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Comment Re:Wow what idiots....can you make it more confusi (Score 1) 575

And the .NET updaters seem to take a lot more time than regular patches.

That's because the .NET Framework is rebuilding the "assembly cache" (recompiling the runtime library into the processor's assembly language) after an update. In a comment to a Slashdot story a few days ago, I suggested doing this rebuilding in the background, letting the user use native applications in the meantime, and marking managed applications that aren't yet ready to start with an hourglass icon. But another Slashdot user objected that letting the user run anything before the assembly cache finishes would break native applications that start a managed subprocess without user interaction.

How badly do you have to fuck up a language runtime library to make it need monthly updates?

The JavaScript runtime (Firefox or Chrome) needs updates as well. And on Ubuntu, I get plenty of updates to various libraries.

Comment Buy a certificate to retrieve your core dumps (Score 1) 575

but would it kill them to stick a "details" button on the dumbed-down error popup to make it trivial for a techie to ask the user to click it and read out a more useful message?

Microsoft would probably do it the way it does crash reporting, where the user is given the option to automatically send error reports to Microsoft. The developer can retrieve these crash reports by 1. forming a corporation or LLC, 2. buying a certificate from VeriSign or DigiCert in this company's name, and 3. registering with Windows Dev Center Hardware and Desktop Dashboard (formerly Winqual).

Comment Re:Sadly, sounds like I was right (Score 1) 204

Losing Eich is going to be the worst thing to ever happen to Mozilla, mark my words.

How is losing someone that thinks 20% of his employees are subhuman not a good thing? He hates his gay employees. He publicly admitted he is a Nazi that wants to steal their rights. He gave money to a cause that attacks them. Unless you are one of them, how can you defend his kind? Hopefully it won't be that many decades before society has progressed enough to put your kind behind bars to protect the rest of us from your intolerance.

20%? Got a citation for that, or just wishful thinking?

Comment Port to GCC, then ensure no backdoors in GCC (Score 5, Interesting) 171

One way to detect a backdoored compiler to a fairly high certainty is diverse double-compiling, a method described by David A. Wheeler that bootstraps a compiler's source code through several other compilers. For example, GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Visual Studio) should be bit for bit identical to GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Clang) and to GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Intel's compiler). But this works only if the compiler's source code is available. So to thwart allegations of a backdoor in Visual Studio, perhaps a better choice is to improve MinGW (GCC for Windows) or Clang for Windows to where it can compile a working copy of TrueCrypt.

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