Posts by Infarction

>...will put the customer first before their financial interests
If they can increase profits otherwise, I believe, that as a publicly traded company, they are legally obligated to maximize their profits... or at least make a very convincing show of it.

I have noticed though, that the last couple years, AAPL has fallen on MacWorld. Strange, but the word does fit when considering stocks and investors.

With Intel pulling out (or getting kicked out), seems like OLPC is having a hard time...

Does this mean we'll start seeing higher speeds too? 1.5Mbps hardly cuts it these days...

The problem with comparing this apple to the rest in the bin is that there's hardly any competition; but we all love to compare things and see how well or poorly they're doing. So comparing it to the Harry Potter books, which are known to be an entertainment phenomenon, MSFT can make a fairly strong point. And while the argument of book = $30 and Halo = $60, there's also a much smaller population buying Halo 3 than there is buying the HP books.

And jwenting sounds about dead on...

It seems to me like Apple is itching to both take over the market and become unpopular with techy people really fast...

For anybody still interested in making gadgets/widgets after reading this, here is a good read by a couple guys from Microsoft about how they're handled. Mostly common sense stuff though, but I remembered it after seeing this...

> In fact the majority of flaws in Windows itself are not known before Microsoft themselves discover them and release a patch.

Also, at one point, most exploits were reverse-engineered from the patches, and effected between the time the patch was released and the time users actually got around to installing it (which is why it takes longer now to get patches out, what with obfuscating the binaries etc...). But it's MSFT's fault, as always... :P

>I would contend that Microsoft should stop playing the blame game and start concentrating on quicker responses, better testing and more open vulnerability disclosure.

So many people say that, but do you think it's really feasible for them? Their responses would be a lot quicker if it was safe to deploy the updates that way; unfortunately it's not. They have to make sure that the patch works and [hopefully] doesn't leave any other holes open. Then when they release it they need to do so in a manner such that the patch can't be reverse-engineered to find the exploitable code (that used to be when a lot of exploitable code was targetted by virus authors). Then there's the issue of deployment usability. If nobody installs the patch, it won't be effective. Having the update notification go off every day would likely cause many people to just turn it off; instead, to goes off a couple times a month (e.g. Patch Tuesday). Actual deployment rates are still excruciatingly slow though, so that making it public whenever they patch some exploitable code would probably cause more malware authors to take advantage of the vulnerability window. As to the testing, they're on a pinched schedule which is an apple the exploit finder's orange. The Blaster exploit took 6 months of tinkering to find an exploitable input for that one little bit of code (it was like 2 lines, as I recall). No company is going to spend that much time on so …

I've not had any issues the last few years either. All I've bought in the last 8 years or so have been Seagates (a couple 60GB from back then are still going strong) and WDs (still going strong as well, even after dropping them hard once).

While I can understand that people might prefer to have the two objects combined for convenience's sake, the i* craze (cult?) is a bit out of hand. Apple could market pocket lint as iDunnowhat and people'd buy it just because it was an Apple product, I swear.

Your last post was so fun, I couldn't wait for this one :P

4. There have been severe security issues with IE 6 and earlier, which came out in 2001 and by 2005 (the date of your cited article) had proven itself to be a huge security risk. And, as you mentioned, the integration with the OS was retrospectively a stupid thing to do. It was, however, an artifact of a time when security received much less focus industry-wide, and considerations for the consequences of said design were probably not given much thought. Now that Microsoft has released a new OS and browser version, both featuring new security models, the products have been much better behaved (though they've not been out long enough to say with certainty how much they've improved). As Firefox gains more popularity, there are also an increasing number of bugs being found in its code - not as serious as some of the IE bugs, but some compromising nonetheless. Of course, this doesn't even touch the standards compliance issue, which hopefully will be a huge focus for IE 8...

5. A lot of the Windows design came at a time when Microsofts mission was simply to have everyone using their product. By impressing the generic one-size-fits-all box of software in front of everyone, they nearly succeeded at their goal. Fortunately, they've since come to realize that they can't force everyone to use the same product. I would note, however, that since the advent of …

Wow, I LOLed.

1. Buffer Overflows are still all over the place. Anyone who knows anything about low level code knows that. People who are only used to Java, .NET managed code, or just about any other interpretted language will typically make the same mistake, whether they be Microsoft fanboys or Linux fanboys, or not even fanboys at all. However, your argument about the security issues doesn't just exist in Microsoft products. A few years ago at one of the Defcons, someone pulled out some 100+ buffer overflows in the Linux kernel, several of them exploitable. Also, Microsoft is putting a lot of money and effort into improving the security of their products, with good results thus far. And their products are often better than the competition.

2. Since they still have about 95% of the desktop OS market, I'd say that vendor lock-in is still working quite well for Microsoft. However, they are starting to work with standards organizations much more than in the past. IE is still a ways behind other browsers in that department, but what other products would you point out?

3. As like point number 1, this argument relies on an ignorant person. Any binary is only compatible with certain architectures for which it was compiled. It's becoming common practice for Linux distros to be based on binary packages, including the kernel. How do they do it? You download the ISO file for your CPU, depending on whether you want 32- or …

If the authoritative figure disagrees with a popular majority on the meaning of a phrase, then who is right? ;) (I agree with the Brits too)

About the blog post, however: why is Microsoft making deals with all the distros? Why not just do one with the OpenOffice team (and similar projects)? Any distro worth it's salt will at least provide the option of using OOo (and similar projects). Or are they using another application for this compatibility fix?

I might try it out if I hear enough good things, but so far I've seen more comments about Vista-ish resource usage

I still find that I get a lot of blurry images when I don't take time to stop and wait for the camera to catch up. I think thi s new device would create a true point-and-shoot camera, without the couple seconds of letting the device focus itself.

Small wonder there's so many problems with malware spreading these days...

Vista has many design changes that have been developed over the last several years. It would be silly for Microsoft to not release a new version. While the pricing on Vista is somewhat controversial, its release is a very good thing.

>...the only difference is that microsofts OS is not good enough
>to be seen as any kind of a threat to the rest of the
>computing world.

Windows is a good OS, though it has big resource requirements. Almost all of the non-malware related crashes are caused by 3rd party software (drivers, especially).

>Oh come on. Install a real operating system everywhere
>and the problem will disappear on its own. That's the battle we
>should be fighting, not expecting the law to step in.
Great idea. Got one handy? And are you sure it'll never be compromised? Not to mention that user applications also need to be secure; viruses don't only attack the OS.

Whew, drives are getting huge for laptops. My little 60GB seems so much smaller than it did a few years ago...

I wonder how well the security would work though. If someone were to steal the drive, keeping the encryption keys in hardware (or firmware?) would still allow them to decrypt the data, wouldn't it?

The LiveCD idea just doesn't fit with Gentoo's ideology. The idea of having a Gentoo box that's automatically configured just seems... not Gentoo-ish at all. And as mentioned, Gentoo is not for everyone; rather, it's for the select few...

I think this is great. I doubt that Redhat will be much affected (as pty mentioned), but I'm interested to see how successful it is. Remember, a lot of consumers will be afraid to make the jump, and IMHO the software on Windows is still a lot better. However, the price tag is very appealing, so we may see lowering prices on one side and increasing quality everywhere.

>This makes the process of emailing a bit more formalized,
>since after meeting somebody, I have to add their email address to the
>whitelist before they can contact me. But this is the only effective way of
>completely shutting down spam, and so whitelists are eventually going to
>become the norm. Perhaps email clients will start to have built-in
>functionality to facilitate the management of server-based whitelists. At
>that point, maintaining a white-list will be something that non-technical
>users can do. Once this gets widespread acceptance, there will no longer be
>any point in attempting to spam.

This has huuuge usability issues. Nobody can contact you until you add them to the white list, which would block a huge amount of legitimate email. It would also require a hand-maintained list, which only a few tech-savvy masochists would want to put up with. Even then, someone will likely find a way to break it. Security systems that don't get used are basically worthless.

What about subtle viruses that turn an innocent computer into a spam bot in the background? Those could still originate from the US/EU and nearby connected nations (IIRC, eastern bloc countries are also a large source of spam...). Creating a botnet can't be that hard given the number of exploits and unpatched systems floating around...

Is flash memory able to take the read/write load of a hard drive? I though that flash mem would fade after a few thousand writes, which seems pretty easy to do on a hard drive, what with temporary files and virtual memory. And at only 32GB, they'd have to target a very specific type of customer who doesn't put much on their laptop (figure 10GB for an OS and applications, which is still a pretty thin estimate for the Microsoft line of products, and leaves about 20GB for files, including music, photos, videos, etc...). I'll stick to mechanical storage devices for a while...

Doing this might get some people to switch, but I doubt it will have much effect. There are already other distros that do this (Debian, anyone?), and most of the *buntu users don't really care about OSS if it means a loss of features. Maybe this is a move to try and get the hardware manufacturers to write some open drivers, but it seems like an ineffective way to me.

Activations will likely still work. Afterall, they did say that 3rd parties can still sell licenses. And since they've already dropped support for SP1 (since October, IIRC), this really isn't much of a surprise. If anything it's good that they're moving past a product with known problems and trying to get people to update (although the Vista reqs make that hard on some people).

There's also the possibility that they want to space out the releases of the iPhone and Leopard for various business reasons. Two I can think of would be to: a) let consumers build their wallets back up after the iPhone, and b) to be able to have two large product launches spread out rather than a huge one combining the two (a case where the sum of the the parts is less than the combined total of each part individually).

Yet another reason to be dissatisfied with the people who make our laws (though they know nothing about what the laws concern). Sometimes I feel like I should try getting involved in government, sometimes I feel like I should run away and hide before being hit by the overwhelming ignorance running the country (and not just this one either).

I don't think a browser is a place for integrating social networking. That's just MHO, but it doesn't fit. The reason I don't use Opera is because they have too many integrated features. Firefox's balance between a simple browser, yet customizability with add-ons is very nice.

As to this particular social networking concept, I don't think it would be as successful as, say, Myspace or Facebook. I'm assuming that the browser concept would limit your 'account' to a single box (or at least, you'd have to configure other machines individually). A web-based site has the advantage that it will maintain state, if you will, between user sessions, whether the user logs on to a private or public computer.

I am glad that the folks at Mozilla are still trying to improve the web experience though.

My $.02 ;)

> Huh? The Mac Pro was dual-dual Xeon before now.
But now it's dual quad. I'm not a mac fan, but I don't think that was an option before ;)

That said, any idea how 8 cores performs compared to, say, 2 or 4? All my machines are still single-cores, but it's kind of hard to get more than 4 processes running at once, much less 8. Obviously, there will be some sitations where the extra power will be useful, but this seems like overkill (and extra cost)... :rolleyes:

All the stickers I've seen had 3 levels of compatibility: not compatible, Vista compatible, and Vista Ultimate compatible (or something similar, I forget the exact words). IMHO this case should be thrown out...

yeah, I'd be running Win7 now, except there isn't upgrade support from the RC to the final version. Quite looking forward to the perf boost though.

My Vista install takes absolutely forever to reboot. So I only reboot when I have critical system updates that are being enforced by IT (I'd run it naked as well, but IT again enforces restrictions on that). Seems to avoid the problem satisfactorily, if not ideal.

Approximately 400 GB of music. That's like, I dunno, 30,000 songs? Something like that :p

Your collection has grown since your last post in the thread 2+ years ago...

I'm up to 5218 songs, which is putting me at around 34GB. A lot more of it was legally acquired than when I last posted though ;)

Actually, playing online poker is not illegal in the US as far as I can see. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act is concerned with blocking financial transactions related to gambling, but aimed at banks rather than individuals. There is no federal law banning the act of online gambling. There is plenty online about this issue, much of it rather confusing :)

Assuming this is directed at me, I wasn't referring to federal law, just Washington state. :)

IIRC, playing poker online is now a felony in Washington state. Sorry :P

I don't think the "record" will stand up very long...

I use soda and pop interchangeably. Never coke unless referring to the product by that nickname.

Most of my shopping, for shirts at least, the last couple years has been at recruiting events or morale events. And grabbing free shirts out of the rare box in the hall at work.

For jeans, I go anywhere in town that has something that'll fit me (till lately I was aiming for 30x34, and those just don't exist).

Morale: don't drink and code.

At least, drink responsibly when you code :P

I usually have music playing, though sometimes just to provide background noise and a beat. If I'm trying to solve a problem, I'll usually pace, walk around the office or my apartment (my gf gets a kick out of it when I randomly get up, peruse the kitchen, and then scramble to the whiteboard with an inspiration). During my pacing, I'll often get sidetracked (I think I might have ADD) and end up forgetting my solution a good portion of the time. Then I pace back to a whiteboard or some paper and re-solve it.

For your signature, you need to go to your profile to remove it. Thanks :)

I can't narrow it down to 3. But Hellsing was in there somewhere.

There's probably a setting where you rotated the screen. Depending on your graphics card, there should be a control program in the Control Panel where you can reset the setting.

Please remove the link in your signature. I'd wager it violates the rules.

I see, anyone have any good experiences with Vista SP1?

I've had no issues with it. It hasn't saved my life yet, but I've not had a reason for it to :P

Same thing happened to me when I found QC. Here's a list of comics I regularly read:

http://questionablecontent.net/
http://xkcd.com/
http://drmcninja.com/
http://www.thenoobcomic.com/index.php
http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/
http://www.insertlifehere.net/
http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php

MS now wants AOL

I'd heard about Facebook, but not AOL. What is this company coming to? :(