It started on the 31st, as you surmised. If you didn't turn the device on between midnight on the 31st and midnight on the 1st (according to UTC, adjust for time zone as needed) you didn't see the issue at all.
Mostly that's a matter of the way cleanup frequently involves local variables. Sure, you could pass them all in by reference (since this is C, that would mean passing them as cleanup(&local1, &local2 &local3); but it gets quite messy, both in the function declaration and in all the calls.
Why do those particular lines strike you as so especially terrible? It's part of an iterative function that takes a number of days since a defined starting point (Jan 1 1980, inclusive, IIRC) and determines how many years (and the remainder number of days) have elapsed. The comments made that fairly clear to me.
Ah, thank you. This explains better why the 2nd-gen and 3rd-gen Zunes didn't suffer this problem; they were completely designed and developed in-house.
While I've never been in a position where I need to do so, there are lawyers who will take a case they are confidant they can be won in exchange for a (often high) portion of the winnings, should there be any. While you might make more if you put down the fees up front, the amounts that courts award these days are significant enough that you could hand over half your winnings and still make off like a bandit. It also strongly encourages your attorney to fight for the biggest award possible, which incidentally means both that you get more money and send the strongest possible message about this kind of shenanigans.
A fair response. Certainly things like the Sony rootkit should be considered malware, although since music CDs shouldn't really be installing software anyhow I'm not sure I'd call it a Trojan.
Idiotic installation of any damn thing that claims to allow watching some pr0n made up more than half of the remainder. There were a few from scareware (like the Microsoft Antivirus 2008/2009 thing on Slashdot a couple days back) and a good handful of Bonzi Buddy or BearShare-type things as well (same category as "Install Flash ActiveX Helper 10.3 in order to watch this [pr0n] video" but somewhat less common). The rest were legitimate exploits.
Thank you for your more-or-less reasonable response. However, I'm not aware of any virtualization system that handles full OLE and nearly certain there's no virtualization software that permits full hardware acceleration (not to mention that there'd be a performance overhead even then). I should not have focused so exclusively on Virtual PC's current capabilities, but bear in mind that adding capabilities beyond those would require tying Win7's ship date to no earlier than the development, testing, and completion of a new version of a more-or-less unrelated product, plus all the integration that would then be required (which could perhaps fairly be viewed as the Win7 group's responsibility). If you have any examples of virtualization software capable of the 100% compatibility you describe, I'd be very interested, however.
Your response to the IPC issue is interesting and might even work, but the creation of that sort of "inter-process firewall" is tricky enough without running in an environment where the IPC client can't even query for a list of what servers *might* be out there (how would Falangy Counting even be able to look for a Quicken process running outside its own virtual environment, let alone inside a different one? How would it then target that other process?) You're well beyond trivial effort at this point, but a user-controlled way to break out of the sandbox could solve this problem (IE7/8 in Protected Mode have this to a limited extent,t hough their sandboxes are far less absolute than running in a virtual system.) As for the iPhone, I was commenting on why third-party solutions to lack of C/C/P require using the network for IPC - I'm well aware that Apple could have done it directly if they had cared.
I'm probably younger than you are, but I'm aware of RAMdiscs and the limitations of 16-bit (and even 8-bit, thanks to a manager who refuses to upgrade a particular microcontroller from the dark ages). However, you're proposing a solution for Win7. Win7 systems will not have 16EB of RAM. They *might* have as much as 16GB at launch in a home user configuration, but I'm sure a significant number will have only 4GB or less (hell, they still sell Vista laptops, brand new, with only 512MB of physical RAM). Using a 64-bit system's memory to create a RAMdisc for the storage of a 32-bit system's pagefile could easily work around the issue of how much physical RAM to pre-allocate a virtual machine (although it does nothing for the 3GB limit - technically 4GB but some address space goes to things other than system RAM - built into the architecture of a 32-bit system). However, you'll inevitably still waste some RAM on each virtual system, and that waste could add up in a hurry.
Also, personal attacks are neither useful nor help your case. I understand quite well how memory management works, and while it is fair to say that the continual tacking-on of compatibility features is short-sighted, I don't quite see where *I* was being "short-sighted about OSes." As for "don't really understand how computers work" this is from somebody who apparently thinks that the 3GB physical RAM (not per-application memory space) limit in (32-bit) XP simply means that if you try and malloc 4GB of RAM the last gig goes to hard disc? Stones and glass houses come to mind. In any case, inaccurate and unhelpful personal attacks aside, I really do appreciate your response.
Recovery from standby, virtual or otherwise, is very fast - single-digit seconds at most. However, you still need to keep all the RAM that the virtual system was using live. In a virtual environment, that means you don't get back the physical RAM allocated to VPC. Not a major problem if you're using a 64-bit system with 128GB of RAM, but for more practical numbers in the short-term (there will be plenty of x64 Win7 boxes sold with only 4GB of RAM) it would be utterly impractical to expect the average user to manage those RAM allocations intelligently, and know when they MUST be released for acceptable performance even if it means long start times for a given process.
Of course, what you were actually talking about is recovery from hibernate. That is a process somewhat faster than clean boot (how much faster depends on amount of RAM present, hard drive IO speed, and a few other factors) and works around the requirement of maintaining RAM for sleeping virtual systems. However, hibernate recovery still takes many seconds even on physical hardware. This is the most reasonable suggestion, though, especially when there's enough host RAM to make RAMdiscs reasonable.
From what I heard, it wasn't actually only the Zunes with 3.0 firmware that failed to boot, although I didn't check that closely. In any case, the bug is in the driver for a component which the Zune 30 (and Toshiba Gigabeat S, which the 30 was based on and which also wouldn't boot) has, but none of the 2nd-gen or 3rd-gen Zunes have (all of which were designed in-house from the ground up).
Anything from month-to-month media rental (for example, the Zune Pass) to simply displaying the time like a watch (how many people do you know who pull out their cell phones to check the time? I know at least 4, and it amuses me to no end, but in any case a "current time" display was one of the most-requested features for the Zune 3.0 firmware).
Zune 80s (in fact, all 2nd-gen and 3rd-gen Zunes) were designed in-house from scratch, not based on the Toshiba Gigabeat S (which, as the summary points out, was also affected). Shame on MS for not ensuring that the Gigabeat code was correct (the bug is a simple case of over-engineering a solution, easy to miss at first glance, but still should have been caught by QA) but at least the Zunes they designed entirely in-house worked fine (my 8GB 2nd-gen didn't have any problems either).
Modern (i.e. Lithium-ion) batteries don't mind that much at all. I've drained laptop, camera, and Zune (2nd-gen, it didn't get hit by this bug) fully with no noticeable loss. Heck, Nickel-metal-hydride batteries, and especially the really old nickel-cadmium batteries (both were used in laptops if you look far enough back) *needed* to be fully drained periodically - leaving them at full charge was what caused them to lose capacity.
Don't confuse car batteries (almost invariably some form of Lead-acid cells) with other battery chemistries. Batteries in consumer electronic devices are designed to tolerate draining.
That's OK, another solution would be to simply add a else {
break; } between lines 267 and 268. Of course, it's a slightly unintuitive approach to otherwise nicely self-documenting code, so a comment would make sense there too. In any case, it's at least four extra lines (using the same style as the rest of the code that I saw, no less)...
Cool idea. Now let's take a step back and look at the realities:
Port VitrualPC to Win7: I suspect it'll already run on Win7, but even if it won't they'd do that anyhow.
Drivers to share the clipboard: Sure. Of course, you'd also need drivers to handle OLE stuff (drag-and-drop, for example). I'm sure it could be done, but don't make the mistake of assuming it's trivial. It takes a bit of work (made utterly painless, but still required) just to allow near-seamless mouse movement in and out of the virtual window.
Launching virtual machine now launches the application rather than the desktop: this is pretty easy. Of course, you still need to account for the bootup time of XP. Even with hardware virtualization, this is at least tens of seconds. I'd really rather not wait that long every time.
Virtually 100% all current software would work: Except, you know, anything that needs 3d hardware acceleration. Or direct driver access. Or more than two COM ports (yes, such programs exist, and VPC's limitation to 2 COM ports is an issue for the one program we have that won't quite work right in Vista. The problem could be worked around, but it's indicative of the greater issue).
Sandboxed by default. How sandboxed? Windows supports an incredible number of forms of inter-process communication. Some programs rely quite heavily on such things. You could allow the VPC to run one process and all the programs that it spawns, perhaps, but there would still be problems. Hell, this sort of excessive sandboxing is supposedly the reason the iPhone can't even handle simple cut/copy/paste!
How much RAM do these virtual systems have? Each virtual machine would need a good chunk of RAM, especially with the overhead of running all those excess copies of Windows. However, they would also compete with native apps for physical RAM. What do you do when some process that runs on Windows 2000 starts demanding 2GB of working set? Is VPC supposed to automatically enlarge the physical RAM allocated to that machine? Is it supposed to use its own pagefile? Perhaps you'd like to somehow get it to use the global pagefile instead?
I hope this is enough to help you realize that, noble though your end goal is, your method simply would not work.
One is a public entity that needs consumer trust to stay in business, and can be brought to court if they harm their users.
The other one is under no obligation to you the user, is anonymous and unfindable, has demonstrably shady ethics, and can only make money from their work by doing something like bundling malware with it.
I'm not saying all cracked software you find on torrent trackers includes malware, but about half the malware infections I clean off of friends' computers got there through installation of NoCD cracks or pirated software that included a Trojan.
Good post. Also, I really doubt that Authenticode has truly been broken. There are ways around it, but to actually make it look like it was in place and correct, you'd need to know the private key Microsoft uses for their code signing. Since I very much doubt anybody has managed to acquire that, and since last I checked RSA signatures were still fundamentally sound, I suspect that they have not, in fact, cracked Authenticode.
Cracking the validation used for WGA, on the other hand, is believable.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I forgot to add: all Microsoft pre-release software, even the builds not meant to be publicly released (but certainly including those) has a built-in "time bomb" to prevent people from using the pre-release as opposed to buying the final version. In the case of Vista RC2, the expiration date was roughly 6 months after Vista was RTM.
I think a real, official open beta would be a very interesting move. MS could get a lot of real-world testing done, and be protected from lawsuits and too much flak for bad crashing and bugs by hiding under a 'beta' umbrella. That, and they could always make the beta lack enough features that people would feel the need to purchase the real product later, or make the beta self-destruct on a timer.
I take it you didn't follow the Vista development at all? Microsoft released at least 3 public beta/RC builds of Vista (there were others released to a more limited audience) and it is fully expected that Windows 7 will get the same treatment, probably within the first two months of 09. These pre-release builds also include tools to report bugs.
Thank you. That's the closest I've seen to an actual explanation of WTF Bordeaux is, and I spent several minutes poking around their site. I knew it had *something* to do with Wine, but their site is about the least informative thing I can remember reading recently.
Google Earth has been written in Qt with a native Linux version for quite some time now. Wouldn't it be easier to use the Linux version?
Wait, does that actually run now? Last I heard it wasn't even beta quality.
Also, YMMV but I've had better luck running Windows apps in Wine on Linux than I have running Linux apps (through compatibility) on FreeBSD (even ones that are supposed to work, like Flash).
Umm, as your quote includes, the expensive component of such a gaming system is the video card. The Slimline's 9500 isn't even in the same league as a 9800 - it's good enough for a casual player who enjoys some WoW or Team Fortress 2, but it's not a high-performance card by the standards of today, let alone tomorrow.
The Slimline's quad-core AMD processor may be better for some tasks than the dual-core Core 2 Duo, but the C2D has a 25% higher clock speed and significantly more cache per core. To a gamer, that will make more difference than a couple extra cores on most games.
Otherwise, your post makes sense - there really is no logic in the commercial Linux providers getting into the gaming scene.
Um, no. Again, do your research. The scam *is* how the malware ends up on the system. Somebody is browsing the web on a completely clean system, and a pop-up (from a otherwise legit ad vender that took these peoples' money) jumps up and screams at them that their system is infected. It tells them that their only hope of salvation lies in downloading Microsoft Antivirus 2009, with a handy link. Being the kind of person who doesn't really understand how computers work, they have no exceptional reason to be suspicious, follow the link, hand over some dough, and willfully install the malware.
THAT is when the locally-originating pop-ups, home page redirects, and blocking of search results starts. Up until then, the duped user had simply been interacting with remote servers on a completely clean computer.
I've managed to avoid dealing with this specific malware, but I've cleaned plenty of others. Over the least few years, nearly all of them were due to Trojans that ignorant users intentionally ran and gave whatever permissions they needed. I think you're a little too ready to assume an actual security flaw where none exists - IE, especially IE6, certainly still has vulnerabilities, but they are not the main avenue by which malware lands on the average user's computer these days. Scareware through legit ad vendors is quite common as well, even to the point that I've seen some very authentic-looking warnings with perfect imitations of the default XP window chrome... while browsing the web using Konqueror on Linux with a theme that looks nothing like that of Windows.
Oh, please. sudo rm -rf/ plus entering a password (equivalent to a UAC prompt, or if you run as Administrator then you're logging in as root and can discard the sudo) is less damaging how? Linux actually makes far less effort to prevent the user from doing something truly stupid than Windows does.
Of course, we were talking about Trojans and malware, rather than just wanton destruction. How about a rootkit that quietly patches your kernel so that any socket you open to port 80 (or 25, 465, or take-your-pick) causes a notification of such to be sent to some malicious address? Hell, that would be an easy piece of really nasty spyware, compared to doing it on Windows (having kernel sources helps, of course). Anything running with root permissions could easily make the modification, even preserving the metadata well enough that you'd probably never notice unless you routinely run hash checks on your kernel. Sure, it wouldn't take effect until you rebooted, but even Linux needs to reboot every now and again. Hell, it might even be possible to do that sort of thing as a loadable kernel module, and then you're hosed unless you happen to notice a funny entry in lsmod.
Thanks for posting. However, if your Zune hasn't already started working again, DO NOT apply this fix. Not only is it a very temporary one, but it voids the warranty and may cause other problems. A more complete and easier solution is available on the Zune website. See http://www.zune.net/en-us/support/zune30.htm
Thanks for posting. However, if your Zune hasn't already started working again, DO NOT apply this fix. Not only is it a very temporary one, but it voids the warranty and may cause other problems. A more complete and easier solution is available on the Zune website. See http://www.zune.net/en-us/support/zune30.htm
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It started on the 31st, as you surmised. If you didn't turn the device on between midnight on the 31st and midnight on the 1st (according to UTC, adjust for time zone as needed) you didn't see the issue at all.
Mostly that's a matter of the way cleanup frequently involves local variables. Sure, you could pass them all in by reference (since this is C, that would mean passing them as
cleanup(&local1, &local2 &local3);
but it gets quite messy, both in the function declaration and in all the calls.
Why do those particular lines strike you as so especially terrible? It's part of an iterative function that takes a number of days since a defined starting point (Jan 1 1980, inclusive, IIRC) and determines how many years (and the remainder number of days) have elapsed. The comments made that fairly clear to me.
Ah, thank you. This explains better why the 2nd-gen and 3rd-gen Zunes didn't suffer this problem; they were completely designed and developed in-house.
While I've never been in a position where I need to do so, there are lawyers who will take a case they are confidant they can be won in exchange for a (often high) portion of the winnings, should there be any. While you might make more if you put down the fees up front, the amounts that courts award these days are significant enough that you could hand over half your winnings and still make off like a bandit. It also strongly encourages your attorney to fight for the biggest award possible, which incidentally means both that you get more money and send the strongest possible message about this kind of shenanigans.
A fair response. Certainly things like the Sony rootkit should be considered malware, although since music CDs shouldn't really be installing software anyhow I'm not sure I'd call it a Trojan.
Idiotic installation of any damn thing that claims to allow watching some pr0n made up more than half of the remainder. There were a few from scareware (like the Microsoft Antivirus 2008/2009 thing on Slashdot a couple days back) and a good handful of Bonzi Buddy or BearShare-type things as well (same category as "Install Flash ActiveX Helper 10.3 in order to watch this [pr0n] video" but somewhat less common). The rest were legitimate exploits.
Thank you for your more-or-less reasonable response. However, I'm not aware of any virtualization system that handles full OLE and nearly certain there's no virtualization software that permits full hardware acceleration (not to mention that there'd be a performance overhead even then). I should not have focused so exclusively on Virtual PC's current capabilities, but bear in mind that adding capabilities beyond those would require tying Win7's ship date to no earlier than the development, testing, and completion of a new version of a more-or-less unrelated product, plus all the integration that would then be required (which could perhaps fairly be viewed as the Win7 group's responsibility). If you have any examples of virtualization software capable of the 100% compatibility you describe, I'd be very interested, however.
Your response to the IPC issue is interesting and might even work, but the creation of that sort of "inter-process firewall" is tricky enough without running in an environment where the IPC client can't even query for a list of what servers *might* be out there (how would Falangy Counting even be able to look for a Quicken process running outside its own virtual environment, let alone inside a different one? How would it then target that other process?) You're well beyond trivial effort at this point, but a user-controlled way to break out of the sandbox could solve this problem (IE7/8 in Protected Mode have this to a limited extent,t hough their sandboxes are far less absolute than running in a virtual system.) As for the iPhone, I was commenting on why third-party solutions to lack of C/C/P require using the network for IPC - I'm well aware that Apple could have done it directly if they had cared.
I'm probably younger than you are, but I'm aware of RAMdiscs and the limitations of 16-bit (and even 8-bit, thanks to a manager who refuses to upgrade a particular microcontroller from the dark ages). However, you're proposing a solution for Win7. Win7 systems will not have 16EB of RAM. They *might* have as much as 16GB at launch in a home user configuration, but I'm sure a significant number will have only 4GB or less (hell, they still sell Vista laptops, brand new, with only 512MB of physical RAM). Using a 64-bit system's memory to create a RAMdisc for the storage of a 32-bit system's pagefile could easily work around the issue of how much physical RAM to pre-allocate a virtual machine (although it does nothing for the 3GB limit - technically 4GB but some address space goes to things other than system RAM - built into the architecture of a 32-bit system). However, you'll inevitably still waste some RAM on each virtual system, and that waste could add up in a hurry.
Also, personal attacks are neither useful nor help your case. I understand quite well how memory management works, and while it is fair to say that the continual tacking-on of compatibility features is short-sighted, I don't quite see where *I* was being "short-sighted about OSes." As for "don't really understand how computers work" this is from somebody who apparently thinks that the 3GB physical RAM (not per-application memory space) limit in (32-bit) XP simply means that if you try and malloc 4GB of RAM the last gig goes to hard disc? Stones and glass houses come to mind. In any case, inaccurate and unhelpful personal attacks aside, I really do appreciate your response.
Recovery from standby, virtual or otherwise, is very fast - single-digit seconds at most. However, you still need to keep all the RAM that the virtual system was using live. In a virtual environment, that means you don't get back the physical RAM allocated to VPC. Not a major problem if you're using a 64-bit system with 128GB of RAM, but for more practical numbers in the short-term (there will be plenty of x64 Win7 boxes sold with only 4GB of RAM) it would be utterly impractical to expect the average user to manage those RAM allocations intelligently, and know when they MUST be released for acceptable performance even if it means long start times for a given process.
Of course, what you were actually talking about is recovery from hibernate. That is a process somewhat faster than clean boot (how much faster depends on amount of RAM present, hard drive IO speed, and a few other factors) and works around the requirement of maintaining RAM for sleeping virtual systems. However, hibernate recovery still takes many seconds even on physical hardware. This is the most reasonable suggestion, though, especially when there's enough host RAM to make RAMdiscs reasonable.
From what I heard, it wasn't actually only the Zunes with 3.0 firmware that failed to boot, although I didn't check that closely. In any case, the bug is in the driver for a component which the Zune 30 (and Toshiba Gigabeat S, which the 30 was based on and which also wouldn't boot) has, but none of the 2nd-gen or 3rd-gen Zunes have (all of which were designed in-house from the ground up).
Anything from month-to-month media rental (for example, the Zune Pass) to simply displaying the time like a watch (how many people do you know who pull out their cell phones to check the time? I know at least 4, and it amuses me to no end, but in any case a "current time" display was one of the most-requested features for the Zune 3.0 firmware).
Zune 80s (in fact, all 2nd-gen and 3rd-gen Zunes) were designed in-house from scratch, not based on the Toshiba Gigabeat S (which, as the summary points out, was also affected). Shame on MS for not ensuring that the Gigabeat code was correct (the bug is a simple case of over-engineering a solution, easy to miss at first glance, but still should have been caught by QA) but at least the Zunes they designed entirely in-house worked fine (my 8GB 2nd-gen didn't have any problems either).
Modern (i.e. Lithium-ion) batteries don't mind that much at all. I've drained laptop, camera, and Zune (2nd-gen, it didn't get hit by this bug) fully with no noticeable loss. Heck, Nickel-metal-hydride batteries, and especially the really old nickel-cadmium batteries (both were used in laptops if you look far enough back) *needed* to be fully drained periodically - leaving them at full charge was what caused them to lose capacity.
Don't confuse car batteries (almost invariably some form of Lead-acid cells) with other battery chemistries. Batteries in consumer electronic devices are designed to tolerate draining.
That's OK, another solution would be to simply add a
else
{
break;
}
between lines 267 and 268. Of course, it's a slightly unintuitive approach to otherwise nicely self-documenting code, so a comment would make sense there too. In any case, it's at least four extra lines (using the same style as the rest of the code that I saw, no less)...
Cool idea. Now let's take a step back and look at the realities:
Port VitrualPC to Win7: I suspect it'll already run on Win7, but even if it won't they'd do that anyhow.
Drivers to share the clipboard: Sure. Of course, you'd also need drivers to handle OLE stuff (drag-and-drop, for example). I'm sure it could be done, but don't make the mistake of assuming it's trivial. It takes a bit of work (made utterly painless, but still required) just to allow near-seamless mouse movement in and out of the virtual window.
Launching virtual machine now launches the application rather than the desktop: this is pretty easy. Of course, you still need to account for the bootup time of XP. Even with hardware virtualization, this is at least tens of seconds. I'd really rather not wait that long every time.
Virtually 100% all current software would work: Except, you know, anything that needs 3d hardware acceleration. Or direct driver access. Or more than two COM ports (yes, such programs exist, and VPC's limitation to 2 COM ports is an issue for the one program we have that won't quite work right in Vista. The problem could be worked around, but it's indicative of the greater issue).
Sandboxed by default. How sandboxed? Windows supports an incredible number of forms of inter-process communication. Some programs rely quite heavily on such things. You could allow the VPC to run one process and all the programs that it spawns, perhaps, but there would still be problems. Hell, this sort of excessive sandboxing is supposedly the reason the iPhone can't even handle simple cut/copy/paste!
How much RAM do these virtual systems have? Each virtual machine would need a good chunk of RAM, especially with the overhead of running all those excess copies of Windows. However, they would also compete with native apps for physical RAM. What do you do when some process that runs on Windows 2000 starts demanding 2GB of working set? Is VPC supposed to automatically enlarge the physical RAM allocated to that machine? Is it supposed to use its own pagefile? Perhaps you'd like to somehow get it to use the global pagefile instead?
I hope this is enough to help you realize that, noble though your end goal is, your method simply would not work.
One is a public entity that needs consumer trust to stay in business, and can be brought to court if they harm their users.
The other one is under no obligation to you the user, is anonymous and unfindable, has demonstrably shady ethics, and can only make money from their work by doing something like bundling malware with it.
I'm not saying all cracked software you find on torrent trackers includes malware, but about half the malware infections I clean off of friends' computers got there through installation of NoCD cracks or pirated software that included a Trojan.
Good post. Also, I really doubt that Authenticode has truly been broken. There are ways around it, but to actually make it look like it was in place and correct, you'd need to know the private key Microsoft uses for their code signing. Since I very much doubt anybody has managed to acquire that, and since last I checked RSA signatures were still fundamentally sound, I suspect that they have not, in fact, cracked Authenticode.
Cracking the validation used for WGA, on the other hand, is believable.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I forgot to add: all Microsoft pre-release software, even the builds not meant to be publicly released (but certainly including those) has a built-in "time bomb" to prevent people from using the pre-release as opposed to buying the final version. In the case of Vista RC2, the expiration date was roughly 6 months after Vista was RTM.
I think a real, official open beta would be a very interesting move. MS could get a lot of real-world testing done, and be protected from lawsuits and too much flak for bad crashing and bugs by hiding under a 'beta' umbrella. That, and they could always make the beta lack enough features that people would feel the need to purchase the real product later, or make the beta self-destruct on a timer.
I take it you didn't follow the Vista development at all? Microsoft released at least 3 public beta/RC builds of Vista (there were others released to a more limited audience) and it is fully expected that Windows 7 will get the same treatment, probably within the first two months of 09. These pre-release builds also include tools to report bugs.
Thank you. That's the closest I've seen to an actual explanation of WTF Bordeaux is, and I spent several minutes poking around their site. I knew it had *something* to do with Wine, but their site is about the least informative thing I can remember reading recently.
Google Earth has been written in Qt with a native Linux version for quite some time now. Wouldn't it be easier to use the Linux version?
Wait, does that actually run now? Last I heard it wasn't even beta quality.
Also, YMMV but I've had better luck running Windows apps in Wine on Linux than I have running Linux apps (through compatibility) on FreeBSD (even ones that are supposed to work, like Flash).
Umm, as your quote includes, the expensive component of such a gaming system is the video card. The Slimline's 9500 isn't even in the same league as a 9800 - it's good enough for a casual player who enjoys some WoW or Team Fortress 2, but it's not a high-performance card by the standards of today, let alone tomorrow.
The Slimline's quad-core AMD processor may be better for some tasks than the dual-core Core 2 Duo, but the C2D has a 25% higher clock speed and significantly more cache per core. To a gamer, that will make more difference than a couple extra cores on most games.
Otherwise, your post makes sense - there really is no logic in the commercial Linux providers getting into the gaming scene.
Um, no. Again, do your research. The scam *is* how the malware ends up on the system. Somebody is browsing the web on a completely clean system, and a pop-up (from a otherwise legit ad vender that took these peoples' money) jumps up and screams at them that their system is infected. It tells them that their only hope of salvation lies in downloading Microsoft Antivirus 2009, with a handy link. Being the kind of person who doesn't really understand how computers work, they have no exceptional reason to be suspicious, follow the link, hand over some dough, and willfully install the malware.
THAT is when the locally-originating pop-ups, home page redirects, and blocking of search results starts. Up until then, the duped user had simply been interacting with remote servers on a completely clean computer.
I've managed to avoid dealing with this specific malware, but I've cleaned plenty of others. Over the least few years, nearly all of them were due to Trojans that ignorant users intentionally ran and gave whatever permissions they needed. I think you're a little too ready to assume an actual security flaw where none exists - IE, especially IE6, certainly still has vulnerabilities, but they are not the main avenue by which malware lands on the average user's computer these days. Scareware through legit ad vendors is quite common as well, even to the point that I've seen some very authentic-looking warnings with perfect imitations of the default XP window chrome... while browsing the web using Konqueror on Linux with a theme that looks nothing like that of Windows.
Oh, please. /
sudo rm -rf
plus entering a password (equivalent to a UAC prompt, or if you run as Administrator then you're logging in as root and can discard the sudo) is less damaging how? Linux actually makes far less effort to prevent the user from doing something truly stupid than Windows does.
Of course, we were talking about Trojans and malware, rather than just wanton destruction. How about a rootkit that quietly patches your kernel so that any socket you open to port 80 (or 25, 465, or take-your-pick) causes a notification of such to be sent to some malicious address? Hell, that would be an easy piece of really nasty spyware, compared to doing it on Windows (having kernel sources helps, of course). Anything running with root permissions could easily make the modification, even preserving the metadata well enough that you'd probably never notice unless you routinely run hash checks on your kernel. Sure, it wouldn't take effect until you rebooted, but even Linux needs to reboot every now and again. Hell, it might even be possible to do that sort of thing as a loadable kernel module, and then you're hosed unless you happen to notice a funny entry in lsmod.
Thanks for posting. However, if your Zune hasn't already started working again, DO NOT apply this fix. Not only is it a very temporary one, but it voids the warranty and may cause other problems. A more complete and easier solution is available on the Zune website. See http://www.zune.net/en-us/support/zune30.htm
Thanks for posting. However, if your Zune hasn't already started working again, DO NOT apply this fix. Not only is it a very temporary one, but it voids the warranty and may cause other problems. A more complete and easier solution is available on the Zune website. See http://www.zune.net/en-us/support/zune30.htm