protection should to be built into the computer not regulated by the government.
I was reading through some of the other comments and thought, "yes, clarification or ammendment to this piece of legislation would make things better," but then saw this comment and realized that destroying the root of the problem is much better action. A large part of the problem wouldn't exist if Microsoft hadn't added the stupid ActiveX feature, or at least didn't make it so insecure.
ActiveX needs to be disabled by default, at least for the Internet zone. A firewall needs to be installed by default to prevent unknown outgoing access, and present a simple interface for allowing programs access to the Internet. I think this will be in Windows XP SP2, anyone want to correct or clarify?
Some of the problem arises from non-wizard computer users who blindly click Yes to dismiss dialog boxes requesting the user make a choice. In cases where such behavior would be dangerous to security, the request shouldn't exist in the first place. Default to the safe, secure choice and provide a mechanism for manually enabling the potentially unsafe behavior elsewhere. Don't ask the user, as that will provide a path to uninformed unsafeness.
Applied to ActiveX, this would mean that the prompt to download ActiveX controls shouldn't even exist. Controls shouldn't be downloaded at all unless the user specifically wants it. If a website depends on an ActiveX control, it can provide a page to help the user enable downloading for that site. Of course, the easier solution is to switch to Firefox, especially since all these suggestions are worthless when wild IE exploits exist that take advantage of unpatchable security holes. I know, I encountered one.
Dear Mr. Brin, now that we're providing webmail services, don't you feel that a Google Messenger should be in order?
What would be neat is if they integrated Google Messenger service with Gmail. Messages sent to you when you're offline can be transformed into emails, and perhaps maybe even messages in an individual messenger session can be logged to a Gmail folder.
It simply works, it doesn't have any flashy ads to bother you, and it's FAST!
I'm also lucky enough to have an account, and one interesting thing is their heavy usage of Javascript to generate the pages. Your inbox is basically an HTML page linking to a Javascript file and containing one block of Javascript code used to generate all the elements on the screen, and assuming the Javascript file is cached, checking your email should be blazing fast. It works perfectly fine with Firefox too!
Please don't tell me the hardware is at fault, because as far as I am concerned, the hardware doesn't crash (there is no smoke coming from the case and I don't need to reset the hardware), Windoze does.
It's not the hardware's fault, it's the driver's fault. It's the same with bad applications. You wouldn't blame a KDE or Gnome crash on the Linux kernel, would you? Likewise, I don't blame the Linux CDROM freezing I had years ago on Linux either, it was probably just bad drivers. And I don't blame a crash in one of nVidia's OpenGL DLL on Windows either. It's nVidia's fault in that case. Remember, Microsoft doesn't make most specialized drivers, the hardware company writes them. Exceptions include the standard VGA driver, but you should be using the vendor-provided driver anyway to get hardware acceleration.
Win2k crashes a lot on me. Sometimes it happens because of bad Creative Sound Blaster Live! drivers (fucking fuck, that's as mainstream as it gets and Windows doesn't properly support that sound card?), sometimes because of nVidia crappy drivers (same shit, but now I have better luck with ATi)
Creative makes shit drivers. I avoid all Creative hardware that requires drivers. My sister's rock stable Win2k box was fine until I installed a Creative webcam, in fact, and one day it crashed while we tried to get the webcam running.
Sometimes it crashes because some other crap, sometimes a program manages to hang the box so badly there is no real difference from a crash
I agree Windows needs work in this area. I'm not sure what the situation is on Linux since I've never encountered it before, but a program eating all the CPU on Windows, kernel-mode or not, will simply make the computer unusable. I've been able to get out of most of these freezes by being extremely patient and waiting until I can kill the program through the UI, but yes, it can be handled better.
We all remember the Win98 Scanner incident, don't we? That was televised...
Give this guy enough blue screens and he'll be begging for penguin.
Or he'll be begging for an NT-based Windows OS. Windows 9x may be unstable and full of crashes, but all NT OS's I've dealt with, including NT4, 2000, XP, and 2003 have collectively crashed perhaps once or twice due to unknown problems. The rest of the time I've been able to trace the crashes back to drivers.
I wonder if it is possible to use the newer commandline compiler from within Visual Studio 6. From what I hear, the.NET IDE isn't so great for C/C++ work. And come on, a project file is now called a "solution" file?? That's just dumb.
I'm currently writing C++ code using Visual Studio.NET, and I haven't noticed any problems compared to Visual C++ 6. Some of the keyboard shortcut defaults are different, but you can revert to the VC++ 6 layout easily.
I think the main reason it might not seem as good for C++ work is that VS.NET adds considerably more features geared towards.NET development, while C++ appears to be neglected somewhat. Remember that VS.NET's IDE supports all their.NET languages, and C++.
For clarification, a solution can contain multiple projects. The old term they used was workspace. Yeah, I thought it was weird at first, but it's just terminology, plus a workspace sort of implies open windows and developer-specific settings to me. A single solution can be used by multiple developers (CVS works nicely).
This looks like an aggressive effort to get people to start developing.NET apps since a major part of the free download includes support for.NET.
One has to assume MS is worried they're losing their development community to run a scheme like this.
Or it's simply a convenience. Microsoft added extensions to C++ so that you can compile and create a fully-managed.NET program in addition to regular programs. I personally would think it'd be weird if they released an optimizing C++ compiler and neglected to include the.NET extensions; it'd feel like they were purposefully ripping out that functionality. And yes, it exists as a switch:/clr
Does anyone know if it would be legal to make a CD full of Windows patches and service packs? Such a CD would be incredibly useful for me, and perhaps other people. Someone could write a nice pamphlet on how to protect your computer, and provide a simple installation program for installing necessary patches from the CD.
It'd be like one of those health pamphlets, such as "how to protect yourself against skin cancer", but geared towards protecting Windows computers.
Replacements for commonly-exploited parts of Windows could also be included, such as Firefox, and as a bonus, MiKTex and a tutorial can be included to free college students from the grasps of Microsoft Equation Editor;)
The scary part is that there are IE/Windows exploits for which no patches currently exist, so Windows Update can't possibly protect you in those cases. What's even worse is that those exploits are being used NOW.
During the time when I naively thought IE would be perfectly safe with all patches, I came across an ad popup that downloaded and ran an executable. Yes, I was fully patched, I even checked afterwards. Turns out the popup got through using an exploit that currently lacks a patch. Luckily, file permissions saved my ass that time, but I'm switching to Firefox to be safe.
Something strange I noticed last night looking for lyrics on a popular site, is that I was prompted to install a "Free Access Plugin" firefox extension.
I've noticed that on some sites too, and I think it'd be best if Firefox disabled auto-download and prompt-to-install of extensions in the future. It seems that spyware makers are catching on with the fact that Firefox is gaining popularity.
Even if extensions are secured somehow, meaning they run in a sandbox or can't modify stuff outside of Firefox, I still don't want extra garbage automatically installing, or even asking. All too often I'll type and accidentally hit enter when a dialog box pops up.
I.e. they're patenting a work around for a stupid shortcoming, for which the only reason nobody else was doing it was that they designed their systems to be more flexible in the first place?
FAT was originally designed in the 1980's, and although long filenames might've been considered, hardware limitations may have made them infeasible at the time. Also, FAT wasn't initially designed by Microsoft; the first version was released with QDOS.
Saying FAT sucks is like saying Minix (the file system) sucks. They're both old, and better file systems supercede them. The only problem is that Microsoft decided to use FAT and extended it for Windows 9x, but that's somewhat understandable from a compatibility standpoint.
Then how, pray tell, can you install virtually any of Microsoft's software? Everything I installed from Microsoft in the past required about a 1000 dlls written to the Windows system directory. Now I stopped caring around about win2k, but has that changed significantly in XP?
Well, you log on as Administrator to install software, just like how you have to be root on Linux to install software. The point of the file security restrictions is to prevent regular users from installing software.
If Microsoft required a prompt for the root password whenever a program tried to install itself, similar to what OS X and many Linux apps do, it would make all the actual security vulnerabilities matter much more.
The Windows defaults with regards to user privileges are crap, and you are right, these vulnerabilities don't matter when everyone has administrative privileges anyway.
Requiring a password to install a program would be difficult in Windows, however, since the installation programs are provided by the software, not Windows (unless it's a Windows Installer package, in which case there's full support for requiring Administrator privileges to install applications). Windows really has no way of telling the difference between a normal application and an installer.
However, what you can do is lock down file permissions. What I did on Windows XP was remove Users write access to the boot drive, Windows directory, Program Files directory, and Documents and Settings (except for the user's profile). Installation programs can still run, but they won't be able to install software to any important location. At worst, the user can install to their profile, but any malicious program becomes a problem only for that user. It's akin to untaring, compiling, and running a program from your home directory on Linux.
I've heard of bad programs that require Administrator privileges or write access to their Program Files directory, in which case this setup will present problems. Still, it's a problem with the program itself, not a Windows problem, although lax or non-existent installation guidelines may have contributed. I personally think all these permissions should've been defaults years ago.
Increased complexity may make stability more difficult to achieve, but it does not imply instability. Additionally, the core parts of Linux and Windows appear to have equal stability on the desktop. I've always been able to trace Windows blue screens to a driver, and I've had a Linux system completely freeze with error text printed to the console while accessing the CDROM.
On the UI end, I've had crashes on both operating systems. KDE and Gnome applications have crashed on me before, but the situation has greatly improved since earlier versions. Explorer and IE crashes are rare but they still happen.
Stability is pretty much a non-issue for me. I'm happy with the stability of either Windows or Linux on the desktop.
Well, that is the whole problem isn't it. You are a fool if you ignore legal issues or Microsoft's desires.
The original post appeared to compare DirectX and OpenGL's technical aspect, which is why I didn't touch upon legal issues.
If DirectX ever became popular on Linux, I can almost guarantee that Microsoft would pull out some patent and screw whatever company wrote it.
I'm completely unfamiliar with any of this legal stuff, but could Microsoft really prevent the independent implementation of a specification? I don't think it'd be reverse engineering either, since the DirectX documentation is freely available online. Plus all the specification is in this case is a set of #defines, interfaces, and maybe some functions somewhere.
Also, has Microsoft used patents before to screw a company that was writing an independent implementation of a Microsoft specification?
2.) DirectX is a MICROSOFT ONLY format. It will never, ever, be in any linux distro except in emulation form. And for second, why should it be? OpenGL is fine and great, and with 2.0 coming out you can stuff DirectX where the sun don't shine.
At its very core, DirectX is just a set of APIs. Yes, it's a Microsoft API, but the exposed interfaces are well documented, and ignoring any possible legal issues, it is entirely possible to write a DirectX implementation on another platform. Okay, some of you may disagree on whether or not DirectX is well documented, but it's documented well enough for emulation purposes.
There are wrappers available that translate Direct3D calls into OpenGL calls (similar to Glide wrappers from the 3dfx days), and I don't see any technical problems with removing the OpenGL layer and having the new Direct3D implementation call the graphics card directly. However, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think Linux 3D graphics drivers are currently all proprietary, so nVidia and ATI would have to provide the Direct3D layer.
Still, even with an emulation layer, why SHOULDN'T DirectX run on Linux? Ignore legal issues and Microsoft's desires. Believe it or not, there are some developers who've only used DirectX and not OpenGL+SDL. It's worth having DirectX on Linux even if only a tiny fraction of those developers decide to port to Linux. That fraction may grow, and after familiarizing themselves with Linux they may switch to other APIs that are better supported on Linux, such as OpenGL and SDL.
DirectX is great for PC Games - but for real scientific/commercial work it *SUCKS*.
Is there a reason why it sucks for such work? I've only done experimental game-related graphics work with both APIs, and although each has its own unique style, I don't really see any major problems of either that would prevent work of any type from being done using it.
I think the real reason why DirectX isn't used for scientific work is because it only works on Windows, and it hasn't been around for as long as OpenGL.
From coding experience the integration is pretty much non-existent or not very strong. APIs such as Direct3D and DirectSound have consistent API styles, but they don't share much API. It is possible to write an OpenGL application that uses DirectSound and DirectInput, like GLQuake.
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Bonzi Buddy's pretty high on my list; not only that, I don't even have to ask to install it! Friendly lil thing ends up there on its own.
Or an uncle installs it. One day a year or so ago my uncle came to visit and excitedly described this talking purple monkey that helped with various computer activities. He's a computer fanatic, meaning he'll spend lots of money on computer components, but not really a geek since he doesn't know much about computer maintenance and usage. Anyway, I was instantly suspicious of the program, and this was back when spyware was relatively obscure.
I later confirmed my spyware suspicions. Back then I wasn't too strict on security, and freaked out when I saw the purple monkey--the same monkey described as bad bad bad on web pages--on my sister's computer.
That was the last time I ever let my uncle install stuff on one of my computers. I guess I made a big deal out of it because my siblings sometimes refer to one of our pets as Bonzi just to annoy me. Yes, I literally cringe whenever I hear that name.
I use 7-zip, it is free (speech and beer) and reads and writes most archive formats, including zip, rar, tar, tgz, etc.
It might seem strange but I use command-line zip from the Unix Utilities package, which contains Win32 ports of common Unix utilities such as grep, zip, and... unrar, although I don't recall ever seeing unrar in Linux.
I'm not a heavy Linux user, but some of those utilities are incredibly useful to have on Windows.
How about the first 10 things you UNinstall from a fresh WinXP install?
2) System Restore Service
I used to wonder what System Restore does, but apparently it saves backups of your registry on your hard drive when various things happen, such as installing a hotfix or Windows Installer package. This has saved me a couple times when the registry got corrupted; a simple boot into recovery mode and copying over the HKLM registry file fixed things (of course, the problem of corruption still remains). Keep that in mind when you disable System Restore.
Yeah, like I do that every day.
Just because you don't do it everyday doesn't mean other people don't have a use for embedding animations or other objects. I've seen videos embedded in PowerPoint presentations, and while it might not be the most efficient way of doing things, the fact is that that person chose to embed a video. It doesn't matter if you don't do it; there are others who do.
Install the .NET Framework (run Windows Update). It will install one at %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\csc.exe
You can compile this with csc /out:DrDRMS.exe *.cs
And if you're on Linux, you can download Mono and compile with mcs DeDRMS.cs.
We need to inovate, not litigate. Spyware protection should to be built into the computer not regulated by the government.
I was reading through some of the other comments and thought, "yes, clarification or ammendment to this piece of legislation would make things better," but then saw this comment and realized that destroying the root of the problem is much better action. A large part of the problem wouldn't exist if Microsoft hadn't added the stupid ActiveX feature, or at least didn't make it so insecure.
ActiveX needs to be disabled by default, at least for the Internet zone. A firewall needs to be installed by default to prevent unknown outgoing access, and present a simple interface for allowing programs access to the Internet. I think this will be in Windows XP SP2, anyone want to correct or clarify?
Some of the problem arises from non-wizard computer users who blindly click Yes to dismiss dialog boxes requesting the user make a choice. In cases where such behavior would be dangerous to security, the request shouldn't exist in the first place. Default to the safe, secure choice and provide a mechanism for manually enabling the potentially unsafe behavior elsewhere. Don't ask the user, as that will provide a path to uninformed unsafeness.
Applied to ActiveX, this would mean that the prompt to download ActiveX controls shouldn't even exist. Controls shouldn't be downloaded at all unless the user specifically wants it. If a website depends on an ActiveX control, it can provide a page to help the user enable downloading for that site. Of course, the easier solution is to switch to Firefox, especially since all these suggestions are worthless when wild IE exploits exist that take advantage of unpatchable security holes. I know, I encountered one.
Dear Mr. Brin, now that we're providing webmail services, don't you feel that a Google Messenger should be in order?
What would be neat is if they integrated Google Messenger service with Gmail. Messages sent to you when you're offline can be transformed into emails, and perhaps maybe even messages in an individual messenger session can be logged to a Gmail folder.
It simply works, it doesn't have any flashy ads to bother you, and it's FAST!
I'm also lucky enough to have an account, and one interesting thing is their heavy usage of Javascript to generate the pages. Your inbox is basically an HTML page linking to a Javascript file and containing one block of Javascript code used to generate all the elements on the screen, and assuming the Javascript file is cached, checking your email should be blazing fast. It works perfectly fine with Firefox too!
Please don't tell me the hardware is at fault, because as far as I am concerned, the hardware doesn't crash (there is no smoke coming from the case and I don't need to reset the hardware), Windoze does.
It's not the hardware's fault, it's the driver's fault. It's the same with bad applications. You wouldn't blame a KDE or Gnome crash on the Linux kernel, would you? Likewise, I don't blame the Linux CDROM freezing I had years ago on Linux either, it was probably just bad drivers. And I don't blame a crash in one of nVidia's OpenGL DLL on Windows either. It's nVidia's fault in that case. Remember, Microsoft doesn't make most specialized drivers, the hardware company writes them. Exceptions include the standard VGA driver, but you should be using the vendor-provided driver anyway to get hardware acceleration.
Win2k crashes a lot on me. Sometimes it happens because of bad Creative Sound Blaster Live! drivers (fucking fuck, that's as mainstream as it gets and Windows doesn't properly support that sound card?), sometimes because of nVidia crappy drivers (same shit, but now I have better luck with ATi)
Creative makes shit drivers. I avoid all Creative hardware that requires drivers. My sister's rock stable Win2k box was fine until I installed a Creative webcam, in fact, and one day it crashed while we tried to get the webcam running.
Sometimes it crashes because some other crap, sometimes a program manages to hang the box so badly there is no real difference from a crash
I agree Windows needs work in this area. I'm not sure what the situation is on Linux since I've never encountered it before, but a program eating all the CPU on Windows, kernel-mode or not, will simply make the computer unusable. I've been able to get out of most of these freezes by being extremely patient and waiting until I can kill the program through the UI, but yes, it can be handled better.
Yera Wanker is certainly a strange name. Hmm, maybe I'll name one of my daughters Yera.
We all remember the Win98 Scanner incident, don't we? That was televised...
Give this guy enough blue screens and he'll be begging for penguin.
Or he'll be begging for an NT-based Windows OS. Windows 9x may be unstable and full of crashes, but all NT OS's I've dealt with, including NT4, 2000, XP, and 2003 have collectively crashed perhaps once or twice due to unknown problems. The rest of the time I've been able to trace the crashes back to drivers.
I wonder if it is possible to use the newer commandline compiler from within Visual Studio 6. From what I hear, the .NET IDE isn't so great for C/C++ work. And come on, a project file is now called a "solution" file?? That's just dumb.
I'm currently writing C++ code using Visual Studio.NET, and I haven't noticed any problems compared to Visual C++ 6. Some of the keyboard shortcut defaults are different, but you can revert to the VC++ 6 layout easily.
I think the main reason it might not seem as good for C++ work is that VS.NET adds considerably more features geared towards .NET development, while C++ appears to be neglected somewhat. Remember that VS.NET's IDE supports all their .NET languages, and C++.
For clarification, a solution can contain multiple projects. The old term they used was workspace. Yeah, I thought it was weird at first, but it's just terminology, plus a workspace sort of implies open windows and developer-specific settings to me. A single solution can be used by multiple developers (CVS works nicely).
This looks like an aggressive effort to get people to start developing .NET apps since a major part of the free download includes support for .NET.
One has to assume MS is worried they're losing their development community to run a scheme like this.
Or it's simply a convenience. Microsoft added extensions to C++ so that you can compile and create a fully-managed .NET program in addition to regular programs. I personally would think it'd be weird if they released an optimizing C++ compiler and neglected to include the .NET extensions; it'd feel like they were purposefully ripping out that functionality. And yes, it exists as a switch: /clr
All I did was browse some weblogs when a popup came up and automatically ran the executable.
Does anyone know if it would be legal to make a CD full of Windows patches and service packs? Such a CD would be incredibly useful for me, and perhaps other people. Someone could write a nice pamphlet on how to protect your computer, and provide a simple installation program for installing necessary patches from the CD.
It'd be like one of those health pamphlets, such as "how to protect yourself against skin cancer", but geared towards protecting Windows computers.
Replacements for commonly-exploited parts of Windows could also be included, such as Firefox, and as a bonus, MiKTex and a tutorial can be included to free college students from the grasps of Microsoft Equation Editor ;)
Not to mention religious use of Windows Update...
The scary part is that there are IE/Windows exploits for which no patches currently exist, so Windows Update can't possibly protect you in those cases. What's even worse is that those exploits are being used NOW.
During the time when I naively thought IE would be perfectly safe with all patches, I came across an ad popup that downloaded and ran an executable. Yes, I was fully patched, I even checked afterwards. Turns out the popup got through using an exploit that currently lacks a patch. Luckily, file permissions saved my ass that time, but I'm switching to Firefox to be safe.
Something strange I noticed last night looking for lyrics on a popular site, is that I was prompted to install a "Free Access Plugin" firefox extension.
I've noticed that on some sites too, and I think it'd be best if Firefox disabled auto-download and prompt-to-install of extensions in the future. It seems that spyware makers are catching on with the fact that Firefox is gaining popularity.
Even if extensions are secured somehow, meaning they run in a sandbox or can't modify stuff outside of Firefox, I still don't want extra garbage automatically installing, or even asking. All too often I'll type and accidentally hit enter when a dialog box pops up.
I.e. they're patenting a work around for a stupid shortcoming, for which the only reason nobody else was doing it was that they designed their systems to be more flexible in the first place?
FAT was originally designed in the 1980's, and although long filenames might've been considered, hardware limitations may have made them infeasible at the time. Also, FAT wasn't initially designed by Microsoft; the first version was released with QDOS.
Saying FAT sucks is like saying Minix (the file system) sucks. They're both old, and better file systems supercede them. The only problem is that Microsoft decided to use FAT and extended it for Windows 9x, but that's somewhat understandable from a compatibility standpoint.
Then how, pray tell, can you install virtually any of Microsoft's software? Everything I installed from Microsoft in the past required about a 1000 dlls written to the Windows system directory. Now I stopped caring around about win2k, but has that changed significantly in XP?
Well, you log on as Administrator to install software, just like how you have to be root on Linux to install software. The point of the file security restrictions is to prevent regular users from installing software.
If Microsoft required a prompt for the root password whenever a program tried to install itself, similar to what OS X and many Linux apps do, it would make all the actual security vulnerabilities matter much more.
The Windows defaults with regards to user privileges are crap, and you are right, these vulnerabilities don't matter when everyone has administrative privileges anyway.
Requiring a password to install a program would be difficult in Windows, however, since the installation programs are provided by the software, not Windows (unless it's a Windows Installer package, in which case there's full support for requiring Administrator privileges to install applications). Windows really has no way of telling the difference between a normal application and an installer.
However, what you can do is lock down file permissions. What I did on Windows XP was remove Users write access to the boot drive, Windows directory, Program Files directory, and Documents and Settings (except for the user's profile). Installation programs can still run, but they won't be able to install software to any important location. At worst, the user can install to their profile, but any malicious program becomes a problem only for that user. It's akin to untaring, compiling, and running a program from your home directory on Linux.
I've heard of bad programs that require Administrator privileges or write access to their Program Files directory, in which case this setup will present problems. Still, it's a problem with the program itself, not a Windows problem, although lax or non-existent installation guidelines may have contributed. I personally think all these permissions should've been defaults years ago.
- Linux is less complex and thus more stable
Increased complexity may make stability more difficult to achieve, but it does not imply instability. Additionally, the core parts of Linux and Windows appear to have equal stability on the desktop. I've always been able to trace Windows blue screens to a driver, and I've had a Linux system completely freeze with error text printed to the console while accessing the CDROM.
On the UI end, I've had crashes on both operating systems. KDE and Gnome applications have crashed on me before, but the situation has greatly improved since earlier versions. Explorer and IE crashes are rare but they still happen.
Stability is pretty much a non-issue for me. I'm happy with the stability of either Windows or Linux on the desktop.
Well, that is the whole problem isn't it. You are a fool if you ignore legal issues or Microsoft's desires.
The original post appeared to compare DirectX and OpenGL's technical aspect, which is why I didn't touch upon legal issues.
If DirectX ever became popular on Linux, I can almost guarantee that Microsoft would pull out some patent and screw whatever company wrote it.
I'm completely unfamiliar with any of this legal stuff, but could Microsoft really prevent the independent implementation of a specification? I don't think it'd be reverse engineering either, since the DirectX documentation is freely available online. Plus all the specification is in this case is a set of #defines, interfaces, and maybe some functions somewhere.
Also, has Microsoft used patents before to screw a company that was writing an independent implementation of a Microsoft specification?
*shrugs* It's late, sorry if I don't make sense.
2.) DirectX is a MICROSOFT ONLY format. It will never, ever, be in any linux distro except in emulation form. And for second, why should it be? OpenGL is fine and great, and with 2.0 coming out you can stuff DirectX where the sun don't shine.
At its very core, DirectX is just a set of APIs. Yes, it's a Microsoft API, but the exposed interfaces are well documented, and ignoring any possible legal issues, it is entirely possible to write a DirectX implementation on another platform. Okay, some of you may disagree on whether or not DirectX is well documented, but it's documented well enough for emulation purposes.
There are wrappers available that translate Direct3D calls into OpenGL calls (similar to Glide wrappers from the 3dfx days), and I don't see any technical problems with removing the OpenGL layer and having the new Direct3D implementation call the graphics card directly. However, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think Linux 3D graphics drivers are currently all proprietary, so nVidia and ATI would have to provide the Direct3D layer.
Still, even with an emulation layer, why SHOULDN'T DirectX run on Linux? Ignore legal issues and Microsoft's desires. Believe it or not, there are some developers who've only used DirectX and not OpenGL+SDL. It's worth having DirectX on Linux even if only a tiny fraction of those developers decide to port to Linux. That fraction may grow, and after familiarizing themselves with Linux they may switch to other APIs that are better supported on Linux, such as OpenGL and SDL.
DirectX is great for PC Games - but for real scientific/commercial work it *SUCKS*.
Is there a reason why it sucks for such work? I've only done experimental game-related graphics work with both APIs, and although each has its own unique style, I don't really see any major problems of either that would prevent work of any type from being done using it.
I think the real reason why DirectX isn't used for scientific work is because it only works on Windows, and it hasn't been around for as long as OpenGL.
From coding experience the integration is pretty much non-existent or not very strong. APIs such as Direct3D and DirectSound have consistent API styles, but they don't share much API. It is possible to write an OpenGL application that uses DirectSound and DirectInput, like GLQuake.