I also think it's worth pointing out that the Slashdot headline (though not the actual text of the post) deviates somewhat from the article. TFA is not talking about Vista failing -- which is what's implied by the post title -- but rather the failure of the DRM technologies in Vista, and thus the failure of next-gen formats.
Um, what? If we take a look at the blog linked in the post (emphasis mine):
Knowing there was already software available for Windows XP to play HD-DVD's, could simply plugging the HD-DVD drive into a PC work? Well, no Windows needs drivers.
If Windows wants drivers, drivers it will get. After installing these drivers magic started to happen. The HD-DVD drive was now recognized in Windows XP. Now we needed a piece of software to actually play the HD-DVD. And after some hard work we managed to find a version of WinDVD 8 that was able to play an HD-DVD movie even on my low end hardware (Granted with some stuttering).
This article is about MSN and blogs and the like, not their software business. They're considering turning off all of the MSN services to China, rather than succumbing and doing filtering as the government pleases (looking at you Google), and rather than turning over bloggers to the government (looking at you Yahoo).
They know perfectly well they don't any significant software revenue in China, and they're at least open about it inside the company.
C++ in Visual Studio is not exactly standards compliant. It's definitely Microsoft specific
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? VC 8 is right on par with GCC 4.0 in terms of C++ '99 (and 2003 rev) compliance. Yes they have some extensions, but so does GCC and pretty much every other compiler out there. Hell, GCC probably has more extensions than VC does. Obviously if portability is a concern, you don't use vendor specific extensions -- regardless of what vendor it is.
What PHP really needs is a MS SQL driver that doesn't leak memory and cause access violations.
You may want to double check for any PEBKAC issues you may be experiencing.
while at the same time, Microsoft is going to use that same API for their own virus detection
Is there any evidence that this is actually true? The things I know are:
The new Microsoft guideline thingies say, no using undocumented or non-public APIs.
The kernel and low level system guys gets pretty angry when software uses undocumented functionality. That stuff is undocumented precisely because it's not intended to be used.
Windows Defender, like any other program, is easy to analyze. Determining a complete list of APIs that it uses would be easy using existing tools and techniques, and use of undocumented APIs could be trivially uncovered.
The only way the MS guys could actually lock out anybody except themselves would be to hardcode a hash of the Defender exe inside the kernel or something. This is another thing that would show up under analysis (though more complex than the previous point). And they couldn't really do that, since it'd make patching Defender kind of hellish. And simply checking executable name would be no good, of course.
So, I guess it just strikes me as extremely unlikely that Microsoft is using undocumented APIs that nobody else knows about or has access to. People -- and by "people" I mean major products from major corporations -- have used undocumented APIs frequently in the past just because they happened to find something that sounded handy in the various DLL export tables. Microsoft using APIs but not allowing access to anyone else sounds pretty good, but I've yet to see any actual evidence to support the claim.
As the parent mentions, he's a public figure. That puts his likeness up for grabs.
The game is user moddable, and this is a user mod. I could do an HL2 model of JT (theoretically) and shoot him up, and apparently that'd be Valve's fault.
He doesn't actually have an explanation of why any of this is illegal -- he's a lawyer and he doesn't like it, therefore it must be illegal.
He's already in danger of being held in contempt of court, you'd think he'd at least wait a couple weeks before making it clear he's a nutcase, again.
Some people are going to wonder, though, why bloggers in China get screwed over, and bloggers in Australia don't. The answer is of course rather simple. Australia, being a modern free westernized country, is not going to ban Google from doing business over this. (Not to mention it's not Australia the government making these requests, afaict.) China, on the other hand...
It's interesting to note that NVIDIA and ATI were both created by people who realized how utterly braindead the SGI management was and walked out before the titantic sank. So in some sense, these people are the leftovers, the ones who screwed up and never realized it.
Can an old dog of a megacorp learn new tricks? We'll find out, I guess. A new competitor in the consumer GPU industry would certainly be appreciated.
You can see that the actual artists -- the people the RIAA pretend to be protecting -- have repeatedly fallen on our side, supporting file sharing and music communities. They are above the petty business interests and sheer greed that has driven the RIAA to attempt to destroy the music industry.
With any luck, more artists will start taking these kinds of steps, and eventually the RIAA will not be watching their own dinner from last night being digested.
While the *ahem* leaning of Slashdot are no secret, is it really necessary to loudly scream, "We are the Fox News of the Internet!" ? You'd think the editors would still at least have the decency to pretend that they're not blatantly anti-Microsoft.
Just FYI,.NET (well, C# and CLI actually,.NET is just a brand name) is also an ISO standard, not just ECMA. The relevant documents are ISO/IEC 23270:2003, ISO/IEC 23271:2003, and ISO/IEC 23272:2003 for C#, CLI, and CLI TR respectively.
Implied in that is that the security solutions of people like McAfee and Symantec are actually good -- they're not. Those products are terribly written and border on malware themselves, installing deep system level hooks and frequently wreaking all sorts of havoc on a system. I've seen systems that didn't need viruses; Norton AV or McAfee was handling destroying the system just fine on its own.
Maybe security should be trusted to someone other than MS, but it sure as fuck ain't these people.
Analysts may be really unreliable people, but it's pretty hard to jack this up. If we look at the link from the PS3 article (clicky), we notice that every Nintendo console ever has launched at $200.
Yet at the same time, PS2 sales are quadruple that of the Gamecube, and frankly profits are of surprisingly little importance in this sector, which is why MS can afford to lose 4 billion through the Xbox generation and not even care.
2 teraflops is the claim. And that's if all you do is run adds, subtracts, and multiplies all day with no flow control/branching, function calls, cache misses, pipeline stalls, or any of that other stuff that happens in "reality".
I wasn't speaking about hardware. That 5-10 year timespan is to find efficient ways of modeling the capability based security that I described earlier.
More importantly, the security models currently used in the kernel are broken, and we can formally prove that they are inadequate. Academic research in this area has been extremely productive, but there are major barriers to entry in the commercial world for the obvious reasons.
At the moment it looks like micrkernel architectures (real ones, none of this hybrid stuff) coupled with capability based security systems, should be able to provide real, formally verifiable security. As with most things there are a handful of practical barriers to overcome (primarily performance related), but another 5-10 years and those problems should be sorted out.
For a more in-depth discussion of capability systems, see the wiki page, and this essay by Dr. Jonathan Shapiro. (And to be perfectly honest, he's a professor of mine and my views are colored as such.)
Slashdot Mirror
I also think it's worth pointing out that the Slashdot headline (though not the actual text of the post) deviates somewhat from the article. TFA is not talking about Vista failing -- which is what's implied by the post title -- but rather the failure of the DRM technologies in Vista, and thus the failure of next-gen formats.
This article is about MSN and blogs and the like, not their software business. They're considering turning off all of the MSN services to China, rather than succumbing and doing filtering as the government pleases (looking at you Google), and rather than turning over bloggers to the government (looking at you Yahoo).
They know perfectly well they don't any significant software revenue in China, and they're at least open about it inside the company.
- The new Microsoft guideline thingies say, no using undocumented or non-public APIs.
- The kernel and low level system guys gets pretty angry when software uses undocumented functionality. That stuff is undocumented precisely because it's not intended to be used.
- Windows Defender, like any other program, is easy to analyze. Determining a complete list of APIs that it uses would be easy using existing tools and techniques, and use of undocumented APIs could be trivially uncovered.
- The only way the MS guys could actually lock out anybody except themselves would be to hardcode a hash of the Defender exe inside the kernel or something. This is another thing that would show up under analysis (though more complex than the previous point). And they couldn't really do that, since it'd make patching Defender kind of hellish. And simply checking executable name would be no good, of course.
So, I guess it just strikes me as extremely unlikely that Microsoft is using undocumented APIs that nobody else knows about or has access to. People -- and by "people" I mean major products from major corporations -- have used undocumented APIs frequently in the past just because they happened to find something that sounded handy in the various DLL export tables. Microsoft using APIs but not allowing access to anyone else sounds pretty good, but I've yet to see any actual evidence to support the claim.So I ask again. Where is this claim validated?
According to his Wikipedia article, he is dating Martha Stewart.
Clearly women are not a focus of his life.
Some people are going to wonder, though, why bloggers in China get screwed over, and bloggers in Australia don't. The answer is of course rather simple. Australia, being a modern free westernized country, is not going to ban Google from doing business over this. (Not to mention it's not Australia the government making these requests, afaict.) China, on the other hand...
Well, you know what they say. Reality has a well known liberal bias.
I don't get it. So they forked a project, then decided they didn't want to use the fork and applied the fork's name back to the original?
And they wonder why people are moving away from Debian. God damn.
It's interesting to note that NVIDIA and ATI were both created by people who realized how utterly braindead the SGI management was and walked out before the titantic sank. So in some sense, these people are the leftovers, the ones who screwed up and never realized it.
Can an old dog of a megacorp learn new tricks? We'll find out, I guess. A new competitor in the consumer GPU industry would certainly be appreciated.
You can see that the actual artists -- the people the RIAA pretend to be protecting -- have repeatedly fallen on our side, supporting file sharing and music communities. They are above the petty business interests and sheer greed that has driven the RIAA to attempt to destroy the music industry.
With any luck, more artists will start taking these kinds of steps, and eventually the RIAA will not be watching their own dinner from last night being digested.
Just FYI, .NET (well, C# and CLI actually, .NET is just a brand name) is also an ISO standard, not just ECMA. The relevant documents are ISO/IEC 23270:2003, ISO/IEC 23271:2003, and ISO/IEC 23272:2003 for C#, CLI, and CLI TR respectively.
Implied in that is that the security solutions of people like McAfee and Symantec are actually good -- they're not. Those products are terribly written and border on malware themselves, installing deep system level hooks and frequently wreaking all sorts of havoc on a system. I've seen systems that didn't need viruses; Norton AV or McAfee was handling destroying the system just fine on its own. Maybe security should be trusted to someone other than MS, but it sure as fuck ain't these people.
Analysts may be really unreliable people, but it's pretty hard to jack this up. If we look at the link from the PS3 article (clicky), we notice that every Nintendo console ever has launched at $200.
It's kind of a no brainer.
Yet at the same time, PS2 sales are quadruple that of the Gamecube, and frankly profits are of surprisingly little importance in this sector, which is why MS can afford to lose 4 billion through the Xbox generation and not even care.
2 teraflops is the claim. And that's if all you do is run adds, subtracts, and multiplies all day with no flow control/branching, function calls, cache misses, pipeline stalls, or any of that other stuff that happens in "reality".
And reality has a well known anti-Sony bias.
The first two of the three don't look right in IE7 at all. The third is quite slashdotted.
I wasn't speaking about hardware. That 5-10 year timespan is to find efficient ways of modeling the capability based security that I described earlier.
More importantly, the security models currently used in the kernel are broken, and we can formally prove that they are inadequate. Academic research in this area has been extremely productive, but there are major barriers to entry in the commercial world for the obvious reasons.
At the moment it looks like micrkernel architectures (real ones, none of this hybrid stuff) coupled with capability based security systems, should be able to provide real, formally verifiable security. As with most things there are a handful of practical barriers to overcome (primarily performance related), but another 5-10 years and those problems should be sorted out.
For a more in-depth discussion of capability systems, see the wiki page, and this essay by Dr. Jonathan Shapiro. (And to be perfectly honest, he's a professor of mine and my views are colored as such.)