Glass panels: what OS?

C J Campbell wrote:

You are going to die if your MX-20 fails?

That was in a Futurama episode. They'd gone back in time to a point before
GPS. As the ship approached Earth, warnings sounded. No GPS, Navigation
failing, the ship was going to crash. "Not if I can help it", says Leela
the pilot. Then the engines power down. "Oh. I guess I can't."

Yep. The GPS is that important.

Laugh

- Andrew

Peter Duniho wrote:

Yes, they have. And it will cost them a lot of money, because now every
user that winds up wanting to do something that the firewall won't allow by
default (because it locks down the system by default) will cost Microsoft
money so that they can have their questions answered because they can't be
bothered to RTFM.

Microsoft charges for user support. They'll *make* money on this deal.

George Patterson
None of us is as dumb as all of us.

"G.R. Patterson III" wrote in message
...
Microsoft charges for user support. They'll *make* money on this deal.

First of all, they only charge for phone support. Secondly, even with the
charge, product support is not a profit center.

I can't tell if your tongue is in cheek, but if not, you're way off base.

Pete

Greg Copeland wrote:
On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 13:09:44 +0000, David Reinhart wrote:

[snip SCO stuff]


Greg, David -- I've got a SCO box at work (which, fortunately
someone else worries about). However, as is wont to happen with
a large organization over many years, we've lost the source code
for a critical component (FORTRAN and C). Which means we're living
with static code that customers need updated but we can't do it.

Do either of you (or anyone else out there) know of any
decompilers for Fortran or C on the SCO? It's an intel box,
latest version of SCO OS.

*help!*

thanks

PS: remove the "blackhole" to respond privately or post here if
there's not too much opposition.

"C J Campbell" wrote in message
...

Now, I know a lot of Windows users. I realize that most computer admin
types
have real problems with trusting the general public with anything more
complicated than an Etch-A-Sketch, but I tend to believe that the general
public is a little smarter than that. All the home users I know have
personal firewalls, anti-virus software, etc.

Considering that something like over 80% of "general public" people run
their internet connection with no firewall and no virus protection, that's
interesting.

The vulnerable computers that I have seen are the office computers which
are
maintained by so-called professional administrators who have turned off
all
these protections for their own convenience.

Really? How many have you seen?

"C J Campbell" wrote in message
...

Now, I know a lot of Windows users. I realize that most computer admin
types
have real problems with trusting the general public with anything more
complicated than an Etch-A-Sketch, but I tend to believe that the general
public is a little smarter than that. All the home users I know have
personal firewalls, anti-virus software, etc.

The vulnerable computers that I have seen are the office computers which
are
maintained by so-called professional administrators who have turned off
all
these protections for their own convenience.


Sounds like CJ is shilling for the local (Washington) company. :~)

In article , Peter Duniho wrote:
Online gaming will be a big area of support, but there are plenty of other
applications that look like end-user client applications but which wind up
hosting at least one "server" port.

I doubt gaming will be a big area of support - all the games I play
online work through my hardware firewall without the need to open any
ports. If you want to run a game _server_ it will affect you, but most
Internet game servers are on co-located boxes because of the bandwidth
requirements. It will affect LAN parties, but since LAN parties tend to
be hosted by geeks anyway, it won't really be a problem.

There are very few end user applications that need to listen on a port.

By blaming Microsoft only, you are starting to sound like those rabid
anti-Microsoft people CJ was talking about. Microsoft had genuine economic
motivation to make their operating system easier for dumb people to get
working and it's unreasonable to lay all (or even most) of the blame at
their feet for catering to their audience.

I'm not blaming them for catering to their audience, they could have
easily done that without leaving so many services the vast majority of
users don't use open and vulnerable to attack without lessening the
usability of the system. Windows XP Home Edition, out of the box, is
like a poorly-configured *server* and it's supposed to be a home user's
OS.
It's not just Microsoft, it's the PC manufacturers. It often takes them
forever to pre-patch their default load of Windows with the security
updates Microsoft puts out. It wouldn't surprise me if PCs are still
shipping without Service Pack 1. Machines we recently got had SP1 but no
critical patches, which have been out for quite some time.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

In article , C J Campbell wrote:
Actually, it is home users that tend to use those services the most, for
things like on-line gaming and such.

Umm, I play rather too many online games than is healthy, but I've never
needed to use the services in question (for example, RPC and LSASS, two
recently exploited services in Windows). In fact, my hardware firewall
doesn't allow anyone from the Internet to connect to a port on my PC yet
all the games I play work.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

Dylan Smith wrote:

nyone from the Internet to connect to a port on my PC yet
all the games I play work.

I'm not much of a game player (since xtrek became unpopular {8^), but I'm in
an organization which includes a number of game builders. They've
impressed me with their tricks for dealing with firewalls (really: the NAT
boxes most consumers call firewalls). From my rough observation, in fact,
they're ahead of the H.323 industry in that area.

Those softwares often still have issues with firewalls and NAT boxes, though
improvements have been occurring.

- Andrew

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 19:59:01 -0600, Blanche wrote:

Greg Copeland wrote:
On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 13:09:44 +0000, David Reinhart wrote:

[snip SCO stuff]


Greg, David -- I've got a SCO box at work (which, fortunately
someone else worries about). However, as is wont to happen with
a large organization over many years, we've lost the source code
for a critical component (FORTRAN and C). Which means we're living
with static code that customers need updated but we can't do it.

Do either of you (or anyone else out there) know of any
decompilers for Fortran or C on the SCO? It's an intel box,
latest version of SCO OS.

Well, I'm not aware of any SCO specfic decompilers. Chances are, if it's
production code, you guys did not leave debugging information compiled in.
Thusly, this can not be "decompiled" in any meaningful way. But, I don't
know for a fact as I'm not aware of the specific linker details on that
platform (assuming you're not using GNU tools). Just the same, I'd be
amazed if you can not get a disassembler. The problem is, you will of
changed your source langauge from FORTRAN and C to x86 assembler. That
alone is going to create another issue. Then, toss in the scale of
groking all that, ouch!




*help!*


I'm sorry, but I don't think I'll be able to help much. Now, if you want
to rewrite it, I'll be happy to provide contact information. I am a
consultant and would be happy to help you guys explore your options.

Cheers,

Greg Copeland