Home Premium OEM is $99 per computer, and this goes down based on the volume purchased.
CrossOver Premium (which you would generally want for this application, especially as it's cheaper than CrossOver Standard plus CrossOver Games) is $69.95 per computer, which also goes down based on the volume purchased. However, you must also renew it every year to continue to get updates. This is "at a discounted price," though I couldn't find what that price is.
So, once you've owned your computer for a year, Windows 7 Home Premium is most likely less expensive than CrossOver, as you only pay for it once. Whether that added cost is worth not giving money to Microsoft, however, is more of a personal decision.
When I close the lid on my MacBook, OS X puts it to sleep. When I open the lid, it wakes up. Every time. Why can't Windows do this?
For the same reason why things "just work" on OS X and can get hairy on Windows and Linux -- because your hardware manufacturer violates one or more standards in such a way that Windows can't reliably do this. Linux users have the same battle, though it's worse due to a lack of manufacturer support. Apple, on the other hand, has a much, much smaller space of hardware to support, all of which they built. If an Apple system violates spec and fails to handle ACPI sleep states, it's either a warranty issue or some engineer gets eviscerated by Jobs.
As for me, when I close the lid on my MacBook, Windows 7 puts it to sleep. When I open the lid, it wakes up. Every time. I ripped OS X off it as soon as I got it home, but I imagine OS X would do the same thing. My work Dell M4400 is about 80%, and that's after I installed our corporate base Windows 7 image; the preinstalled Dell image was 0%. On my old desktop that I built myself using Gigabyte, OCZ, and MSI hardware on Intel P55, it was about 98% successful on sleep. My new EVGA-based desktop using X58 varies from 100% on a good week to 0% on a bad one, with about a 60% success on average.
So what's the solution? Microsoft already puts a lot of effort into hardware compatibility. The only way it could get much better is to start moving towards a Jobsian lockdown of the Windows platform, which would alienate developers (who are, let's remember, the reason Windows is successful; an OS relies on application software to survive), anger hardware manufacturers, and raise the ire of technocrats in both the professional developer and free software communities. Microsoft's really stuck in a tough situation here, and Linux is worse off, as they can't throw money at HC testing and use digital certificates and a dominant platform position to at least try to force people to play ball.
The only other solution is to take the Windows 7 approach and try to make the computer more intelligent at dealing with these situations.
(Also, by the by, Windows XP is an ancient OS at this point. Sleep support in Windows has gotten much better in the two subsequent versions. We don't take Linux to task for what it did back in 2.2 -- or, at least, we shouldn't.)
I would argue this says a lot more about the coding capabilities of the subcontractors and their processes than it does about.NET, which has been used in some fairly large scale projects (as another poster noted). One doesn't blame tools for the deficiencies of their wielders.
Also, the fact that any.NET assembly can be disassembled into CIL, traced, and analyzed means that anything that isn't documented either can be or already has been -- for instance, by the Mono project.
Yes, it is. (Though in a sense, it's actually both.)
The mechanism of action of methylphenidate, just like every other drug in the amphetamine analogue group, is to increase dopamine and norepinephrine levels by blocking their reuptake. It also increases the release of these neurotransmitters, but isn't nearly as potent in this regard as, say, methamphetamine or cocaine. Both of these effects are stimulatory, a fact that can be easily discerned by giving it to animal models or humans. Small doses create a feeling of energy and mental clarity, while large doses create a high distinctly different from that of depressants. Overdoses can provoke stimulant-induced schizophrenia, most likely due to the high levels of dopamine.
That said, in the treatment of ADHD, the proposed mechanism of action is that the areas of the brain controlling impulse control (presumably, the frontal lobe) are naturally depressed. Increasing overall levels of stimulation in the brain causes this area to achieve a normal level of stimulation and activity. Obviously, because this area is inhibitory, methylphenidate in this case has an overall depressant effect, but make no mistake -- methylphenidate itself is definitely a stimulant. Just because a drug can exhibit paradoxical psychoactive effects doesn't mean its standard classification is different; it just means that it has idiosyncratic paradoxical effects in a subset of the population. In this case, that happens to be therapeutic (as opposed to, say, fatal in the case of some antipsychotics and antidepressants).
- IHAADIP (I Have An Advanced Degree In Psychology)
Actually, for Windows Mobile 6.x, you can quite literally write whatever you want and your users can install it. Yes, it is possible to restrict installations only to code signed by specific certificates and this is a relatively common practice on Windows Mobile 6.x Standard, but I've yet to encounter a single WM Professional phone that had such restrictions in place out of the box. This is why you can download software such as GSPlayer, GPSTestTool, and the like for free, or hop over to Handango and buy and install whatever you want. If you're up to it, you can even download the SDK and write your own software without having to pay Microsoft a single cent.
Now, Windows Phone 7 is substantially more restrictive in what it can run, but Microsoft doesn't: * Restrict what ad systems you can use * Arbitrarily deny specific development languages (the only restriction is that the code run on the Silverlight version of the CLR; this means you can use F#, C#, VB, Python, and even COBOL) * Ban the use of interpreted code, so you can write emulators in the CLR language of your choice
Microsoft has also said that its final app requirements won't include any wiggle room for random app denials, and they've also strongly implied that the testing process for app approval will be at least partially automated to remove the possibility of an angry or prudish tester zapping your app. They've also said that they're working on parental controls and intend to allow mature content once that's in place.
So, how again is Windows Mobile or Windows Phone development substantially similar to i-device development?
Bear in mind that the certificate store in Windows is shared across multiple applications. I don't have Firefox installed on my fully-patched Windows 7 Professional machine, and I don't have the CNNIC Root certificate in any of my certificate stores. If you have it, you've installed something that's added it or upgraded from a version of the OS that's trusted it. It most definitely isn't something that Windows trusts by default.
My MBP isn't handy, so I can't check and see if OS X has it by default; my MBP has a tiny OS X partition I only use for software and firmware updates, so it's as close to a stock install as you can get.
This will work, but the certificate is still "trusted" in a sense. The best way is, as the parent noted, to use the Certificates snap-in in MMC to move the certificate to the Untrusted store. Doing so permanently removes trust for that certificate and, thus, all of the certificates that chain to it. This approach is also useful in that it blocks trust of the certificate for any purpose by any program that uses the cryptographic functions in Windows for verifying certificate trust.
Optimally, you'll want to get as much math as you can, especially in the realm of proofs, number theory, and combinatorics. They're particularly useful because they directly map to computer science in computational complexity and computability. Knowledge of complexity and the ability to establish the best, average, and worst case performance of an algorithm is quite helpful in ensuring your programs run quickly -- especially if they have slow parts outside of your control (GC, I/O, etc.) or if you're working on large data sets where the difference between O(log n) and O(n log n) can be substantial. On that basis, I'd recommend taking discrete structures with graph theory. Personally, I don't see where the advantage of the selected math chapters course is for a software developer, unless you're planning on coding for domains such as engineering or quantitative finance; however, as I said, the more math you get, the easier certain topics will be for you (e.g., functional programming).
That said, you might also want to consider taking a course in computational linguistics if one's available; they're often offered out of your local psychology department. Computational linguistics deals with large to enormous data sets and will teach you how to work with techniques such as dynamic programming, caching, lambda expressions, tree traversal, and probabilistic models. It's a great fusion of math, linguistics, and computer science that I feel is an excellent capstone course. If you can't find such a course, I'd still take the general principle here and look for a course that will require you to integrate your computer science and programming experience with some other field. The more connections you can find between your pure computational knowledge and the real world, the better the developer you'll be.
C# is an ECMA standard. The.NET Framework is the proprietary part, and there's Mono and DotGNU if you'd prefer more openly licensed libraries.
Also, if you've ever used C#, you know that a lot of what you learn there is applicable to Java and, to a lesser extent, other curly-braces syntax languages (and if you're really feeling up to it, you can play with pointer arithmetic using unsafe pointers and the marshalling system for P/Invoke and COM Interop). The new C# 3.5 features such as generics, anonymous methods, and lambda expressions also provide a reasonable introduction to templates and functional programming, though I think both of those would be inappropriate to show to new programmer unless they're a bit of a math geek.
I admit, that this sounds religion-motivated, but that's hardly a drawback of an argument...
Sure it is. Arguments typically need to be backed up by evidence. An argument based on religion, which is by its very nature a construct of faith that's not backed up by evidence, is fundamentally an appeal to authority (the religion's higher power) or an appeal to the populace (lots of people believe it, so it must be true). Appeals to religion as evidence for an argument are especially problematic when discussing governmental policies in the United States, where a law must have a secular legislative purpose (as per the Lemon test). If the only justification for a law is religious, then it fails this prong of the Lemon test and is unconstitutional.
At any rate, I would have one bit of advice for you: please consider whether your desire to frown upon or ban such "unearned" pleasures is a function of some actual, real harm you can perceive, or is just a gut reaction to something you personally find distasteful. If it's the latter, I would implore you to consider that banning things you personally find abhorrent is the exact reason why we get laws like the CDA (and, more broadly, censorship laws in the US in general) and why we from time to time end up with attorneys general attacking "smut peddlers" in the courts.
Linus is not a lawyer, and his statements should not be taken as legal advice.
Licensing is entirely a legal issue, not a technical one, and the whole "when does linking and in what manner cause a module to be considered a derived work" question is an unsettled legal one (i.e., it has not been tested in court with regards to the GPL). nVidia's binary driver issue hasn't yet been tested because no one who has standing has been interested in suing over it. A lack of legal action doesn't necessarily mean that no legal action is possible. At any rate, Stallman and others seem to fall on the side that any kernel module is a derived work, which is why there's Linux-libre.
Honestly, if FAT32 won't do what you need, NTFS is pretty much where you'll need to go. NTFS-3g gives you stable read/write capability on Linux and OS X as a FUSE driver; in fact, many distributions have NTFS-3g in their repositories. There's also native NTFS write support in Snow Leopard if you want to risk turning it on. I personally haven't had any issues with it, but some people have encountered file corruption when using it, so you might want to be wary. It is worth noting, however, that many embedded devices won't read anything other than FAT. If you plan on hooking this drive up to, say, a DVD player to show pictures, NTFS won't work for you.
Like it or not, Microsoft file systems are the lingua franca of file transfer on portable drives these days, merely due to the installed base of Windows computers.
As long as you don't need to use an unmanaged interface... then you get to play with P/Invoke and COM Interop. COM Interop is particularly fun when the target object doesn't implement IDispatch and likes to use unions for passing data around... then you get to have fun with custom marshalling and the Layout attributes.
But thankfully, that's getting less and less common these days, and writing a COM-visible component in.NET is trivially easy -- which is great!
Worms and viruses fall into certain definitions of "autonomous software agents," and there have been some that have uninstalled their opposition. Welchia is a modern example and the source of some ethical arguments over on BUGTRAQ.
Many applications written for XP assume the running user is a member of the Administrators group. In general, the biggest issues were:
1. Writing to something in %programfiles% (games in particular were bad about this) 2. Writing to something in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Both of these are secured locations in Vista and 7 and sometimes were, but not always, in XP. That's why Vista had things like application file and registry virtualization to redirect writes to secure locations to safe, per-user locations. There's also issues, especially with XP, with tasks that shouldn't necessarily require Admin or UAC elevation but did anyway with GPOs -- such as changing the time zone.
Much of this has been cleared up between Virtual XP Mode and improvements in the required rights in 7, so it's far less of an issue than it was before. Of course, a Virtual XP Mode VM can still be rooted, but it, at least, can be easily obliterated or rolled back with an Undo Disk.
Same happens with Evolution : some kind of speciation has been reproduced in laboratory, or has been man-caused in industrial countries. Nonetheless we can't currently "evolve an eye in a lab"(due to obvious problems of time scale and necessary space). For lots of larger-scale models, instead, we have to rely on what we learn from our planet trough fossils records. (Fossil and planet Earth are to evolution, what telescopes and the universe is to extreme-range physics).
Nope. While relativity and QM fall into the category of "extremely hard to test," evolutionary biology doesn't (with one exception). If you mean "create a new species as species is usually operationally defined (i.e., unable to mate successfully with other lifeforms)," then we've not only done this in the lab using test animals such as D. melanogaster, we've observed it in the wild on multiple occasions with isolated populations. The fastest way to create a new species by this definition is to take members of a population, split them off into an area with different selection pressures, and wait. Pretty soon, they'll not mate with members of the other species, and after that, they'll become unable to do so.
If you mean "develop new traits in response to selection pressures" or "develop a new genotype in response to selection pressures," this has been observed so many times it's not even worth discussing. From the classic examples of bacterial resistance to observations of transplanted populations, this has been observed over and over again.
If you mean "develop complex new traits in response to selection pressures," this is something of a new area of research. However, bacteria reproduce very quickly and we can control their environment very effectively, so they make good models for this. Recently, a team caused a strain of bacteria to develop the ability to metabolize a toxic substance in their environment over many generations. They didn't use selective breeding, but simply changed the fitness landscape and let the bacteria live in it. Eventually, the survivors in the environment overcame the new selection pressure with an enzyme to metabolize the substance (which I want to say was acetic acid, but I don't recall off the top of my head). Outside the lab, we have an excellent example of this -- bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
If you mean "turn a population into a new species by the layman's definition of species," then yeah, we haven't turned fruit flies into bees or monkeys into humans. Collecting traits takes time. In this case, yes, paleontology can come in handy to provide support for an induction argument that evolution can create new species with major differences in phenotype.
Paleontology certainly has a place in evolutionary study, but those working in evolutionary biology sure don't rely on it to make their gains. They rely on the methods proposed by their theories to get results.
I'm afraid not. The reason this malware is easy to remove is because it doesn't do anything truly wretched, like patch libc and other applications, install a rootkit kernel module, and the like.
Having dealt with Linux boxes that have been hit by automatic exploitation tools that go well out of their way to hide their presence, I can tell you that no matter what the operating system, the standard advice holds: once the machine is infected, the only sure way to get it back to a known state is to restore from a backup made prior to the exploitation or to wipe it completely and start over. I should also point out that these machines were rooted through the exploitation of previously-patched vulnerabilities in setuid services -- which is the exact same vector many Windows worms use, including Slammer and Conficker.
The only difference between the tools I've run into and a full-on worm is that they run at the command of a cracker and scan IP address ranges of his choice. With a bare amount of automation, they could become very successful Linux worms, breaking into all those machines that, say, have old OpenSSH binaries that haven't been patched against its known remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.
Yes, except for the fact that the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" was the marketing appearance of a restrictive licensing mechanism based on the lockout chip, and circumventing the lockout chip was, until the courts decided otherwise, of questionable legality.
Games for Windows is just a marketing mechanism. It has no effect on one's ability to publish or sell a game. In fact, many games exist that don't support the 360 controller or do so only tentatively, and yet there's no push to eliminate them from the PC. Microsoft, for whatever other issues you may ascribe to it, at least strongly believes in an open software ecosystem. They *want* people to write software for Windows of all types, because without a vibrant developer community, an OS is doomed.
It depends on the printer; my Phaser 6180DN will print on a wide variety of papers, though I can't say I've ever run cardboard or canvas through it, and cheap transparencies might melt in the fuser. I often run heavy cardstock through, and I've printed on inkjet photo paper before in a pinch. I often use fine linen papers with it. The key is to get a printer with a simple paper path (usually, that means using the MPT) and turn the duplexer off. If you must duplex, do it by hand.
I assume you're referring to wax phase change printers such as the Phaser 800 series and its subsequent models, as opposed to dye sublimation printers. Dye sublimation printers don't need to keep any wax melted; the print head sublimates the wax using a thermal printing head. You can think of phase change printers as similar to inkjets, while dye-sub printers are similar to thermal receipt printers. Dye sublimation != phase change; they don't even use the same type of pigment (dye sub uses dye on a ribbon, while phase change uses wax with pigments).
As a prior owner of a Phaser 850 phase change printer, I can say that I was generally happy with it over the 7 years I owned it -- except for some rubber solenoid heads turning to goo due to the high heat in the printer. I also got to maintain a Phaser 8400, which made its users quite happy. One great advantage of these printers at the time they were released was that they had a very small dot size and excellent registration (as all the ink comes out of a print head, as opposed to a drum transfer process in a color laser) and printed faster than the color lasers of the time. They did all of this at a relatively low upfront cost, and Xerox even gave you black wax ("solid ink") for the life of the printer for the cost of shipping. Companies such as MediaScience quickly replicated the wax recipe and offered comparable consumables at an extremely low cost.
That said, phase change printers do suffer many of the flaws you mention; the standby on the Phaser 850 was about 250W, IIRC. The later models brought that down some, but the printer did need to keep wax melted and the printhead hot, which made their power costs relatively high. The printers also chew wax at an incredible speed, especially since they have to dump part (or in the case of the 850, all) of the melted wax if they ever went through a power cycle.
Nowadays, the advantages of the phase change printers are more or less gone; color lasers have caught up and come down in price, while cheaper inkjets do the job well enough with a lower upfront cost. That's essentially squeezed them out of the market.
Come now. If you, say, run the EOT plugin for Firefox from PDMS, FF can be used to exploit the vulnerability. Clearly the answer is to drive-by install that software to improve the l33t exploiter experience.
In all seriousness, the issue isn't that IE has access to the kernel, but that IE can request that an EOT font be rendered. Apparently, something about the EOT font rendering pipeline hits win32k.sys, and if that EOT font is properly constructed, it can cause remote code execution at that point. Any program that supports EOT can be used to exploit the vulnerability. Right now, though, the major program that supports it is IE.
That would explain why everyone on the Bugtraq and Full-Disclosure mailing lists are being hit with C&Ds from Microsoft if they opt not to report the vulnerability to Microsoft first, and why security researchers live in fear of the Giant from Redmond and its legal team.
Oh, wait, that's not actually happening. One inept C&D about a Bing vulnerability does not a pattern of behavior make. While Microsoft certainly prefers responsible disclosure -- as does essentially everyone -- they aren't running around threatening everyone who doesn't do it.
That said, this report is more than a little fishy, though I would say it's due to its notably missing methodology explanation over anything else.
My understanding is that the graphics drivers for NT have always run in kernel mode. What you get in the newer kernels that use WDDM (Vista, 2008 Server, 7) is that the API layer of the graphics driver runs in user mode, but there's a kernel mode dispatch driver that actually sends the commands to the video card. The general idea is that the kernel mode driver is so lean and optimized that it's unlikely to fail, while the bulk of the driver sits in user space so that it can be restarted if (or when, in the case of some cards' drivers:) ) it fails.
Also, it's not like the Windows 95 UI is particularly brutal on computational resources. I recall running it on entirely non-accelerated VGA cards without any trouble. It's not "grafting" so much as "replacing progman.exe with explorer.exe" and "adding new Shell functionality."
I manage an Enterprise Agreement for 250 seats. The minute we upgrade our ShoreTel VOIP system to the new Shoreware version with Windows 7 support, we're done with XP. We're going to begin reimaging all computers with Windows 7 Enterprise using WDS.
Why, you might ask? Windows 7 offers a ton of advancements for the enterprise, from DirectAccess (for always-on VPNs) to improved terminal services and application virtualization (MED-V) and BranchCache (like Offline Files, but better). Additionally, it's got a cleaner interface and, in our tests, runs a smidge faster than XP for office applications on our new Core 2 desktops. Another plus is that we don't have to include drivers in our WDS image, since Windows 7 supports almost every network device I've thrown at it out of the box, and whatever other drivers it needs to download, it can grab during setup.
Admittedly, 250 seats isn't huge and the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of businesses with EAs and Software Assurance are going to snap up Windows 7. It's a major improvement over XP, and both users and sysadmins like it.
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Home Premium OEM is $99 per computer, and this goes down based on the volume purchased.
CrossOver Premium (which you would generally want for this application, especially as it's cheaper than CrossOver Standard plus CrossOver Games) is $69.95 per computer, which also goes down based on the volume purchased. However, you must also renew it every year to continue to get updates. This is "at a discounted price," though I couldn't find what that price is.
So, once you've owned your computer for a year, Windows 7 Home Premium is most likely less expensive than CrossOver, as you only pay for it once. Whether that added cost is worth not giving money to Microsoft, however, is more of a personal decision.
When I close the lid on my MacBook, OS X puts it to sleep. When I open the lid, it wakes up. Every time. Why can't Windows do this?
For the same reason why things "just work" on OS X and can get hairy on Windows and Linux -- because your hardware manufacturer violates one or more standards in such a way that Windows can't reliably do this. Linux users have the same battle, though it's worse due to a lack of manufacturer support. Apple, on the other hand, has a much, much smaller space of hardware to support, all of which they built. If an Apple system violates spec and fails to handle ACPI sleep states, it's either a warranty issue or some engineer gets eviscerated by Jobs.
As for me, when I close the lid on my MacBook, Windows 7 puts it to sleep. When I open the lid, it wakes up. Every time. I ripped OS X off it as soon as I got it home, but I imagine OS X would do the same thing. My work Dell M4400 is about 80%, and that's after I installed our corporate base Windows 7 image; the preinstalled Dell image was 0%. On my old desktop that I built myself using Gigabyte, OCZ, and MSI hardware on Intel P55, it was about 98% successful on sleep. My new EVGA-based desktop using X58 varies from 100% on a good week to 0% on a bad one, with about a 60% success on average.
So what's the solution? Microsoft already puts a lot of effort into hardware compatibility. The only way it could get much better is to start moving towards a Jobsian lockdown of the Windows platform, which would alienate developers (who are, let's remember, the reason Windows is successful; an OS relies on application software to survive), anger hardware manufacturers, and raise the ire of technocrats in both the professional developer and free software communities. Microsoft's really stuck in a tough situation here, and Linux is worse off, as they can't throw money at HC testing and use digital certificates and a dominant platform position to at least try to force people to play ball.
The only other solution is to take the Windows 7 approach and try to make the computer more intelligent at dealing with these situations.
(Also, by the by, Windows XP is an ancient OS at this point. Sleep support in Windows has gotten much better in the two subsequent versions. We don't take Linux to task for what it did back in 2.2 -- or, at least, we shouldn't.)
I would argue this says a lot more about the coding capabilities of the subcontractors and their processes than it does about .NET, which has been used in some fairly large scale projects (as another poster noted). One doesn't blame tools for the deficiencies of their wielders.
Also, the fact that any .NET assembly can be disassembled into CIL, traced, and analyzed means that anything that isn't documented either can be or already has been -- for instance, by the Mono project.
Yes, it is. (Though in a sense, it's actually both.)
The mechanism of action of methylphenidate, just like every other drug in the amphetamine analogue group, is to increase dopamine and norepinephrine levels by blocking their reuptake. It also increases the release of these neurotransmitters, but isn't nearly as potent in this regard as, say, methamphetamine or cocaine. Both of these effects are stimulatory, a fact that can be easily discerned by giving it to animal models or humans. Small doses create a feeling of energy and mental clarity, while large doses create a high distinctly different from that of depressants. Overdoses can provoke stimulant-induced schizophrenia, most likely due to the high levels of dopamine.
That said, in the treatment of ADHD, the proposed mechanism of action is that the areas of the brain controlling impulse control (presumably, the frontal lobe) are naturally depressed. Increasing overall levels of stimulation in the brain causes this area to achieve a normal level of stimulation and activity. Obviously, because this area is inhibitory, methylphenidate in this case has an overall depressant effect, but make no mistake -- methylphenidate itself is definitely a stimulant. Just because a drug can exhibit paradoxical psychoactive effects doesn't mean its standard classification is different; it just means that it has idiosyncratic paradoxical effects in a subset of the population. In this case, that happens to be therapeutic (as opposed to, say, fatal in the case of some antipsychotics and antidepressants).
- IHAADIP (I Have An Advanced Degree In Psychology)
Actually, for Windows Mobile 6.x, you can quite literally write whatever you want and your users can install it. Yes, it is possible to restrict installations only to code signed by specific certificates and this is a relatively common practice on Windows Mobile 6.x Standard, but I've yet to encounter a single WM Professional phone that had such restrictions in place out of the box. This is why you can download software such as GSPlayer, GPSTestTool, and the like for free, or hop over to Handango and buy and install whatever you want. If you're up to it, you can even download the SDK and write your own software without having to pay Microsoft a single cent.
Now, Windows Phone 7 is substantially more restrictive in what it can run, but Microsoft doesn't:
* Restrict what ad systems you can use
* Arbitrarily deny specific development languages (the only restriction is that the code run on the Silverlight version of the CLR; this means you can use F#, C#, VB, Python, and even COBOL)
* Ban the use of interpreted code, so you can write emulators in the CLR language of your choice
Microsoft has also said that its final app requirements won't include any wiggle room for random app denials, and they've also strongly implied that the testing process for app approval will be at least partially automated to remove the possibility of an angry or prudish tester zapping your app. They've also said that they're working on parental controls and intend to allow mature content once that's in place.
So, how again is Windows Mobile or Windows Phone development substantially similar to i-device development?
Bear in mind that the certificate store in Windows is shared across multiple applications. I don't have Firefox installed on my fully-patched Windows 7 Professional machine, and I don't have the CNNIC Root certificate in any of my certificate stores. If you have it, you've installed something that's added it or upgraded from a version of the OS that's trusted it. It most definitely isn't something that Windows trusts by default.
My MBP isn't handy, so I can't check and see if OS X has it by default; my MBP has a tiny OS X partition I only use for software and firmware updates, so it's as close to a stock install as you can get.
This will work, but the certificate is still "trusted" in a sense. The best way is, as the parent noted, to use the Certificates snap-in in MMC to move the certificate to the Untrusted store. Doing so permanently removes trust for that certificate and, thus, all of the certificates that chain to it. This approach is also useful in that it blocks trust of the certificate for any purpose by any program that uses the cryptographic functions in Windows for verifying certificate trust.
Optimally, you'll want to get as much math as you can, especially in the realm of proofs, number theory, and combinatorics. They're particularly useful because they directly map to computer science in computational complexity and computability. Knowledge of complexity and the ability to establish the best, average, and worst case performance of an algorithm is quite helpful in ensuring your programs run quickly -- especially if they have slow parts outside of your control (GC, I/O, etc.) or if you're working on large data sets where the difference between O(log n) and O(n log n) can be substantial. On that basis, I'd recommend taking discrete structures with graph theory. Personally, I don't see where the advantage of the selected math chapters course is for a software developer, unless you're planning on coding for domains such as engineering or quantitative finance; however, as I said, the more math you get, the easier certain topics will be for you (e.g., functional programming).
That said, you might also want to consider taking a course in computational linguistics if one's available; they're often offered out of your local psychology department. Computational linguistics deals with large to enormous data sets and will teach you how to work with techniques such as dynamic programming, caching, lambda expressions, tree traversal, and probabilistic models. It's a great fusion of math, linguistics, and computer science that I feel is an excellent capstone course. If you can't find such a course, I'd still take the general principle here and look for a course that will require you to integrate your computer science and programming experience with some other field. The more connections you can find between your pure computational knowledge and the real world, the better the developer you'll be.
C# is an ECMA standard. The .NET Framework is the proprietary part, and there's Mono and DotGNU if you'd prefer more openly licensed libraries.
Also, if you've ever used C#, you know that a lot of what you learn there is applicable to Java and, to a lesser extent, other curly-braces syntax languages (and if you're really feeling up to it, you can play with pointer arithmetic using unsafe pointers and the marshalling system for P/Invoke and COM Interop). The new C# 3.5 features such as generics, anonymous methods, and lambda expressions also provide a reasonable introduction to templates and functional programming, though I think both of those would be inappropriate to show to new programmer unless they're a bit of a math geek.
I admit, that this sounds religion-motivated, but that's hardly a drawback of an argument...
Sure it is. Arguments typically need to be backed up by evidence. An argument based on religion, which is by its very nature a construct of faith that's not backed up by evidence, is fundamentally an appeal to authority (the religion's higher power) or an appeal to the populace (lots of people believe it, so it must be true). Appeals to religion as evidence for an argument are especially problematic when discussing governmental policies in the United States, where a law must have a secular legislative purpose (as per the Lemon test). If the only justification for a law is religious, then it fails this prong of the Lemon test and is unconstitutional.
At any rate, I would have one bit of advice for you: please consider whether your desire to frown upon or ban such "unearned" pleasures is a function of some actual, real harm you can perceive, or is just a gut reaction to something you personally find distasteful. If it's the latter, I would implore you to consider that banning things you personally find abhorrent is the exact reason why we get laws like the CDA (and, more broadly, censorship laws in the US in general) and why we from time to time end up with attorneys general attacking "smut peddlers" in the courts.
Linus is not a lawyer, and his statements should not be taken as legal advice.
Licensing is entirely a legal issue, not a technical one, and the whole "when does linking and in what manner cause a module to be considered a derived work" question is an unsettled legal one (i.e., it has not been tested in court with regards to the GPL). nVidia's binary driver issue hasn't yet been tested because no one who has standing has been interested in suing over it. A lack of legal action doesn't necessarily mean that no legal action is possible. At any rate, Stallman and others seem to fall on the side that any kernel module is a derived work, which is why there's Linux-libre.
"Trivially refuted," indeed.
Honestly, if FAT32 won't do what you need, NTFS is pretty much where you'll need to go. NTFS-3g gives you stable read/write capability on Linux and OS X as a FUSE driver; in fact, many distributions have NTFS-3g in their repositories. There's also native NTFS write support in Snow Leopard if you want to risk turning it on. I personally haven't had any issues with it, but some people have encountered file corruption when using it, so you might want to be wary. It is worth noting, however, that many embedded devices won't read anything other than FAT. If you plan on hooking this drive up to, say, a DVD player to show pictures, NTFS won't work for you.
Like it or not, Microsoft file systems are the lingua franca of file transfer on portable drives these days, merely due to the installed base of Windows computers.
As long as you don't need to use an unmanaged interface... then you get to play with P/Invoke and COM Interop. COM Interop is particularly fun when the target object doesn't implement IDispatch and likes to use unions for passing data around... then you get to have fun with custom marshalling and the Layout attributes.
But thankfully, that's getting less and less common these days, and writing a COM-visible component in .NET is trivially easy -- which is great!
Worms and viruses fall into certain definitions of "autonomous software agents," and there have been some that have uninstalled their opposition. Welchia is a modern example and the source of some ethical arguments over on BUGTRAQ.
Let the worm wars begin!
Many applications written for XP assume the running user is a member of the Administrators group. In general, the biggest issues were:
1. Writing to something in %programfiles% (games in particular were bad about this)
2. Writing to something in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Both of these are secured locations in Vista and 7 and sometimes were, but not always, in XP. That's why Vista had things like application file and registry virtualization to redirect writes to secure locations to safe, per-user locations. There's also issues, especially with XP, with tasks that shouldn't necessarily require Admin or UAC elevation but did anyway with GPOs -- such as changing the time zone.
Much of this has been cleared up between Virtual XP Mode and improvements in the required rights in 7, so it's far less of an issue than it was before. Of course, a Virtual XP Mode VM can still be rooted, but it, at least, can be easily obliterated or rolled back with an Undo Disk.
Not being an intellectual does not mean you are anti-intellectual.
Same happens with Evolution : some kind of speciation has been reproduced in laboratory, or has been man-caused in industrial countries. Nonetheless we can't currently "evolve an eye in a lab"(due to obvious problems of time scale and necessary space). For lots of larger-scale models, instead, we have to rely on what we learn from our planet trough fossils records. (Fossil and planet Earth are to evolution, what telescopes and the universe is to extreme-range physics).
Nope. While relativity and QM fall into the category of "extremely hard to test," evolutionary biology doesn't (with one exception). If you mean "create a new species as species is usually operationally defined (i.e., unable to mate successfully with other lifeforms)," then we've not only done this in the lab using test animals such as D. melanogaster, we've observed it in the wild on multiple occasions with isolated populations. The fastest way to create a new species by this definition is to take members of a population, split them off into an area with different selection pressures, and wait. Pretty soon, they'll not mate with members of the other species, and after that, they'll become unable to do so.
If you mean "develop new traits in response to selection pressures" or "develop a new genotype in response to selection pressures," this has been observed so many times it's not even worth discussing. From the classic examples of bacterial resistance to observations of transplanted populations, this has been observed over and over again.
If you mean "develop complex new traits in response to selection pressures," this is something of a new area of research. However, bacteria reproduce very quickly and we can control their environment very effectively, so they make good models for this. Recently, a team caused a strain of bacteria to develop the ability to metabolize a toxic substance in their environment over many generations. They didn't use selective breeding, but simply changed the fitness landscape and let the bacteria live in it. Eventually, the survivors in the environment overcame the new selection pressure with an enzyme to metabolize the substance (which I want to say was acetic acid, but I don't recall off the top of my head). Outside the lab, we have an excellent example of this -- bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
If you mean "turn a population into a new species by the layman's definition of species," then yeah, we haven't turned fruit flies into bees or monkeys into humans. Collecting traits takes time. In this case, yes, paleontology can come in handy to provide support for an induction argument that evolution can create new species with major differences in phenotype.
Paleontology certainly has a place in evolutionary study, but those working in evolutionary biology sure don't rely on it to make their gains. They rely on the methods proposed by their theories to get results.
I'm afraid not. The reason this malware is easy to remove is because it doesn't do anything truly wretched, like patch libc and other applications, install a rootkit kernel module, and the like.
Having dealt with Linux boxes that have been hit by automatic exploitation tools that go well out of their way to hide their presence, I can tell you that no matter what the operating system, the standard advice holds: once the machine is infected, the only sure way to get it back to a known state is to restore from a backup made prior to the exploitation or to wipe it completely and start over. I should also point out that these machines were rooted through the exploitation of previously-patched vulnerabilities in setuid services -- which is the exact same vector many Windows worms use, including Slammer and Conficker.
The only difference between the tools I've run into and a full-on worm is that they run at the command of a cracker and scan IP address ranges of his choice. With a bare amount of automation, they could become very successful Linux worms, breaking into all those machines that, say, have old OpenSSH binaries that haven't been patched against its known remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.
Yes, except for the fact that the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" was the marketing appearance of a restrictive licensing mechanism based on the lockout chip, and circumventing the lockout chip was, until the courts decided otherwise, of questionable legality.
Games for Windows is just a marketing mechanism. It has no effect on one's ability to publish or sell a game. In fact, many games exist that don't support the 360 controller or do so only tentatively, and yet there's no push to eliminate them from the PC. Microsoft, for whatever other issues you may ascribe to it, at least strongly believes in an open software ecosystem. They *want* people to write software for Windows of all types, because without a vibrant developer community, an OS is doomed.
It depends on the printer; my Phaser 6180DN will print on a wide variety of papers, though I can't say I've ever run cardboard or canvas through it, and cheap transparencies might melt in the fuser. I often run heavy cardstock through, and I've printed on inkjet photo paper before in a pinch. I often use fine linen papers with it. The key is to get a printer with a simple paper path (usually, that means using the MPT) and turn the duplexer off. If you must duplex, do it by hand.
I assume you're referring to wax phase change printers such as the Phaser 800 series and its subsequent models, as opposed to dye sublimation printers. Dye sublimation printers don't need to keep any wax melted; the print head sublimates the wax using a thermal printing head. You can think of phase change printers as similar to inkjets, while dye-sub printers are similar to thermal receipt printers. Dye sublimation != phase change; they don't even use the same type of pigment (dye sub uses dye on a ribbon, while phase change uses wax with pigments).
As a prior owner of a Phaser 850 phase change printer, I can say that I was generally happy with it over the 7 years I owned it -- except for some rubber solenoid heads turning to goo due to the high heat in the printer. I also got to maintain a Phaser 8400, which made its users quite happy. One great advantage of these printers at the time they were released was that they had a very small dot size and excellent registration (as all the ink comes out of a print head, as opposed to a drum transfer process in a color laser) and printed faster than the color lasers of the time. They did all of this at a relatively low upfront cost, and Xerox even gave you black wax ("solid ink") for the life of the printer for the cost of shipping. Companies such as MediaScience quickly replicated the wax recipe and offered comparable consumables at an extremely low cost.
That said, phase change printers do suffer many of the flaws you mention; the standby on the Phaser 850 was about 250W, IIRC. The later models brought that down some, but the printer did need to keep wax melted and the printhead hot, which made their power costs relatively high. The printers also chew wax at an incredible speed, especially since they have to dump part (or in the case of the 850, all) of the melted wax if they ever went through a power cycle.
Nowadays, the advantages of the phase change printers are more or less gone; color lasers have caught up and come down in price, while cheaper inkjets do the job well enough with a lower upfront cost. That's essentially squeezed them out of the market.
Come now. If you, say, run the EOT plugin for Firefox from PDMS, FF can be used to exploit the vulnerability. Clearly the answer is to drive-by install that software to improve the l33t exploiter experience.
In all seriousness, the issue isn't that IE has access to the kernel, but that IE can request that an EOT font be rendered. Apparently, something about the EOT font rendering pipeline hits win32k.sys, and if that EOT font is properly constructed, it can cause remote code execution at that point. Any program that supports EOT can be used to exploit the vulnerability. Right now, though, the major program that supports it is IE.
That would explain why everyone on the Bugtraq and Full-Disclosure mailing lists are being hit with C&Ds from Microsoft if they opt not to report the vulnerability to Microsoft first, and why security researchers live in fear of the Giant from Redmond and its legal team.
Oh, wait, that's not actually happening. One inept C&D about a Bing vulnerability does not a pattern of behavior make. While Microsoft certainly prefers responsible disclosure -- as does essentially everyone -- they aren't running around threatening everyone who doesn't do it.
That said, this report is more than a little fishy, though I would say it's due to its notably missing methodology explanation over anything else.
My understanding is that the graphics drivers for NT have always run in kernel mode. What you get in the newer kernels that use WDDM (Vista, 2008 Server, 7) is that the API layer of the graphics driver runs in user mode, but there's a kernel mode dispatch driver that actually sends the commands to the video card. The general idea is that the kernel mode driver is so lean and optimized that it's unlikely to fail, while the bulk of the driver sits in user space so that it can be restarted if (or when, in the case of some cards' drivers :) ) it fails.
Also, it's not like the Windows 95 UI is particularly brutal on computational resources. I recall running it on entirely non-accelerated VGA cards without any trouble. It's not "grafting" so much as "replacing progman.exe with explorer.exe" and "adding new Shell functionality."
I manage an Enterprise Agreement for 250 seats. The minute we upgrade our ShoreTel VOIP system to the new Shoreware version with Windows 7 support, we're done with XP. We're going to begin reimaging all computers with Windows 7 Enterprise using WDS.
Why, you might ask? Windows 7 offers a ton of advancements for the enterprise, from DirectAccess (for always-on VPNs) to improved terminal services and application virtualization (MED-V) and BranchCache (like Offline Files, but better). Additionally, it's got a cleaner interface and, in our tests, runs a smidge faster than XP for office applications on our new Core 2 desktops. Another plus is that we don't have to include drivers in our WDS image, since Windows 7 supports almost every network device I've thrown at it out of the box, and whatever other drivers it needs to download, it can grab during setup.
Admittedly, 250 seats isn't huge and the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of businesses with EAs and Software Assurance are going to snap up Windows 7. It's a major improvement over XP, and both users and sysadmins like it.