Now imagine Ballmer looked at these awful apps like iTunes degrading his platform, and announced all Windows apps must be in C++ or C#.

I'm shocked, shocked to find out people are writing tech columns just for page views.

Yep, right until the NEXT feature comes out that breaks the OS that says it can handle the truth. Now you need TWO "don't lie to me" commands. Repeat ad infinitum.

Yeah, I think this might actually be the literal definition of FUD. We could just go over to UrbanDictionary and add an entry with a link back to this story.

Agreed -- it IS rather bad, but generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN. As Windows vulnerabilities go, this isn't horrible in a practical sense.

Actually, quite a few companies ship laptops in this configuration. It allows them to advertise the 4 GB, and very nearly none of their audience will ever be wise to it. The last time I saw this was with a machine purchased literally two weeks ago. It's now happily churning along with Win7 x64, no functionality missing.

I don't think you quite understand. These people didn't go to some torrent site and download Windows. They took Windows XP, built an illicit distribution with the activation bits etc removed, and sent that around -- probably for money. IOW, they enabled millions of other people to run stolen copies of Windows XP, possibly without even realizing it (third rate vendors have a nasty habit of using these bootleg Windows copies on their machines).

I think there are some subtleties here that are not being correctly addressed. Specifically, what's legitimate from the viewpoint of the kernel, versus what is legitimate from the viewpoint of C.

On these systems it is perfectly valid (and correct) C to define a structure which has the layout of the attached devices and then cast 0 to a pointer to this structure and use that for I/O.

No, it isn't "valid", per se. It is how you get the desired effect, and might work fine on said device -- but it's a blatant violation of the rules of C.

Remember that C, like most languages, makes some very basic assumptions about the underlying platform and require certain things of it. One of these is you can't dereference NULL legally, end of story. From the kernel's point of view, strictly by the rules of the underlying processor and machine, this might be totally legal. But the C standard says quite explicitly that you can't be doing this under any condition. Not only that, it's undefined behavior -- you're in a particularly bad no man's land.

Legal in C and legal on the machine are NOT the same thing. Please remember that difference. C still has rules and assumptions that you have to follow, and when you don't, things like this happen. That's why the code behind this vulnerability is NOT correct. It obeys machine rules but not C's stricter rules.

The FedEx system doesn't handle hand written letters though, does it? You have to do a shipping label for most (all?) packages, with a digital bar code. USPS runs some very powerful OCR systems; maybe they're making the transactions so expensive. Just a thought.

But it's not supposed to be a product! MS --> Research --. It's an architectural experiment, and sure, a lot of projects graduate from Research to an actual product group. The goal is NOT to make something you can take to the open market though. It's a proper research lab, and so of course its stuff is frequently lacking. If it were to be converted to a product, it'd be staffed up with a full team who would spend a year or two -- or seven in the case of some unfortunate victims -- making it viable for public consumption.

He's talking about Eclipse 3.1 because the article has nothing to do with what the title says. It's not about Mono vs Java, even though the author thinks it is. He spends most of his time basically talking about how Debian is garbage (which seems obvious to me but reasonable people can disagree). In fact the article seems to imply that Debian IS Linux, which is broken on several levels.

Oh, cool! Where's the source to iTunes, Quicktime, iPhoto, any piece of iLife, XCode, Safari, iMovie, iDVD, Aperture, and iWork? I've always wanted to see that and I'm so thrilled that since most of the software on a Mac is GPL, most of that is surely available to me.

I worked on a commercial PS3 title (none of that homebrew bull), where the GCC compiler is available as one of the options for the platform. It generates noticeably worse -- mainly longer -- code than is reasonable, and larger x86 code than Visual C++ generates. In turn, the larger code causes a lot of methods not to be inlined, and the cascaded effect (no doubt with caching issues etc thrown in) is notably slower. We're talking maybe 5-10% total here, but 5% because of a subpar compiler is pretty harsh.

Just FYI, an open source reference implementation is NOT a standard, nor does it imply the existence of an open standard. So you may want to mention ACTUAL standards instead.

Additionally, please remember that in a patent, the abstract is not what is being patented. The abstract just provides the rough background for the actual patented invention, which is why it always sounds familiar.