The point is when there is a system crash or lockup, you expect the the old version of the file, not 0 byte files.

I suspect people beta testing a kernel would run into this often..

You should go read the bug again. If applications keep on re-writing the same file again and again, they will loose data. Here it is for your benefit...

"So the difference between 5 seconds and 60 seconds (the normal time if you're writing huge data sets) isn't *that* big, but for certain crappy applications that apparently write huge numbers of small files in users' home directories. This appears to be the case for both GNOME and KDE. Since these applications are rewriting existing files, and are apparently doing so *frequently*, the chances that files will be lost is high."

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/45

And calm down !!

There was a certain pride associated with being an intellectual/creative/professorial person 300 years ago. Now, people are just out to screw each other. Blame overpopulation, blame materialism. Whatever.

Those that are not interested in money are ALREADY creating stuff and giving it away for free. A lot of times, this is like a hobby or something they do in their spare time. The number of people who are in it for the money hugely outweigh the others. Its just a fact of life.

What would be the relevant ads for them? :D

You cannot pass messages between sessions, otherwise you could mess with another user who was logged into ... y'now his own session. This is such a basic fact, that you probably should reevaluate how you learned windows programming.

Huh? GUID Action? There is no such thing. A GUID is simply a unique ID. It doesn't mean anything till someone gives it meaning. It has been used to identify COM objects, but that has nothing to do with specific actions.

Application developers can request elevation any time and windows cant know what they are going to do with that elevation. Only the user can know that because they chose to do a particular operation which lead to the popup.

Obviously any program can mislead the user. The point is UAC is different from sudo. You can still get sudo like functionality on Vista, its just that its of no use because like I mentioned it elevates the entire process. So you end up running all the current programs as admin anyway. With the UAC annoyance, MS took a huge PR hit so that app devs could fix the apps.

Its not even a claim. Its what they hope will happen. They don't know or claim to know how its going to end up.

This is patently false. UAC dialogs are in their own session so you cant "OK" them programatically.

Ya, you forgot to say its only for certain folders which contain program files. Do users on linux typically copy to ~/bin or ~/sbin everyday?

There is a difference in philosophy here. UAC doesn't define a security boundary. Even if you OK ONE admin operation you might not want to OK another operation from the same program.

sudo basically gives the entire process admin rights and you're screwed if it does anything malicious.

Ya, UAC doesnt help if you just keep on clicking yes so its two different philosophies. It seems to me that MS took a gamble on some middle ground. They hope that application devs would fix apps so they wouldnt need the UAC popups and then in the next windows release they would make everyone by default limited user and use something like sudo.

They started the OS layering task long ago. MinWin was just one demonstration of that. (40 meg core - no dependencies) Watch out for the Microsoft-Windows-System-*-L1-1-0.dll files in Win7 . ;)

Huh? The NX flag is already used by all the modern operating systems. If you enable Data Execution Prevention on XPSP2+ , the OS will crash any app that tries to execute "data". (A simple Instruction pointer on heap check)

Storing / creating the string would be slower. You would have to count the tokens in the string before you could store it.

So you're saying the test of a true pirate would be someone who downloads/uploads illegal software/media but never uses it himself? Stick it to the man..

This is what the OP defined it as

This is such a loose definition that it would seem each and every operating system that supports kernel mode programming would fall under this category. You have 100% raw control on any OS in kernel mode. You can do anything you want if you understand the h/w specs and how to communicate with the h/w. There is nothing that can stop you. If you encounter DRM in the display driver, its pretty simple - write your own kernel mode driver. (we already established pre-req that you know how to speak to the h/w)

You can only do so _BECAUSE_ someone has already written the code (aka tools) necessary for you to execute certain modules/programs/patches/drivers whatever. You are still not in control. You're merely the Gate Keeper of what you let execute. This definition is very ambiguous. Unless you are in charge of the actual kernel mode process that interacts with the hardware all you're doing is handing over control to helper functions.

Why are we heading towards a closed-open source argument? This is offtopic.

Jeez. The engine/otehr car components are _NOT_ modifiable while the car is running. (unless you chip your car or do something out of the ordinary i.e. not what average consumers buy)

OTOH, With computers you can decide anything from which pointers go into which register or which stack variable gets loaded when and where or how much memory a particular program should be able to access, each of these decisions is possible on the fly. You can unload a shared library if you don't like its location and rebase it in memory, etc. You get the picture.

Hmm.. then you're using an awfully funny definition of control.

Under your definition of control, You just choose what executes, but you have no control over what the piece of code actually does (since you didn't write it, how are you sure it does what it says it does?). If it does what it says it does, then all is good, if not you just offloaded the trust onto a piece of code you didn't write and expect it to do the task X.

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