While I agree with the general gist of your comment, I find your beef with Avatar a little ridiculous... you want *more* hard science and social commentary? Heck, 90% of the criticism of Avatar that I've heard is that the social commentary is a little heavy-handed (I disagree, but then I spent most of the movie on the edge of my seat in excitement - I barely even noticed the social aspects until afterwards, which is what I think was intended).
"Plausible science": Slower-than-light starships that take 6 years to reach Alpha Centauri, and have lots of little touches like giant heat-radiation fins. Room-temperature superconductor (unobtanium) is the most valuable material known (one of the critical points not mentioned on-screen, but well documented in supplementary material). Said superconductor (including mountains largely composed of it) floats when placed in a strong magnetic field. Only very brief periods of full darkness on a moon orbiting a gas giant. Human-breathable airspaces are pressurized above the external atmosphere, limiting internal mixing of gases in the case of a breach. The jungle is *full* of insect life. Low gravity allows for huge flying lifeforms and immense trees. Consistent language with syntax and grammar.
OK, some of that is largely just a "did their homework" sort of deal, but there's more. I'm not claiming that the movie required no suspension of disbelief, or that there aren't any holes in the explanations, but it's still a good cut above the majority of science fiction, especially in video.
"Good social commentary": Doing the right thing for your people vs. doing the right thing as a person (patriotism vs. morality). Science vs. business. Greed as a controlling factor in behavior. Property rights vs. access to resources. How we treat those we deem primitive, savage, or alien. Environment vs. industrialism.
I could go on a lot longer with this, or flesh out any of those points much more. Suffice to say, there's a lot of good reflections on humanity in there... maybe not quite as much as District 9 (as another recent example) but it certainly wasn't lacking.
Pretty sure you can shorten that path a lot using the APPDATA environment variable, as in
"%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys\*" or something like that. At least use "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\..."
Windows Mobile (mostly ARM) and Nokia N800/810/900 (ARM) devices have had Flash for a while. It's typically a version behind the desktop release, but it's the full player,a nd any applet that ran in that version of the player will run on the mobile device.
If it's important to you that your device can play Flash, you have three options: complain to Adobe directly, complain to the device/OS developer, or use a device/OS which already supports it (and has for years). It's obviously not a major technical problem; if Nokia and Microsoft can get it supported, then Google or Apple could too.
You really think putting schools, for all age groups, every two miles or so is cheap? Cheaper than a bus system, especially? Walking a mile to school isn't that big a deal for most kids (special needs aside) and indeed I did so from about 2nd grade to 6th (walking with others until 4th grade; but the suburbs were pretty safe). It took 20-30 minutes, depending on the length of my legs (or my sister's, when she started).
There *were* no junior high schools within a mile of my location though, and the closest one - at just over two miles, including crossing major streets and skirting a construction zone - was not a good area. The neighborhood wasn't all that bad - you could get around the worst parts with no more than an additional 5 minutes walking - but the school itself was terrible (heavy drug use, frequent violence, very poor academic record, and a low college acceptance rate). If it had been a good school, I might have walked anyhow; about 40 minutes on foot, perhaps 15 by bike (mostly uphill in the morning). The next closest option was a good school but at least an hour's walk away though, so I rode the bus there.
The nearest high school would have been an hour or more, and it started so early that I'd have been making the entire morning walk in the darkness during winter. The next closest was just as far in a different direction. Now, maybe in some areas you have schools much closer than that, but overall I find your suggestion a bit unreasonable. We lived in fairly high-density suburbs, with a *lot* of school-age children in the area, and it was no coincidence that my parents bought a house so close to the local schools. We could have been much further (when you're a kid on foot, an extra 3 or 4 miles each way is a *lot*) or in a much more dangerous area.
I ran across my WarCraft 2 Battle.Net Edition CD a while ago (for those who don't know, WC2 - the barely-even-32-bit predecessor to WC3 - shipped with networked play but no online matchmaking service because Battle.Net didn't exist at the time; Blizzard later released the WC2 BNE which added basically the same Battle.net features seen in SC). Just for laughs, I installed it and loaded it up (worked out of the box on Win7 x64, which was pretty damn impressive). There were maybe a few hundred people on the Battle.Net servers, and a few tens of games... yet they still run. (for comparisons, both SC and WC3 will have several orders of magnitude more players/games at any given time).
... unless you run with maximum permissions (root/Administrator). Vulnerabilities in Flashplayer are typically cross-platform; an exploit that works in Windows will work (after modification, but it will work) on Linux too. The difference usually just comes down to the degree of harm possible. Besides, while I don't know how this particular infection spreads, the odds are very good that it's a trojan... such things work quite nicely on *any* system where the user can get full permissions (almost everything except locked-down business machines) and doesn't know much about computer safety (the vast majority of non-Linux PC users, and some of the Linux users too).
In any case, stardard user accounts can't make changes like that. While EoP exploits may well exist, there are none I know of being used in the wild right now, and Microsoft takes patching them quite seriously. In any case, the specific OS version you're referring to is so old that it was designed for computers that listed their clock speeds in MHz and their hard disks in tens of GB. If it were *anybody* other than Microsoft, they wouldn't still be getting security updates at all!
Aside from there being two expansions rather than just one (and a 12-year wait for the next title in the franchise), how is this different from the original SC?
StarCraft shipped with a fairly small set of maps, about 30 campaign missions, and full multiplayer. Brood War added new units, maps, and roughly 30 more campaign missions, and if you wanted to use the new units or new map tilesets you had to play with other people who had Brood War too. These days, nobody plays SC without Brood War, and while you can still buy them together you can't get them separately.
SC2 will ship with an unknown number of maps, about 30 campaign missions, and full multiplayer. Each of the two expansions will add new units, maps, and roughly 30 more campaign missions each, but if you want to use the new stuff in multiplayer you'll need everybody in the game to have the expansions. Really, this is *exactly* the same pattern as before. What are you so upset about?
For the record, there are definitley machines out there that can't run XP. Most noticeably, XP's pre-install environment doesn't seem to support booting from a SATA optical drive; it will BSOD while loading drivers. While some machines still use IDE drives, it's becoming less common, and on a laptop you can't even just swap out the drive.
Of course, you're talking about an OS that is more than 8 years old (even counting service packs, it's still older than any version of OS X that Apple still supports). I suppose I should be happy it supports SATA hard drives.
WHile it's true that WC3 technically didin't have a spawn installation option, it really wasn't needed for local games. Even on the release version (years before the official No-CD patch), the game installed all its data files to the hard disk. The only time it checked for the CD was when you started the game, after which you could remove the CD and play all you wanted, even single-player. This emant that within one household, you only really needed on WC3 (and Frozen Throne) CD if you wanted to play on a LAN. Of course, you couldn't go on Battle.Net together (shared CD key) but it was fine for local games.
With the advent of the official no-CD patch, you didn't even need to do the whole load CD / start game / eject CD / hand to next person / repeat cycle anymore.
LLVM is a compiler back-end; it takes low-level instructions and emits assembly. You still need a front end to turn the source into low-level instructions. GCC can do this, for any language that it has a front-end for (lots), and the result is portable to anything LLVM runs on. GCC is actually pretty widely used for this. Clang is a newer compiler, built specifically to use LLVM for the back-end. It may be what you're thinking of, especially since its C++ front-end is still very much a work-in-progress (C is nearly 100%, Objective-C is up there too).
There is one counter-point to that, though: JIT compilers can take advantage of very specific features of your processor (not just things like instruction set extensions; I'm talking about stuff such as the exact size of your cache lines) to optimize exactly for your system. The resulting code probably won't run as well on another computer (might not run at all) but it works great on *your* computer and that's what matters.
Of course, there's no reason that a standard C compiler or whatever can't do similar optimizations, but in general, pre-compiled code targets a very general processor design. A lot of binaries I see target only i586, some are even i386, and even among those targeting i686 there's so many processors today, most with the same instruction sets but with widely varying caches, bus bandwidths, and support for things like branch prediction, that it's entirely possible that a good JIT can produce code that runs faster on your system than a good compiler targeting a generic member of your processor family.
Technically true, but it's still pretty damn easy. Most systems will happily treat any UMS device as a bootable drive, in which case you just have to do the same things that make a hard disk bootable; mark one partition active and install a bootloader. Simply installing a bootloader to the MBR should also work. In Windows, you can mark a partition active (including one on a flashdrive) using diskpart.exe (command line tool that comes with Windows and should be in your PATH). After that, it's just a matter of copying some bootable media on there; WinPE works pretty well, for example (I have a modified Win7 install image, useful either for installations or diagnostics/repairs).
Getting the files is the easy part; either burn the image, mount it, or unpack it with a tool like 7-zip. Then just copy the files onto the flashdrive, and you're good to go.
Protected Mode requires a substantial change to the process security model. Basically, until Vista/Server 2008, NT followed what was essentially the *NIX security model, where access permissions of a program were determined by the user/group the program was run by. There are differences in implementation between NT and the various POSIX systems, but that's the general idea. The problem is that when the vast majority of your users run with nearly full access to the system, one misbehaved (vulnerable) program can bring everything crashing down.
In NT6 (Vista/Server 2008), Microsoft introduced a new concept of process integrity levels, which are a per-process (rather than per-user) level of security. By default, programs run with medium integrity, which means their access permissions are basically what they were before. High integrity processes, such as system processes or anything run with actual Administrator permissions, can access anything but can't be accessed by lower-integrity programs (which helps prevent elevation of privilege from a non-Admin program.
The relevant datum here is that Internet Explorer runs (by default) with Low integrity, which means it has extremely limited access to the rest of the system. A low-integrity process can't start medium-integrity processes, can't write to the vast majority of the filesystem (there's a special low-integrity folder for things like Temporary Internet Files) or registry, and basically is unable to cause any harm. The trick is, it has these limitations regardless of the permissions of the user who runs the program.
XP can't do that. If you, as a user, can write to a location, any program you start can too (unless you tell Windows to start it as another user). Therefore, since Protected Mode is just Microsoft's term for "this process runs with low integrity" and XP can't *do* low integrity, no, you don't get Protected Mode on XP, and never will (it would require a substantial change to the kernel security subsystem).
The N800/N810 has had a Gecko-based browser since 2008, with full Flash support (version 9, not the "lite" crap). Both AdBlock Plus and Flashblock were ported to this browser. While the ability to use un-modified Firefox extensions would be nice (the older browser doesn't include XUL), the idea isn't so new.
That said, yes, playing Flash hurt the battery life significantly. With normal browsing (including ABP so no Flash ads), you could get 7 hours continuous use pretty easily. Hit YouTube or Pandora.com, though, and it dropped to more like 2 hours (although it could run both sites, if slowly - loading Pandora took about 10 seconds). It also used enough RAM that having much else open at once would be pretty slow, although it was possible (SD card configured to act as swap).
Awesome though this is, I'm not sure why it's seen as such a new thing. The browser on the N800/N810 (non-phone predecessors to the N900) is Gecko-based and includes full Flash 9 support. It doesn't use XUL, which means that porting something like AdBlock Plus wasn't trivial, but it *was* done - i.e. you can't even argue that it doesn't support extensions (it just couldn't use un-modified Firefox extensions).
Granted, the version of Gecko on the last N800 I tried was outdated (1.6?) by modern standards, so definitely not as standards-compliant as Firefox 3.6, but it certainly worked well enough for most things (especially since this was 2 years ago).
"Arguably less standards compliant" nothing. I'm pretty sure IE7 is the only browser on that list that fails Acid 2, for example (IE8 handles it just fine).
Sounds like a major step up. I hadn't actually seen any info on IE9, but if you say it's released publicly I'll take a look. Better JavaScript will definitely be very nice, as would SVG, but I do hope that canvas, at least, is supported too.
Any idea when a beta will be available, for MSDN subscribers or otherwise?
Clearly you didn't even read the article, just looked at numbers. IE should not have even been tested - it does not support HTML5 canvas elements! They worked around this using a bunch of really ugly hacks that completely destroyed the performance, but honestly they'd have been better off simply saying "it doesn't work, we'll wait until IE9, thanks for giving us Acid2 compatibility but you've got a long way to go!"
IE8 actually works pretty damn well for much of the modern web; it's far from the fastest but it's fast enough for most, it is compatible with CSS2 and the other standards most web developers still use, and it has fixed most of the issues that people have cursed at IE over for so long. However, it has very little support for new standards - its CSS3 is still limited, and as far as I know it supports no HTML5 at all. Compared to the rapid improvement of other browsers, the IE team had better be on their toes or they'll be left far behind in the dust.
Nice idea, but if the implementation is truly that bad I'll be astonished. A single hard-coded public key in the game's binary and this idea won't work.
I'm not saying it won't be cracked - I'm sure it will, probably sooner rather than later, and probably repetitively - but you're not going to do it without modifying the game files. On the other hand, I'm not aware of any software that has thus far resisted all attempts to reverse-engineer it, and games don't even have the luxury of things like massive amounts of polymorphic or self-decrypting code, run-time checksums, and so forth... not unless they want to jump the system requirements through the roof to account for the associated performance losses.
There are some apps that have tried to be an open source "like OneNote" but my experience has suggested that none are even close. The ability to import anything into your notes, the quality of the handwriting recognition, the simple but powerful UI, the lack of limitations on writing or annotation area... it's a damn good program, definitely one of *the* reasons to get a tablet PC.
Of course, it has to be an actual PC. This "too big to put in your pocket but doesn't actually run a desktop OS" device isn't going to run OneNote any time soon.
One of these days there's going to be a suit over how bloody much the carriers charge you if you go over 5GB on their "unlimited" plans. Probably not an issue with a phone, but something like this? At full resolution that's only a few hours of video.
This test is quite old - HTML 4 and CSS1 - and the window border (which you'll note they refer to as "generic chrome") shows this fairly clearly. It far predates both Firefox and Chrome (browser).
As a side note, when Windows first came out, it wasn't really an OS; it was little more than a window manager and an API. While definitely not the first graphical computer operating environment, it's entirely possible that the concept of a "window" in the software world wasn't really established yet, assuming it even existed. Maybe it was (how old is the concept of a "window manager"?) but in any case, it was a program that allowed one to graphically view multiple running programs, each in their own "window" on your display. Microsoft's naming has historically been very unimaginative, but I suspect that the name of the Windows operating system is a legacy thing, from the days when it was little more than (for example) KWin (KDE's window manager).
But, you don't have phone capability... which is what is required for this. The "app" just uses the phone capability to place a call to a Google-owned number, which then routes the call to your destination such that it shows as coming from your Google Voice number, rather than your iPhone number.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\ (on 64-bit systems, HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\) is the registry key that controls access to that proker process (it's called something like Flash10Util.exe - look through the GUIDs until you find the correct one). Then, you can set its Policy value as you like. I've knocked it back to 2 for now, but then, prompts don't annoy me much.
0 - Disable calling this program from IE (the only default 0 policy I found was cmd.exe, a reasonable thing to block). 1 - The external process runs, but only as Low Integrity (can't write to most of the disk or registry, can't invoke external programs). 2 - The user gets a Protected Mode prompt identifying the program that is trying to start outside of Protected Mode; if approved the process will run as Medium Integrity (normal user level). 3 - The external process is silently elevated to Medium Integrity and runs without prompting; the Flash broker process installs this policy by default.
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While I agree with the general gist of your comment, I find your beef with Avatar a little ridiculous... you want *more* hard science and social commentary? Heck, 90% of the criticism of Avatar that I've heard is that the social commentary is a little heavy-handed (I disagree, but then I spent most of the movie on the edge of my seat in excitement - I barely even noticed the social aspects until afterwards, which is what I think was intended).
"Plausible science":
Slower-than-light starships that take 6 years to reach Alpha Centauri, and have lots of little touches like giant heat-radiation fins.
Room-temperature superconductor (unobtanium) is the most valuable material known (one of the critical points not mentioned on-screen, but well documented in supplementary material).
Said superconductor (including mountains largely composed of it) floats when placed in a strong magnetic field.
Only very brief periods of full darkness on a moon orbiting a gas giant.
Human-breathable airspaces are pressurized above the external atmosphere, limiting internal mixing of gases in the case of a breach.
The jungle is *full* of insect life.
Low gravity allows for huge flying lifeforms and immense trees.
Consistent language with syntax and grammar.
OK, some of that is largely just a "did their homework" sort of deal, but there's more. I'm not claiming that the movie required no suspension of disbelief, or that there aren't any holes in the explanations, but it's still a good cut above the majority of science fiction, especially in video.
"Good social commentary":
Doing the right thing for your people vs. doing the right thing as a person (patriotism vs. morality).
Science vs. business.
Greed as a controlling factor in behavior.
Property rights vs. access to resources.
How we treat those we deem primitive, savage, or alien.
Environment vs. industrialism.
I could go on a lot longer with this, or flesh out any of those points much more. Suffice to say, there's a lot of good reflections on humanity in there... maybe not quite as much as District 9 (as another recent example) but it certainly wasn't lacking.
Pretty sure you can shorten that path a lot using the APPDATA environment variable, as in
"%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys\*"
or something like that. At least use "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\..."
Windows Mobile (mostly ARM) and Nokia N800/810/900 (ARM) devices have had Flash for a while. It's typically a version behind the desktop release, but it's the full player,a nd any applet that ran in that version of the player will run on the mobile device.
If it's important to you that your device can play Flash, you have three options: complain to Adobe directly, complain to the device/OS developer, or use a device/OS which already supports it (and has for years). It's obviously not a major technical problem; if Nokia and Microsoft can get it supported, then Google or Apple could too.
You really think putting schools, for all age groups, every two miles or so is cheap? Cheaper than a bus system, especially? Walking a mile to school isn't that big a deal for most kids (special needs aside) and indeed I did so from about 2nd grade to 6th (walking with others until 4th grade; but the suburbs were pretty safe). It took 20-30 minutes, depending on the length of my legs (or my sister's, when she started).
There *were* no junior high schools within a mile of my location though, and the closest one - at just over two miles, including crossing major streets and skirting a construction zone - was not a good area. The neighborhood wasn't all that bad - you could get around the worst parts with no more than an additional 5 minutes walking - but the school itself was terrible (heavy drug use, frequent violence, very poor academic record, and a low college acceptance rate). If it had been a good school, I might have walked anyhow; about 40 minutes on foot, perhaps 15 by bike (mostly uphill in the morning). The next closest option was a good school but at least an hour's walk away though, so I rode the bus there.
The nearest high school would have been an hour or more, and it started so early that I'd have been making the entire morning walk in the darkness during winter. The next closest was just as far in a different direction. Now, maybe in some areas you have schools much closer than that, but overall I find your suggestion a bit unreasonable. We lived in fairly high-density suburbs, with a *lot* of school-age children in the area, and it was no coincidence that my parents bought a house so close to the local schools. We could have been much further (when you're a kid on foot, an extra 3 or 4 miles each way is a *lot*) or in a much more dangerous area.
I ran across my WarCraft 2 Battle.Net Edition CD a while ago (for those who don't know, WC2 - the barely-even-32-bit predecessor to WC3 - shipped with networked play but no online matchmaking service because Battle.Net didn't exist at the time; Blizzard later released the WC2 BNE which added basically the same Battle.net features seen in SC). Just for laughs, I installed it and loaded it up (worked out of the box on Win7 x64, which was pretty damn impressive). There were maybe a few hundred people on the Battle.Net servers, and a few tens of games... yet they still run. (for comparisons, both SC and WC3 will have several orders of magnitude more players/games at any given time).
... unless you run with maximum permissions (root/Administrator). Vulnerabilities in Flashplayer are typically cross-platform; an exploit that works in Windows will work (after modification, but it will work) on Linux too. The difference usually just comes down to the degree of harm possible. Besides, while I don't know how this particular infection spreads, the odds are very good that it's a trojan... such things work quite nicely on *any* system where the user can get full permissions (almost everything except locked-down business machines) and doesn't know much about computer safety (the vast majority of non-Linux PC users, and some of the Linux users too).
In any case, stardard user accounts can't make changes like that. While EoP exploits may well exist, there are none I know of being used in the wild right now, and Microsoft takes patching them quite seriously. In any case, the specific OS version you're referring to is so old that it was designed for computers that listed their clock speeds in MHz and their hard disks in tens of GB. If it were *anybody* other than Microsoft, they wouldn't still be getting security updates at all!
Aside from there being two expansions rather than just one (and a 12-year wait for the next title in the franchise), how is this different from the original SC?
StarCraft shipped with a fairly small set of maps, about 30 campaign missions, and full multiplayer. Brood War added new units, maps, and roughly 30 more campaign missions, and if you wanted to use the new units or new map tilesets you had to play with other people who had Brood War too. These days, nobody plays SC without Brood War, and while you can still buy them together you can't get them separately.
SC2 will ship with an unknown number of maps, about 30 campaign missions, and full multiplayer. Each of the two expansions will add new units, maps, and roughly 30 more campaign missions each, but if you want to use the new stuff in multiplayer you'll need everybody in the game to have the expansions. Really, this is *exactly* the same pattern as before. What are you so upset about?
For the record, there are definitley machines out there that can't run XP. Most noticeably, XP's pre-install environment doesn't seem to support booting from a SATA optical drive; it will BSOD while loading drivers. While some machines still use IDE drives, it's becoming less common, and on a laptop you can't even just swap out the drive.
Of course, you're talking about an OS that is more than 8 years old (even counting service packs, it's still older than any version of OS X that Apple still supports). I suppose I should be happy it supports SATA hard drives.
WHile it's true that WC3 technically didin't have a spawn installation option, it really wasn't needed for local games. Even on the release version (years before the official No-CD patch), the game installed all its data files to the hard disk. The only time it checked for the CD was when you started the game, after which you could remove the CD and play all you wanted, even single-player. This emant that within one household, you only really needed on WC3 (and Frozen Throne) CD if you wanted to play on a LAN. Of course, you couldn't go on Battle.Net together (shared CD key) but it was fine for local games.
With the advent of the official no-CD patch, you didn't even need to do the whole load CD / start game / eject CD / hand to next person / repeat cycle anymore.
LLVM is a compiler back-end; it takes low-level instructions and emits assembly. You still need a front end to turn the source into low-level instructions. GCC can do this, for any language that it has a front-end for (lots), and the result is portable to anything LLVM runs on. GCC is actually pretty widely used for this. Clang is a newer compiler, built specifically to use LLVM for the back-end. It may be what you're thinking of, especially since its C++ front-end is still very much a work-in-progress (C is nearly 100%, Objective-C is up there too).
There is one counter-point to that, though: JIT compilers can take advantage of very specific features of your processor (not just things like instruction set extensions; I'm talking about stuff such as the exact size of your cache lines) to optimize exactly for your system. The resulting code probably won't run as well on another computer (might not run at all) but it works great on *your* computer and that's what matters.
Of course, there's no reason that a standard C compiler or whatever can't do similar optimizations, but in general, pre-compiled code targets a very general processor design. A lot of binaries I see target only i586, some are even i386, and even among those targeting i686 there's so many processors today, most with the same instruction sets but with widely varying caches, bus bandwidths, and support for things like branch prediction, that it's entirely possible that a good JIT can produce code that runs faster on your system than a good compiler targeting a generic member of your processor family.
Technically true, but it's still pretty damn easy. Most systems will happily treat any UMS device as a bootable drive, in which case you just have to do the same things that make a hard disk bootable; mark one partition active and install a bootloader. Simply installing a bootloader to the MBR should also work. In Windows, you can mark a partition active (including one on a flashdrive) using diskpart.exe (command line tool that comes with Windows and should be in your PATH). After that, it's just a matter of copying some bootable media on there; WinPE works pretty well, for example (I have a modified Win7 install image, useful either for installations or diagnostics/repairs).
Getting the files is the easy part; either burn the image, mount it, or unpack it with a tool like 7-zip. Then just copy the files onto the flashdrive, and you're good to go.
Protected Mode requires a substantial change to the process security model. Basically, until Vista/Server 2008, NT followed what was essentially the *NIX security model, where access permissions of a program were determined by the user/group the program was run by. There are differences in implementation between NT and the various POSIX systems, but that's the general idea. The problem is that when the vast majority of your users run with nearly full access to the system, one misbehaved (vulnerable) program can bring everything crashing down.
In NT6 (Vista/Server 2008), Microsoft introduced a new concept of process integrity levels, which are a per-process (rather than per-user) level of security. By default, programs run with medium integrity, which means their access permissions are basically what they were before. High integrity processes, such as system processes or anything run with actual Administrator permissions, can access anything but can't be accessed by lower-integrity programs (which helps prevent elevation of privilege from a non-Admin program.
The relevant datum here is that Internet Explorer runs (by default) with Low integrity, which means it has extremely limited access to the rest of the system. A low-integrity process can't start medium-integrity processes, can't write to the vast majority of the filesystem (there's a special low-integrity folder for things like Temporary Internet Files) or registry, and basically is unable to cause any harm. The trick is, it has these limitations regardless of the permissions of the user who runs the program.
XP can't do that. If you, as a user, can write to a location, any program you start can too (unless you tell Windows to start it as another user). Therefore, since Protected Mode is just Microsoft's term for "this process runs with low integrity" and XP can't *do* low integrity, no, you don't get Protected Mode on XP, and never will (it would require a substantial change to the kernel security subsystem).
You should be using AdBlock Plus port for MicroB and Flashblock port for MicroB.
No ads, pages load faster, don't run any Flash you don't want to - and yet, you can run all the flash that you *do* want to!
The N800/N810 has had a Gecko-based browser since 2008, with full Flash support (version 9, not the "lite" crap). Both AdBlock Plus and Flashblock were ported to this browser. While the ability to use un-modified Firefox extensions would be nice (the older browser doesn't include XUL), the idea isn't so new.
That said, yes, playing Flash hurt the battery life significantly. With normal browsing (including ABP so no Flash ads), you could get 7 hours continuous use pretty easily. Hit YouTube or Pandora.com, though, and it dropped to more like 2 hours (although it could run both sites, if slowly - loading Pandora took about 10 seconds). It also used enough RAM that having much else open at once would be pretty slow, although it was possible (SD card configured to act as swap).
Awesome though this is, I'm not sure why it's seen as such a new thing. The browser on the N800/N810 (non-phone predecessors to the N900) is Gecko-based and includes full Flash 9 support. It doesn't use XUL, which means that porting something like AdBlock Plus wasn't trivial, but it *was* done - i.e. you can't even argue that it doesn't support extensions (it just couldn't use un-modified Firefox extensions).
Granted, the version of Gecko on the last N800 I tried was outdated (1.6?) by modern standards, so definitely not as standards-compliant as Firefox 3.6, but it certainly worked well enough for most things (especially since this was 2 years ago).
"Arguably less standards compliant" nothing. I'm pretty sure IE7 is the only browser on that list that fails Acid 2, for example (IE8 handles it just fine).
Sounds like a major step up. I hadn't actually seen any info on IE9, but if you say it's released publicly I'll take a look. Better JavaScript will definitely be very nice, as would SVG, but I do hope that canvas, at least, is supported too.
Any idea when a beta will be available, for MSDN subscribers or otherwise?
Clearly you didn't even read the article, just looked at numbers. IE should not have even been tested - it does not support HTML5 canvas elements! They worked around this using a bunch of really ugly hacks that completely destroyed the performance, but honestly they'd have been better off simply saying "it doesn't work, we'll wait until IE9, thanks for giving us Acid2 compatibility but you've got a long way to go!"
IE8 actually works pretty damn well for much of the modern web; it's far from the fastest but it's fast enough for most, it is compatible with CSS2 and the other standards most web developers still use, and it has fixed most of the issues that people have cursed at IE over for so long. However, it has very little support for new standards - its CSS3 is still limited, and as far as I know it supports no HTML5 at all. Compared to the rapid improvement of other browsers, the IE team had better be on their toes or they'll be left far behind in the dust.
Nice idea, but if the implementation is truly that bad I'll be astonished. A single hard-coded public key in the game's binary and this idea won't work.
I'm not saying it won't be cracked - I'm sure it will, probably sooner rather than later, and probably repetitively - but you're not going to do it without modifying the game files. On the other hand, I'm not aware of any software that has thus far resisted all attempts to reverse-engineer it, and games don't even have the luxury of things like massive amounts of polymorphic or self-decrypting code, run-time checksums, and so forth... not unless they want to jump the system requirements through the roof to account for the associated performance losses.
There are some apps that have tried to be an open source "like OneNote" but my experience has suggested that none are even close. The ability to import anything into your notes, the quality of the handwriting recognition, the simple but powerful UI, the lack of limitations on writing or annotation area... it's a damn good program, definitely one of *the* reasons to get a tablet PC.
Of course, it has to be an actual PC. This "too big to put in your pocket but doesn't actually run a desktop OS" device isn't going to run OneNote any time soon.
s/unlimited/5GB/g
One of these days there's going to be a suit over how bloody much the carriers charge you if you go over 5GB on their "unlimited" plans. Probably not an issue with a phone, but something like this? At full resolution that's only a few hours of video.
A good random example of this:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/current/sec5526c.gif (Reference image for the Acid 1 test.)
This test is quite old - HTML 4 and CSS1 - and the window border (which you'll note they refer to as "generic chrome") shows this fairly clearly. It far predates both Firefox and Chrome (browser).
As a side note, when Windows first came out, it wasn't really an OS; it was little more than a window manager and an API. While definitely not the first graphical computer operating environment, it's entirely possible that the concept of a "window" in the software world wasn't really established yet, assuming it even existed. Maybe it was (how old is the concept of a "window manager"?) but in any case, it was a program that allowed one to graphically view multiple running programs, each in their own "window" on your display. Microsoft's naming has historically been very unimaginative, but I suspect that the name of the Windows operating system is a legacy thing, from the days when it was little more than (for example) KWin (KDE's window manager).
But, you don't have phone capability... which is what is required for this. The "app" just uses the phone capability to place a call to a Google-owned number, which then routes the call to your destination such that it shows as coming from your Google Voice number, rather than your iPhone number.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\ (on 64-bit systems, HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\) is the registry key that controls access to that proker process (it's called something like Flash10Util.exe - look through the GUIDs until you find the correct one). Then, you can set its Policy value as you like. I've knocked it back to 2 for now, but then, prompts don't annoy me much.
0 - Disable calling this program from IE (the only default 0 policy I found was cmd.exe, a reasonable thing to block).
1 - The external process runs, but only as Low Integrity (can't write to most of the disk or registry, can't invoke external programs).
2 - The user gets a Protected Mode prompt identifying the program that is trying to start outside of Protected Mode; if approved the process will run as Medium Integrity (normal user level).
3 - The external process is silently elevated to Medium Integrity and runs without prompting; the Flash broker process installs this policy by default.