Interesting idea, but it's worth pointing out that time is a significant factor, and is not directly inter-changable with money. It's more of an inversely proportional relationship. More money equals less and less time taken.

Sometimes you're really, REALLY, just out of time, and absolutely have to ship, and then where do you draw the line? You can't find and fix every single bug ever in a finite time frame (I hope I don't need to discuss the halting problem with the Slashdot crowd, here).

That said, acting the way these researches are is never going to improve the situation for either side in this argument. While it may feel good to the self-righteous slashdot crowd, that's cold comfort to the teams who were planning how to juggle security/features going forward, and had the rug ripped out from under them and now have to rush out a fix with less testing than is normally done. (This is precisely what a HotFix is, an under-tested patch that doesn't meet the full-standard for "we support this 100%"). For a company that prides itself on back-compat, and selling to companies that do their own staged-rollout, a month or two's delay before the release is minor. And some bugs are just less important.

I wouldn't be surprised if the bugs that had been 'sat on for a year' are some of the more obscure special case bugs, and aren't part of the common configuration, and that there's some grandstanding going on, which ignored prioritization completely, just because it was these researcher's claim to fame.

Right. Except that Windows 7 is selling 30 million units a month, and has already sold 150 million since it released. less than a year ago. IE9 is slated to be released in 2011. By then, XP won't have been purchasable for computers for almost a year, and will be on its way out both in market-share, and support.

And good riddance, it's 10 years old. Time to move on to newer stuff and get useful things done instead.

Many? Ati has support. Nvidia has support. Intel has support. For what the browser is doing, you'd have to struggle to find a video chipset that *isn't* supported.

Not to mention that your average video chipset can do the same job with much less power usage, since it's more heavily optimized for pipe-line based jobs. And since you can set things up in video memory, and then leave it there, you save on system resources, since you're using less of the system's bus to transfer rendered content.

And let's not forget what we can do with the cpu power since it's now freely available.

Pushing stuff off to the video card is just an overall win.

So... have you tested that in the ie9 tech preview and filed a bug if it hasn't already been fixed, yet? or are you just uselessly shaking your fist from a basement?

Uh, Dude. They demoed this working at a convention a few months ago ON A NETBOOK. Popular consumer-grade netbooks have been out for >6 months that support all of this just fine. And, of course, the netbook that can't utilize accelerated graphics for IE9 ALSO cannot do it in flash or anything else with decent performance. Such a netbook is going to be slow no matter what you try to run (as people quickly found out with non-nvidia ion based netbooks.)

You do realize that that's what Direct2D and DirectWrite essentially are, right? Ways to render lines and fonts using the hardware instead of software rasterisers? There's no point in making the entire thing an opengl surface, however, when you can create APIs that give you finer-grained control over things than that.

Except that the only way to do so will be to use the standard, w3c provided tags... If other browsers accelerate it to (protip, they're working on that), then that's a win for everyone, no matter what.

We're not talking silverlight here, just plain ole html(5)

What's more, when you buy stuff on an XBox, you effectively get two licenses to the content. One belongs to your gamer-tag, and one is a transferrable copy that you can migrate between your 'home' console. If you're not logged in, anyone using that 'home' console can also use the content. and if you're at a friends place, you can use it on their console while you're logged in (but can't as soon as you log out).

Transferring the license between consoles is a little bit annoying, since you can only do it every 12 months unless there's a repair involved by MS.

Right. Which is why we can totally find references to researchers blocking climate change skeptics from publishing in all of those emails that got leaked, amirite?

Oh, wait. I'm not? There's no reference to them blocking things at all in their personal emails? You'd think you'd at least find some reference to it, wouldn't you... UNLESS THE RELEASE OF THE EMAILS WAS A CONSPIRACY DESIGNED TO HIDE ANOTHER CONSPIRACY!
[dun-dun-dun!!!!!!!!]

Or, you know, you could grow the fuck up. The fame one would gain from publishing sound papers showing that everything is A-OK and discrediting a whole bunch of scientists at their own game would be monumental. The problem is, there's nothing to show that climate science isn't right about the changing climate.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg -- this is interesting commentary on the issue (with references, it's not just blind commentary)

Sure, except we have/had apps that also embed trident. My RSS reader does. Steam used to, but no longer does. The help system does. Any bugs there can also be exploited via any of those vehicles, depending on how targeted you make your attack.

I'm with this guy. If you can afford to, separate the web tier and the database tier physically. Provide extra layers of security on essential stuff at the database tier (additional validation via procedures, etc). Make sure the app keeps a secure write-once log of every transaction that occurs for all players. I'd direct that off to another machine as well, if you can.

You might remember some time back that there was a case where EVE players found a way to essentially cheat to create more resources than the game normally allows (they found out that certain factories would keep getting raw material, even though the material was actually being sent to a different factory, for as many factories as they performed the same trick) the EVE people essentially figured it out, and then rolled back all of the in-game corporations to erase the money made. Something like this is only possible with full logs of every item created and used up and the flow of resources throughout the system.

Actually, there's a better reason to not do anything. The model of drive they use is significantly faster to read data than other more stable models. And since the specs of the system can't change (including data read times for games), then if all other drives are slower, then it can't be changed.

While it still sucks that you can scratch a disc, what i'd prefer to see is an explicit "do you want to copy this to the hard drive" the first time a disc goes in rather than having it hidden away in a menu that some people still don't know exists.

A nematode would be an upgrade from Pauline Hanson. Julia Gillard is not from an extremely racist part of Queensland. Her seat may be in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and as someone who used to live there, they're not high up on the social scale, but they aren't filled with extremely racist people, either.

SPF 70+ and a hat.