Microsoft 'Trustworthy Computing' Turns 10 185
gManZboy writes "Bill Gates fired off his famous Trustworthy Computing memo to Microsoft employees on Jan. 15, 2002, amid a series of high-profile attacks on Windows computers and browsers in the form of worms and viruses like Code Red and 'Anna Kournikova.' The onslaught forced Gates to declare a security emergency within Microsoft, and halt production while the company's 8,500 software engineers sifted through millions of lines of source code to identify and fix vulnerabilities. The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million. Today, the stakes are much higher. 'TWC Next' will include a focus on cloud services such as Azure, the company says."
"Trustworty" if you trust Micro$oft (Score:2)
It's true that Win 7 is a step ahead for windoze systems. It' practically workable! That is if you happen to like the way it works, because to tweak it even just a bit, you need to either be an expert or then buy a customising software.
But "Trustworthy Computing" has much more heinous objectives than making your windoze box more secure. It wants to make UEFI standards so that no other OS's can be run on a machine that uses M$ OS. It wants to make listening to your own music dependent on the presence of a TP
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That, or your completely unsubstantiated premises are wrong. And personally I can't see why a declining company, with a reputation as bad as MS, would entertain the notion of further alienating users by further locking down their platform against the users' interests, so that really just leaves the false premise possibility.
Made up numbers (Score:3)
The profession of inventing numbers has always intrigued me. The article says, "The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million." Well, sure they can figure out how much money they usually make in a time frame, and how much money they didn't make during this time frame, and BAM you've got a number. But that number, $100,000,000, just seems a bit too ... round. It seems like someone said, "Hey, call the department that makes up numbers. We need one that's not so small it seems insignificant but not so big no one believes it. Not too cold, not too hot. Not too lumpy, not too soft. Something that's juuussssssttt right." Which is certainly a shorter route to 'news' than actually doing the work to figure out what it actually cost. It also sounds like something a 7 year old would say on the playground in a screaming match about fathers' occupations, "OH? Yeah?! Well! My dad works for Microsoft and they lost a hundred million dollars!"
And how can they know that's what it would have been? Maybe that was the month, had they asked, that Apple would have sold out to Microsoft. But they didn't ask and no one will ever know. Would have been more than a hundred million dollars, for sure.
Yes, wildly off topic, but it's the crazy shit that goes through my brain.
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Well, back of the envelope, 8,500 employees, times 100/hr times three weeks ( 120 hours) and you have 102 million. Labor costs alone could easily account for it.
So, if the average engineer spent three weeks searching, and
You know what makes everything more secure? (Score:2)
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WOW,
you posted that entire comment in under 1 minute. You sir win an internet.
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WOW,
you posted that entire comment in under 1 minute. You sir win an internet.
He could be a subscriber or saw the article in the firehose.
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Not a shill at all (Score:1, Troll)
A new user profile with a very fast first pro-MS post about the successes of MS and Windows? Can't possibly be a shill. I'm actually curious whether these people are paid for this stuff or they're just insecure MS employees with nothing better to do.
Like them or not, at least you don't see Google and Apple stooping to these levels.
Re:Not a shill at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Shill or not, he has a point. Security within Windows and Internet Exploder have improved over the years. It may not be all wine and roses but it's not as bad as it once was.
Of course, there still is a long way to go...
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> Shill or not, he has a point. Security within Windows and Internet Exploder have improved over the years.
How could it not? Alternate answer: Test by: Windows still exists as a product.
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Perhaps not, just relating my own experiences. About that time I bought a software firewall, and about a year later a hardware firewall, which mostly fixed the problem.
I don't slaver over every new version of Winders the company craps out; didn't switch to XP until SP1. Is that the version that included the firewall?
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Never used XP myself, just had the misfortune of re-installing it from pre-SP2 (it's when they apparently re-did, as the other reply noted the capability was there, and enabled it by default [wikipedia.org]) media a few times. Within less than a minute after connecting to the net (routers weren't standard accesories yet, so no NAT) you'd get the fucking restart countdowns [wikipedia.org]. S
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> Within less than a minute after connecting to the net (routers weren't standard accesories yet, so no NAT) you'd get the fucking restart countdowns [wikipedia.org].
I really don't get it. In some cases (smaller cable and dsl companies in the boonies) they're *still* connecting some poor retiree's PC directly to a modem and hence to the raw internet. My mother in law, for instance, just recently switched from dial-up to DSL (I know I know, DSL is passe now, but that's what was available in her area).
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One might say I overreacted a tad; the product of so many bad experiences, but on reflection, I don't think so. Agreed the router could have exploits, but I *know* my routers thoroughly, where in contrast, I'm never quite sure what Windows firewall is doing, except when it's denying service of some kind that I need...
I think Windows firewall is a very necessary component, and I do keep it turned on (*mostly* turned on -- if you turn on every security feature you can't get anything done) but I don't trust A
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Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:5, Insightful)
For the past decade, Microsoft has been where it is now: equal or worse. Internet Explorer shares the browser market with Chrome. Windows 7 shares the desktop market with XP and OS X. XBox shares the console market with PS3 and Wii.
Being as good as your competitors means that when something bad does happen, like a new zero-day exploit in the wild that makes the headlines, the company drops back to second place. Regardless of its current improved security, Microsoft will never regain lost reputation until they produce a series of spectacular products that are consistently better than any competitor. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:4, Interesting)
I know replying to myself is bad form, but after posting I looked up the stock growth for Microsoft and its competitors [google.com]. Over the past 10 years, Microsoft is more stagnant than Slashdot (the site, not Geeknet as a company).
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What's wrong with a solid, stable company? Except of course if you are doing stock trading you want lots of highs and downs, but otherwise it shouldn't matter. Stock price has little to do with how good company is doing, other than revenue wise. In Microsoft's case it just shows that Microsoft is a solid company and will stay stable as it is for many years.
Okay then... tell me, what don't you like about Microsoft? Or, what do you consider the biggest weakness(es) of either the company itself or any of their products? I believe reasonable people can acknowledge they are not perfect on the basis that no company is perfect.
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Of the top of my head, I hate that Microsoft killed The Courier [gizmodo.com] tablet and didn't see the potential it had. It was the first tablet that really got me excited, and in my opinion it was bad decision not to go further with it.
So you regret that their amazing genius was not applied to tablets? The only thing wrong with the Courier is that it didn't happen?
Do you believe there are any weaknesses in existing products that I could go purchase today?
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Weaknesses? Most likely, as all products have. But something that really bugs me? No, not in the products I use, at least. Of course you can always improve something, but I can't really think of specific thing that I would hate. I was going to point out that I've always thought IE is somewhat slow to use, but I before I posted I quickly tested IE9 and man has that improved, both performance and UI wise. Since it also supports HTML5 and other standards I don't think there's anything to complain about it. Firefox and Chrome like addons would be nice touch, but I personally use Opera anyway.
Knowingly or not, I leave that up to you and wouldn't presume to guess ...
But you truly come across like someone who is afraid to piss off his boss.
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Since companies do not pay dividends the people who own the stocks do not make a single cent on the stock they purchase.
Actually, Microsoft declared a $0.20 dividend per common share in October. Over four quarters, that would be $0.80 a share. The stock price is in the high 20s, so that is about a 3% annual return.
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That's not true at all. I remember those days and DirectX was a steaming load of crap. It just happened to be what MS was using at the time to make it less convenient to program cross platform.
Windows was really popular amongst gamers for the simple reason that it was the largest platform and attracted the most developer attention. It wasn't any better than the other options at that point, in many ways it was inferior. But, MS had the ability to crowd out the competition and get its OS installed on the vast
Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:4, Insightful)
DirectX 9 was released 9 years ago, and hasn't been replaced because of the stagnation of Windows. OpenGL is cross-platform, and with OS X's adoption, sees growing use. New versions of DirectX do not add any vital features over old versions, so Microsoft still has no clear advantage in that field.
Windows does currently hold the gaming market, but OS X is gaining ground, with the porting of Steam and generally-growing user base. A multi-platform release is now an important goal for new games, just as it was in the early 90's.
Apple is also providing a platform, for which Microsoft has yet to provide a comparable answer. They call it iOS, and it's now the hip new place for budding programmers to make their debut into professional development.
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DirectX rules the gaming world, and doesn't need to add `vital features` as it already has them.
That's my point. There's nothing new that's really useful, so there's no real reason to upgrade to DX 10 or 11, which leads back to my original claim that Microsoft hasn't been really innovative in about 10 years.
Multi-platform releases have always been important.
Except from the mid-90's to mid 2000's, where new games were available almost exclusively for Windows. Mac versions were much rarer, and were hardly ever seen in major retailers. If you had a mac and wanted to play a game, mail-order was the best chance you had to get it. Barring that, Mac users we
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They also loathe open source. Really loathe it. Take, as an e
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I don't get why people have a problem with UAC, I've found it to be only a bit more annoying that the Linux equivalent. It's not like with Vista where it would be asking for a click every 5 minutes or so.
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Because there's still a lot of software that doesn't work correctly if UAC is enabled.
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Then the vendors of that software need to be kicked in the ass hard.
LOL.. good luck with that.
What's the point of running Windows if you have to replace all your old software with new versions?
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I agree completely, but if you recall XP actually had to remove security features because of stubborn vendors wanting to write insecure software. Vendors of all kinds hate doing things right.
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I don't get why people have a problem with UAC, I've found it to be only a bit more annoying that the Linux equivalent. It's not like with Vista where it would be asking for a click every 5 minutes or so.
It happens a lot because of poorly-designed old software (or poorly-designed new software).
It regularly gets hidden when it pops up, so you don't realise that you've been waiting ten minutes for something to happen because UAC was waiting for you to do something.
It displays meaningless gibberish like 'Do you want to allow program HappyKittyScreenSaver to Access local disk?' so even techies don't know whether they should allow it.
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Eh, I ran XP as a standard user. Let me tell you, UAC (even on Vista) was a god-send. After the hell of RunAs (which can only be used on executables; if you wanted to do something like install a .MSI you had to manually elevate msiexec.exe and pass the .MSI as a parameter) I thought Vista's UAC was the best thing since multi-user Windows. I've used NT at least lightly since 4 and first used it primarily with 2000, but mostly as Admin because it was too much of hassle otherwise (sometimes as "Power User" -
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Like so many people, you completely misunderstand what UAC is. UAC does not provide security, in fact, UAC's sole function is to lessen security. UAC is what GIVES you the ability to do things.
The purpose of UAC is the same as sudo, gives you privileges you wouldn't otherwise have. Turning off UAC would mean you couldn't do anything that required any privileges. What most people think
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For example ?
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Windows 7 removed the prompting for a lot of tasks, such as attaching a debugger to a process spawned by the debugger itself (which kind of makes sense really, the debugger does technically own that process).
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The purpose of UAC is the same as sudo, gives you privileges you wouldn't otherwise have. Turning off UAC would mean you couldn't do anything that required any privileges. What most people think
You are seriously mistaken. User Account Control works by *stripping* your the process token of certain "powerful privileges". UAC does NOT elevate your privileges beyond what is already granted to you through group direct assignments or groups memberships. Once you elevate through an UAC prompt it merely gives you those rights back. That is *very* different from Linux/Unix/sudo where you essentially change effective user to the all-powerful, unrestricted root account.
Think about that for a second. Think ab
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They actually do it for (to them) legitimate reasons - software related and habit being the two largest.
One of the titles I help support was written back in 1999, in order for it to save changes it requires admin access, the program that is. With Windows 7 there are around 6 or 7 different ways to give a program admin access, without the user having to log in as an admin. The easiest is right on the compatibility tab.
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"1) While most users do not need admin access and by default Vista and 7 do not give it to you, I still see people assigning admin rights to themselves and deactivating UAC as a prerequisite to using the computer, which puts the lie to your top two paragraphs."
That's an issue of users trading security for convenience, not an inherent weakness of the OS.
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I can't imagine having to (often remotely) support 700+ PCs without having local admin rights via ACL, but then my experience on Unix-based systems (outside my Ubuntu/Mint desktop at home) is admittedly limited.
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Never heard of 'su', I take it ?
Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:4, Insightful)
To rebut specifically:
1) While most users do not need admin access and by default Vista and 7 do not give it to you, I still see people assigning admin rights to themselves and deactivating UAC as a prerequisite to using the computer, which puts the lie to your top two paragraphs.
I still feel Microsoft needs to be given credit for implementing the UAC by default to begin with. Nobody can drop the single-user paradigm that's dominated consumer-grade computing for the past 30 years overnight and expect end-users (let alone developers) to go along with it swimmingly. At home, XP was typically the first experience most users had with a true multi-user environment to begin with.
UAC makes the best of a bad situation that is not strictly (or at least not exclusively) Microsoft's fault. You'd sooner eliminate spam before you'd train all computer users to use runas.
always try to compare Firefox without plugins with IE. IE has no facility for blocking scripts and flash selectively that doesn't cost more than a browser is worth. Noscript and ABP are a few mouse clicks away. You can have all the sandboxing in the world, but not letting the script run in the first place is the only effective defense against drive-by malware installs.
NoScript is still relatively unique to Firefox, but IE9 has most (if not all) of the capabilities of AdBlock Plus out-of-the-box. You can subscribe to your favorite flavor of EasyList without installing any additional add-ons, third-party or otherwise.
Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:5, Insightful)
While the OP is clearly a shill, your refutations ring hollow.
Using Firefox's own usage stats, only about 0.5% of users use NoScript. Comparing that tiny segment to the standard IE install makes no sense.
Then, on the other side, you focus on people who turn off UAC, and ignore the hundreds of millions who leave it on.
Basically, from each group, you're cherry picking whichever segment best supports your argument, even when that segment is in no way representative.
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Where did you see these statistics? I am curious about other addons/extensions like AdBlock Plus.
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While the OP is clearly a shill, your refutations ring hollow.
Where did this widespread belief the Microsoft pays shills to defend its honor on /. come from? Did everyone crank their tinfoil hats up to 11 or something?
I don't think Slashdot is influential enough to have any impact on Microsoft's business, and as a practical matter, if there is a cadre of professional shills, you don't think somebody would spill the beans? How big a conspiracy is needed?
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This guy created a new account purely to post in this thread, and based on the timestamps, he apparently had his post typed up ahead of time, just waiting for a Microsoft security related story to come along. That definitely sets off my shill-dar.
It's pretty well established that companies do hire shills. They aren't directly on the companies payroll, but are instead subcons of marketing companies hired by the company that wants the astroturfing done. I've read "exposés" by such shills in the past,
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Funny, my IE9 install has Flash blocking and Ad blocking.
For Flash, I use the built-in Flash-blocking (site-wide basis, not the fine-grained of Firefox FlashBlock, but c'est la vie). Tools -> Manage Add-ons -> Shockwave Flash Object -> Remove all sites. It will now operate on a whitelist basis, not even loading the plugin until you approve the page. The prompt appears on the Information Bar (at the bottom of the screen).
Too annoying to have the Info Bar, or want to block *all* ActiveX proactively?
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So this is your only comment with a new account?
So does it hurt to shill that hard?
I agree with the top 3 paragraphs, but please don't spam forums.
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He is apparently a paid cheer lady ...
He says he doesn't work for Microsoft, that's another person with the same name.
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> Windows 7 is a very good OS, actually so good that Microsoft really needs to step up their game in windows 8 so that W7 won't become the new XP.
Why would that be a bad thing?
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Right, that was kind-of my point. All we as users want is a stable environment in which to work. At some point we need to get off the upgrade merry-go-round.
Results show it's not enough (Score:2)
Nice advertisement above however it's a little misplaced. Can we get to details about what is happening now instead of h
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> Interestingly it was also one of the reasons why people initially hated Vista.
Initially?
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Thank you for including that dollar sign in place of S every time you abbreviate Microsoft. Not only did I not realize they were a for-profit company, I also did not realize the depth of your creativity. You have truly opened my eyes. Now let's see if we can change the characters used to spell Open Source to hint at Stallman. Maybe give it a beard and surround it with flies?
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Since this is Slashdot, I expect the above well-written post to be marked flamebait within 10 minutes, because it dared to speak well of Microsoft.
Yet oddly enough, as I write it's modded "4, Interesting".
Slashdot doesn't suffer from groupthink nearly so bad as a lot of people like to (group?)think it does
.
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And why do you believe that Windows/Apple/BSD admins are more professional?
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David
Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:4, Interesting)
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The idea that windows 7 is the best thing since xp is silly because it fails to take in account all the exact same issues you have had since XP and windows NT.
Back in c.o.l.a. days (is that still around?), the Windows fans went through endless rounds of "Yeah, the last version of Windows was crap, but *this* one is the best OS money can buy!" New release, same old song.
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That's the thing Win 7 is a good, but not great OS, and is solidly mediocre in most respects.
It's far more secure than it used to be but still lacks things like security levels and separate configuration files like has been the case for many, many years with Linux and *BSD. For as long as I've used FreeBSD I've had security levels to work with, and one program doesn't need to be able to write to a configuration file for another. If it's needed then I, myself, have to make it happen.
Windows has gotten a lot
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That's the thing Win 7 is a good, but not great OS, and is solidly mediocre in most respects.
It's far more secure than it used to be but still lacks things like security levels and separate configuration files like has been the case for many, many years with Linux and *BSD. For as long as I've used FreeBSD I've had security levels to work with, and one program doesn't need to be able to write to a configuration file for another. If it's needed then I, myself, have to make it happen.
Windows has gotten a lot better, but it is indeed mediocre.
??? Normally I don't think much of Windows security, but the OS has had most of the ACLs and other security level systems it has needed since NT3 -- that's not really the problem. The problem is that nobody uses these features. Windows 7 made that a bit better by forcing programmers to use some of them, or end up with code that wouldn't work. Full use of mandatory access controls, ring levels, etc. that are ALREADY THERE would significantly improve security. Unfortunately, most people don't understand h
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The problem is that most OSes will shine in some area and the only areas in which Windows shines are the direct result of years of monopoly abuse. In short the only reason I use Windows at all is because I paid for a copy and the only reason I paid for a copy is that it's hard to find decent laptops for a reasonable price that haven't at some point paid for a license.
For MS the fact that Win 7 is regarded as good or mediocre is something that they should be celebrating after 15 years of garbage releases.
But
Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:4, Insightful)
the only areas in which Windows shines are the direct result of years of monopoly abuse
I'm not convinced of this personally. I personally, and from observation of those around me, find that the areas where Windows shines are that it's easy to use (although there is inevitably some confusion each new release which changes things around for no real reason), and that software built for one version rarely breaks on a newer one. By contrast, OS X will tell you to piss off if you want to run old PPC software (I can still run the 25 year old Commander Keen on Windows 7. I cannot say the same for OS X), and Linux - well, let's just call it unpredictable and leave it at that. It may not refuse to run it, but it may not run correctly either.
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(I can still run the 25 year old Commander Keen on Windows 7. I cannot say the same for OS X)
I call bullshit, windows 7 has no dos stuff in it. The only way to run commander keen on windows 7 is to use dosbox to do it (If you purchase it new from id software, it comes bundled with dosbox to run it) the very same open source dos box which can be used on both mac and linux.
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That's nice. Now tell me what software I can use to run PPC applications on Lion? Wait, there is none? Oh, that's terrible.
Besides, 32-bit Windows 7 can and does run 16-bit DOS applications. 64-bit does not because the processor is physically incapable of running 16-bit code in 64-bit mode, and there's perfectly reasonable alternative solutions freely available (ex. DOSBox) so there's no need to write an emulation layer.
Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:4, Informative)
Besides, 32-bit Windows 7 can and does run 16-bit DOS applications.
No it cannot, try running something like kknd, syndicate wars or the like on 32-bit windows 7, it won't even try to start up let alone work properly.
Things like that need proper dos (or an emulated environment like dosbox, or a VM with dos on it), which no version of windows has supplied since windows ME.
As for running ppc apps while having lion installed, here [applehelpwriter.com] provides a few solutions. Mostly it is either virtualization or dual booting.
But hey, dual booting win98/win2k or win98/winXP was how people remedied wanting to play their dos games too, and you've already said that work-arounds such as dos box and virtualization are acceptable.
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In addition to, not because of.
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So Unix has ASLR, DEP, compiler exception handling bounds checking?
VMS is the only other OS that has DEP support fully. XP has partial support by SP 2.
Checklist wise Windows is the most secure kernel
I tend to doubt that. Have you checked out PaX and Grsecurity? I personally use Gentoo Hardened [gentoo.org]. It's a source-based distro so everything in userland is also built with SSP [ibm.com] which provides the bounds checking (one nice thing about having the source). It also includes support for SELinux (see the Resources section of that first link I provided).
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You are not their demographic, the "luser" is. As a developer, I would hope that you would understand the need to cater to the users, instead of maligning them for not being as knowledgeable as yourself.
As an aside, the issues that I recall everyone complaining about back in the day were blue screening and degradation over time. I can't speak to your experience but I haven't need a reformat since g
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If an operating system marketed at users gives users a better interface, how exactly is this a bad thing?
If only Windows 7 did...
Instead we got a brain-dead reimplementation of the 'Start Menu', 'Libraries' that confuse the heck out of non-techies I know, the wacky new taskbar, shinier windows, and... UAC.
I would agree that UAC was a good idea, but the implementation is awful. The best part is when you start an application, switch to another application, sit there for ten minutes wondering why the first application didn't start up, and then eventually spot the hidden UAC window on the task bar so you can switc
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You are not their demographic, the "luser" is. As a developer, I would hope that you would understand the need to cater to the users, instead of maligning them for not being as knowledgeable as yourself.
I do appreciate your point. Much of the "maligning" of users is unwarranted. But there is one legitimate form of it that occurs not because they are ignorant, but because they actively resist learning. Do I expect them to become expert technicians overnight? Of course not. But it's just not natural to use a system for five years and know nothing more about it than when you started. That ... that takes work.
It's the most natural thing in the world to slowly pick up new tidbits of knowledge with incr
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Pet peeves with what limited windows 7 use I've had (generally integrating it into others networks)
1 - lack of NFS support unless you use ultimate/enterprise editions, most machines don't come with ultimate, so that is $189 AUD per copy straight up just to get it to work decently with network shares. (and no, smb is not an adequate solution)
2 - The control panel reimagination, no windows, I don't want you to try to fix the problem for me, I know the problem, but let me find the dialog to fix it myself pleas
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How many home users need NFS?
I'd say most of the people who have older model embedded media playback devices that only support it, that is why I have had to go that route on several home networks.
How many are running a home built NAS?
Mostly people with home theater setups and the like, I wouldn't call it every mom and pop but among pc enthusiasts (and as you mention, even gamers) it is extremely common now compared to ten years ago.
Shock! Actually use a server or enterprise software for server or enterprise features?
I'd hardly consider nfs support an enterprise feature, considering windows xp had it. The features listed should all be standard fare for opera
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What are these devices ? Why would any "embedded media playback device" preference NFS over SMB, when the proportion of the target audience who even had an NFS-capable data source would be fractions of one percent ?
NFS, outside of serious (as in: all the way
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What are these devices ? Why would any "embedded media playback device" preference NFS over SMB, when the proportion of the target audience who even had an NFS-capable data source would be fractions of one percent ?
I cannot remember the brand off hand it was a company that specializes in such embedded devices on the higher end of the scale. It did technically support smb but even in the menu system it forewarned that the performance penalty to do so was pretty nasty and that hd stream throughput may suffer for it. Tried smb then nfs and there was a night and day difference, so nfs stayed. They were quite nice devices though and if interested I can post what it was after i visit them next.
No, your bitching is about how Microsoft isn't supporting your niche requirements.
Almost everyones niche is som
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Name one, because I'd set up sandisk and Cowon and Rio and just about every kind of MP3 and PMP known to man and I have NEVER actually seen on that preferred NFS
Here you go [cnet.com.au] it's a fine player that plays anything format you could really want, but smb performance is abysmal, nfs is the only way to go for hd streaming over the network.
And as for NAS? that's what those cheapo HP WHS boxes are for. Its a HELL of a lot cheaper and unlike some jury rigged homebuilt it will actually be efficient and is actually BUILT for that job, its also great for media and file serving since it has a ...drumroll...server OS!
Oh, you mean like the dedicated cheapo home storage boxes that were already installed when i arrived? it handled four disks at the time and achieved a maximum throughput over the network of 4mb/sec. When I made the linux nas (with the only new hardware being an extra plain sata controller, rest he already had) he wanted some more stora
Re:Microsoft Succeeded (Score:4, Informative)
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Of course 2GB of ram only costs $30 at the time, and XP SP2+ basically needed at least 512MB, preferrably 1GB anyways (and standard machines had been shipping with 1GB for a couple of years). So yeah, there some people who were affected by that, but most weren't
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Having 2 GB cost $30 does no good for people whose computers could only handle three 256 megabyte RAM cards.
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While there might be a few such systems out there (typically laptops, and they weren't limited to specific sizes of memories, rather they were limited by the density of the memory, thus could take larger sized sticks when they became available in lower densities), most computers simply didn't have those limitations. If anything, 2GB was the limitation for anything built in the XP era, which was typically a chipset limitation.
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Windows users also weren't adjusted to having to work under non-admin account.
by using a non-admin account for the last couple of years i learned that the system is much less secure this way.
on windows the only program that could auto update was google chrome. firefox, flash, thunderbird, java, etc, all required manual update checks (which a non too computer savvy user, like my wife, won't do). firefox actually shows that there's an update available when chacking manually, but requires to be "run as administrator" to actually install it.
same problem for the mac. system update checks won't happen automatically in non-admin accounts.
eventually i got pissed of having to update everything manually and switched my accounts to admin.
Not having a centralized package manager to easily and automatically take care of these things would drive me crazy if I ever had to use Windows. I really don't know if Windows could ever have a proper Linux-style package manager able to take care of the entire OS and all applications by itself. Even the freeware applications often have licenses that don't explicitly allow you to redistribute them, making it extremely difficult or impossible to operate a comprehensive central repository. Each little appl
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Really ? Can you elaborate on which awesome features and capabilities these "other operating systems" have that Windows lacks ?
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How about the basic security issues:
they didn't provide a crack to the encryption for the entire operating system.
So yeah, I'd consider that a security feature.
Do we have to go through this every time someone mistakenly believes that windows somehow has more features and capabilities than every other enterprise solution?
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What does that even mean ?
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It means that Microsoft has provided the government (not just NSA) for their perusal all of their encryption (and decryption) keys for windows - so information can be readily decoded at the OS level even if you use bitlocker or other full-disk encryption solutions, and that this has been going on since Windows XP.
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... and you phone gets malware and either stops working or starts calling phone sex lines in Butfukistan.