No, you're not getting it right, this is a service as in a process always running on your computer, not as in a cloud based compiler. The point is your program can dynamically call the compiler with additional source code to be compiled so your program can modify itself even though it's in a relatively static language like C#.
In a native app. If your web app already supports most browsers, just pick the most convenient one for each platform - mshtml/trident on windows for example. Otherwise just host a webkit variant. The steam client from Valve has done both at various points in time.
Every organization that has ever partnered with microsoft has lost, big time
I don't know, Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, Lenovo and a large number of other companies have done quite well over the last 30 years selling hardware for MS software.
(standard disclaimer: as my profile states, I work for MS, but not on anything related to phones)
This might just be a reprisal for Microsoft granting free licenses to NGOs in an effort to prevent Russia using software licensing as a means to repress opposition groups. I wonder if it'll actually result in any actual change though or if it's just lipservice.
Here in reality-land, what would have been is irrelevant. What matters is how statistics like this will effect developer and publisher behavior. The answer is exactly what the grand parent poster said - they'll begin abandoning the PC as a platform except in specialized cases where they can induce onerous or clever DRM like storing content on servers and come up with other mechanisms that require authentication.
You can't expect people who make, sell, advertise, distribute games for a living to sit back and say "Oh, 90% of our users are pirating our game, I bet they wouldn't have bought the game anyway if they couldn't have gotten it for free," even if that were the obvious logical conclusion to come to (which it really isn't). They're going to say "Oh shit, 90% of our users are pirating our game, let's stop that and hope even a couple percent of them end up buying it and that will give us 10, 20, 30% greater sales," even if it's not necessarily possible to prevent a most of the piracy.
You mean like the one mentioned in the article? 'The next day, it [Microsoft] posted a "Fix it" tool that automatically unregisters the HCP protocol handler, a move Microsoft said "would help block known attack vectors before a security update is available."'
As far as pushing this to users automatically, people get angry when you break shit without asking them.
Wow, you have a lot more faith in the tech press than I do. Try having a product you work on or company you work for be written about sometime. You'll realize at that point why a lot of the press will tell you privately, "It's more important to be first than right."
And Ryan Gavin isn't the head of Ryan Gavin isn't the head of IE, Dean Hachamovitch is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Hachamovitch I think PC Pro UK may just like playing it loose with the details if they serve a narrative.
You can't sell, consume, promote, or otherwise utilize child pornography without inherently promoting its production. By doing so you are absolutely complicit in harming the child.
For most server uses you're right, it doesn't make sense to use Aero, which is why it isn't turned on by default. However, aside from running a terminal server for your users to connect to (for example with a nightly build of an app you're building for testers to use), a lot of devs use WS as their desktop OS for development. This was even more common with WS2k3 as early versions of WS2k8 made it hard to do, but they've added back in optional "desktop services" to make it possible to do again. Think about it, if you're hosting a local dev version of the site you're developing it makes things much easier than running a second box. That way your staging server can run only builds checked in to source control and each dev runs their own version with their local changes. There were also some cool virtual machine technologies that came only with WS2k8 before Windows 7 came out. Still are probably.
A skeptic, that is to say, anyone who can recall Microsoft's behavior over the past 20 years, might wonder if Microsoft ran the official SVG test suite on all competing browsers to find areas where they failed. They then built a second test where they know the others will fail.
You mean like Hickson did with Acid3? Whatever set of tests you're using, if they're incomplete (and they always will be), they will be biased in terms of coverage. Some test suites like Acid3 are meant as a bludgeon to wag the dog of a competitor or certain organization, some are designed to ensure that features you care about are supported in they way you believe they should be, and others are just QA guys doing their best to make sure their product works. In any event, whichever set of tests you code to, you will have the highest passing rate on those tests, it doesn't need to be malicious.
Because wireless is slow and unreliable, especially in a big house? Because you've got interference at 2.4Ghz (microwaves, wireless phones and toys, lots of neighbors, other signals etc)? There are a lot of scenarios that even with good signal don't work so well over wireless - media streaming, file backup, gaming if the connection is even a little wonky. In an ideal scenario where you're getting about ~50mbps (and I don't really see even 802.11n getting these speeds in my 2BR apt) on wireless, you're still 20x slower than 1gbps, which can still be frustratingly slow to copy files over.
Actually, any add on can be enabled for only a specific set of pages. For instance, to restrict the use of Flash in IE8, to go Tools->Manage Add-Ons then under the Adobe published by section, double click the "Shockwave Flash Object" (I don't know why Adobe can't just call it Flash), then under the text field titled "You have approved this add-on to run on the following websites:", click the button "Remove all sites". Now you'll get a gold bar on every site that uses flash in which you can allow the site to run flash or not. Not quite as nice as Flashblock, but still pretty good.
Actually, on Vista and Win7, IE runs even lower privileged than normal user. It has no messaging access to any process not in limited mode, and no write access to any files not in the user's "local low" directory.
You're right, I was making a rhetorical point, not a logical one.
The main thing I dislike about Javascript is that it's not a designed language. What I mean by this is that the most basic way of doing things should be the correct way. By this metric, Javascript fails miserably. There's so much broken - scope, the this keyword, scope for eval'd code, the hoops you have to jump through to make "private" functions and variables, etc. I also have a strong bias against untyped languages and those whose syntactical correctness you can only test by running it with complete code coverage. Even tools like jslint are miserable compared to the compile errors, warnings and other static analysis info you get from a well tooled, typed, compiled language. On at least part of this last part, Brendan Eich agrees with me, although the rest of the world managed to convince him it didn't belong in Ecmascript. http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/javascript-creator-ponders-past-future-704?page=0,3
I tend to go by the thickness of Crockford's book, vs the thickness of any "Complete Javascript" book when determining how much "good stuff" the language has. The truth is it's an accident of history, a tech demo that should never have been released, a baby not even its creator could love (and the Ecmascript 5 group had to tear out of his hands to ensure it remained a compatible language for the web).
Besides Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance, which might require port forwarding (at least for RD, I'm pretty sure RA works just fine without it), Live Mesh works great and has no issues with firewalls, NAT etc assuming you can get them to install it and send you a username/password combo.
A version of.Net is installed with each version of Windows since one of the XP service packs yes, but if you want to use a more recent version than 1.1, chances are you're going to have to install it on at least some customer machines. Last release was 3.5 SP1 I think, 4.0 is already in beta. To use WPF (and get support for XAML like Silverlight) you've got to at least use 3.0, which I believe is installed on Vista and above, but not XP and lets face it, most apps still need to support XP. Relatedly, I believe that app startup time for Silverlight is also faster than full.Net, but I'm not sure about that one.
I think this is actually more of a result of there being two audiences interested in Silverlight. The first is the audience interested in Silverlight as a media streaming or flash replacement browser plugin. For them, nothing changes. These new Windows only features are more for the other audience which is client app developers looking for a lightweight replacement to.Net (one that doesn't take at least 30 minutes to install!). For them SL was interesting in that it was easy to deploy, but they could give a heck about sandboxing - they wanted a way to access the whole system and want their apps to behave just like any other client application. The COM interaction lets them do this if there's some piece of functionality not available in SL on the system, they can just write a native DLL and interact with SL through COM.
Sounds exactly like IE doesn't it? The only difference is I couldn't quickly find a way to change the default in FF whereas in IE, it asks you as you add a provider.
Security patches are not subject to the Genuine Advantage check. People running pirated software are just less likely to run windows update because they are scared that it will somehow invalidate their pirated install. Also, as you note, installing pirated software, including Windows, is a risk in itself as much pirated software has been prepackaged with malware.
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No, you're not getting it right, this is a service as in a process always running on your computer, not as in a cloud based compiler. The point is your program can dynamically call the compiler with additional source code to be compiled so your program can modify itself even though it's in a relatively static language like C#.
In a native app. If your web app already supports most browsers, just pick the most convenient one for each platform - mshtml/trident on windows for example. Otherwise just host a webkit variant. The steam client from Valve has done both at various points in time.
I'd assume it's more that PC users expect more than 320x240 resolution graphics. (Original Xbox was for normal TV, not HD, so 480i resolution).
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's own LiveJournal account, which he termed 'revolting and illegal.'
I agree. LiveJournal accounts can often be revolting and illegal.
Every organization that has ever partnered with microsoft has lost, big time
I don't know, Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, Lenovo and a large number of other companies have done quite well over the last 30 years selling hardware for MS software.
(standard disclaimer: as my profile states, I work for MS, but not on anything related to phones)
This might just be a reprisal for Microsoft granting free licenses to NGOs in an effort to prevent Russia using software licensing as a means to repress opposition groups. I wonder if it'll actually result in any actual change though or if it's just lipservice.
Here in reality-land, what would have been is irrelevant. What matters is how statistics like this will effect developer and publisher behavior. The answer is exactly what the grand parent poster said - they'll begin abandoning the PC as a platform except in specialized cases where they can induce onerous or clever DRM like storing content on servers and come up with other mechanisms that require authentication.
You can't expect people who make, sell, advertise, distribute games for a living to sit back and say "Oh, 90% of our users are pirating our game, I bet they wouldn't have bought the game anyway if they couldn't have gotten it for free," even if that were the obvious logical conclusion to come to (which it really isn't). They're going to say "Oh shit, 90% of our users are pirating our game, let's stop that and hope even a couple percent of them end up buying it and that will give us 10, 20, 30% greater sales," even if it's not necessarily possible to prevent a most of the piracy.
You mean like the one mentioned in the article? 'The next day, it [Microsoft] posted a "Fix it" tool that automatically unregisters the HCP protocol handler, a move Microsoft said "would help block known attack vectors before a security update is available."'
As far as pushing this to users automatically, people get angry when you break shit without asking them.
Wow, you have a lot more faith in the tech press than I do. Try having a product you work on or company you work for be written about sometime. You'll realize at that point why a lot of the press will tell you privately, "It's more important to be first than right."
And Ryan Gavin isn't the head of Ryan Gavin isn't the head of IE, Dean Hachamovitch is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Hachamovitch I think PC Pro UK may just like playing it loose with the details if they serve a narrative.
You can't sell, consume, promote, or otherwise utilize child pornography without inherently promoting its production. By doing so you are absolutely complicit in harming the child.
For most server uses you're right, it doesn't make sense to use Aero, which is why it isn't turned on by default. However, aside from running a terminal server for your users to connect to (for example with a nightly build of an app you're building for testers to use), a lot of devs use WS as their desktop OS for development. This was even more common with WS2k3 as early versions of WS2k8 made it hard to do, but they've added back in optional "desktop services" to make it possible to do again. Think about it, if you're hosting a local dev version of the site you're developing it makes things much easier than running a second box. That way your staging server can run only builds checked in to source control and each dev runs their own version with their local changes. There were also some cool virtual machine technologies that came only with WS2k8 before Windows 7 came out. Still are probably.
A skeptic, that is to say, anyone who can recall Microsoft's behavior over the past 20 years, might wonder if Microsoft ran the official SVG test suite on all competing browsers to find areas where they failed. They then built a second test where they know the others will fail.
You mean like Hickson did with Acid3? Whatever set of tests you're using, if they're incomplete (and they always will be), they will be biased in terms of coverage. Some test suites like Acid3 are meant as a bludgeon to wag the dog of a competitor or certain organization, some are designed to ensure that features you care about are supported in they way you believe they should be, and others are just QA guys doing their best to make sure their product works. In any event, whichever set of tests you code to, you will have the highest passing rate on those tests, it doesn't need to be malicious.
Because wireless is slow and unreliable, especially in a big house? Because you've got interference at 2.4Ghz (microwaves, wireless phones and toys, lots of neighbors, other signals etc)? There are a lot of scenarios that even with good signal don't work so well over wireless - media streaming, file backup, gaming if the connection is even a little wonky. In an ideal scenario where you're getting about ~50mbps (and I don't really see even 802.11n getting these speeds in my 2BR apt) on wireless, you're still 20x slower than 1gbps, which can still be frustratingly slow to copy files over.
Actually, any add on can be enabled for only a specific set of pages. For instance, to restrict the use of Flash in IE8, to go Tools->Manage Add-Ons then under the Adobe published by section, double click the "Shockwave Flash Object" (I don't know why Adobe can't just call it Flash), then under the text field titled "You have approved this add-on to run on the following websites:", click the button "Remove all sites". Now you'll get a gold bar on every site that uses flash in which you can allow the site to run flash or not. Not quite as nice as Flashblock, but still pretty good.
Actually, on Vista and Win7, IE runs even lower privileged than normal user. It has no messaging access to any process not in limited mode, and no write access to any files not in the user's "local low" directory.
Um, any remote code execution vulnerability allows a worm to propagate. There have been tons of those in nearly any OS. The question is whether anyone writes a worm to take advantage of it and what they did with machines they compromised. Client Linux is less of a target due to its low marketshare, but it's by no means immune: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramen_worm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devnull http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L10n_worm
Server software tends to be a better target as there are a larger number of more powerful always connected machines to hit and provide the opportunity to induce secondary infections on clients accessing the server. Of course because of the high value of the target, it's not necessary to attack with a worm, simply hacking a single server can be worth it: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/24/1930207 http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2002-091311-5851-99
You're right, I was making a rhetorical point, not a logical one.
The main thing I dislike about Javascript is that it's not a designed language. What I mean by this is that the most basic way of doing things should be the correct way. By this metric, Javascript fails miserably. There's so much broken - scope, the this keyword, scope for eval'd code, the hoops you have to jump through to make "private" functions and variables, etc. I also have a strong bias against untyped languages and those whose syntactical correctness you can only test by running it with complete code coverage. Even tools like jslint are miserable compared to the compile errors, warnings and other static analysis info you get from a well tooled, typed, compiled language. On at least part of this last part, Brendan Eich agrees with me, although the rest of the world managed to convince him it didn't belong in Ecmascript. http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/javascript-creator-ponders-past-future-704?page=0,3
I tend to go by the thickness of Crockford's book, vs the thickness of any "Complete Javascript" book when determining how much "good stuff" the language has. The truth is it's an accident of history, a tech demo that should never have been released, a baby not even its creator could love (and the Ecmascript 5 group had to tear out of his hands to ensure it remained a compatible language for the web).
Besides Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance, which might require port forwarding (at least for RD, I'm pretty sure RA works just fine without it), Live Mesh works great and has no issues with firewalls, NAT etc assuming you can get them to install it and send you a username/password combo.
A version of .Net is installed with each version of Windows since one of the XP service packs yes, but if you want to use a more recent version than 1.1, chances are you're going to have to install it on at least some customer machines. Last release was 3.5 SP1 I think, 4.0 is already in beta. To use WPF (and get support for XAML like Silverlight) you've got to at least use 3.0, which I believe is installed on Vista and above, but not XP and lets face it, most apps still need to support XP. Relatedly, I believe that app startup time for Silverlight is also faster than full .Net, but I'm not sure about that one.
I think this is actually more of a result of there being two audiences interested in Silverlight. The first is the audience interested in Silverlight as a media streaming or flash replacement browser plugin. For them, nothing changes. These new Windows only features are more for the other audience which is client app developers looking for a lightweight replacement to .Net (one that doesn't take at least 30 minutes to install!). For them SL was interesting in that it was easy to deploy, but they could give a heck about sandboxing - they wanted a way to access the whole system and want their apps to behave just like any other client application. The COM interaction lets them do this if there's some piece of functionality not available in SL on the system, they can just write a native DLL and interact with SL through COM.
Sounds exactly like IE doesn't it? The only difference is I couldn't quickly find a way to change the default in FF whereas in IE, it asks you as you add a provider.
Now try changing the default in Firefox from Google to *anything* else.
Security patches are not subject to the Genuine Advantage check. People running pirated software are just less likely to run windows update because they are scared that it will somehow invalidate their pirated install. Also, as you note, installing pirated software, including Windows, is a risk in itself as much pirated software has been prepackaged with malware.