The rate of piracy on Windows Vista is lower than its predecessor, and Congress moves to ramp up copyright infringement penalties. Also: Peeling Apple. Microsoft says it's gotten better at securing its products, but some observers question Redmond's perspective. Microsoft is seeing piracy rates for Windows...
Mozilla Europe president explains why having fewer disclosed vulnerabilities doesn't mean Internet Explorer is safer than the open-source Web browser. The Mozilla Foundation is perhaps best known for its Firefox Web browser, an open-source offering that was first developed to go head-to-head with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Tristan...
Microsoft made available for download on December 9 a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of "Astoria," the technology now officially known as ADO.Net Data Services. Pablo Castro, Technical Lead on ADO.Net, has taken to describing Astoria as "a REST interface for data." Astoria is designed to enable applications...
Projity is turning up the heat on its SaaS and open source attack on Microsoft Project.
The San Mateo, Calif. company is launching next week the next major release of its commercial project management service, Project-ON-Demand.
Projity is also looking to expand its footprint in the open source space with support programs for its OpenProj desktop, [...]
On the same day Microsoft issued fixes for at least 11 Windows software flaws, the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) warned that hackers were using malicious Microsoft Access databases to launch attacks against unknown targets. According to a US-CERT alert, the attacks are using an unpatched...
It’s the brower war v. 2.0.
No doubt, Opera’s antitrust complaint filed against Microsoft today to the European Commission is causing huge headaches in Redmond.
The Norwegian company, whose pioneering open source browser rose to prominence on mobile devices, claims that the company’s integration of IE with Windows is anti-competitive and that it is [...]
Notable headlines: Ed Burnette: Getting started with Android Ed Bott: Microsoft to relax XP activation rules with SP3 Mary Jo Foley: There's still a lot of life left in desktop office suite. Microsoft releases CRM 4.0 to manufacturing just under the...
Microsoft, I argued, is closer to being Favre than Woods. And the young guns challenging its dominance are all associated with open source. This observation may make it a bit harder to boo Microsoft in the future. But there it is.
GrooveMonitor is a service utility that tracks groove behavour and creates reports for error reporting to MS (what else does it report?). It loads on startup. It gets installed when you install Office 2007. However it doesn’t get uninstalled when you uninstall Office 2007. GrooveMonitor starts upon Windows startup (via registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run). In the [...]
I've found an interesting little bug in Internet Explorer, by interesting I of course mean totally bloody annoying. I shall walk you through the situation. You have an existing input element you'd like to make a copy of with a new name. EG:
So you grab it, clone it, rename the clone and append it like so:
var base = document.getElementById( 'target' );
var newNode = base.cloneNode( true );
newNode.name = 'new_input';
newNode.id= 'new_target';
base.parentNode.appendChild( newNode );
Woot! You now have two input tags. Here's where it gets interesting. what would you expect the following code to do?
var list = document.getElementsByName( 'target_input' );
for ( var i = 0; i < list.length; i++ )
{
list[i].value = list[i].name;
}
If you answer was set the first input field to have a value of 'target_input' and the second would keep it's value of 'value' then well done, have a banana. If your answer was set the first input field to have a value of 'target_value' and the second would keep it's value of 'new_input' then I guess you work for Microsoft.
Yup. document.getElementsByName( 'target_input' ); returns our new element in IE despite it knowing that the name has been changed. Interestingly document.getElementsByName( 'new_input' ); returns a single element list with just our new element in it. Yup, IE seems to have gone a tad nutty. The moral of this story seems to be avoid cloneNode with form elements and IE. Joy.
The apparent success of GOS in selling-through the channel means we're bound to see more from this duo in the coming year. But it also means we're going to see more activity from Dell, H-P, and the other main PC vendors on desktop Linux, regardless of what that means for their relations with Microsoft.
A statistically unsound study shows that comparatively few PC people have heard of, let alone use online applications As sure as night follows day and the blogs go bonkers. Attention is naturally directed towards a Google v Microsoft shoot out. If you're one of the 500 million...
A false positive in company's antivirus products leads to quarantine or deletion of some Windows users' copies of explorer.exe. Windows Explorer, one of the most crucial components of Microsoft's operating system, was quarantined earlier this week after being falsely identified as malicious code by an antivirus company. ...
Here's a look at the most popular posts of 2007 based on traffic. It's a microcosm of the year in security. Hacker, Microsoft duke it out over Vista design flaw Wi-Fi hacking, with a handheld PDA Super Bowl stadium site hacked, seeded with exploits ...
As those of us who have worked with attempting to make any logically partitioned/layered OO schema work between .NET client applications and WebServices know, it's simply not possible without going far out of your way to do a lot of extra work that the elegant OO inheritance/extension was supposed to alleviate anyway. When I am especially irked about this issue, I will construct job interviews with the following two questions spaced one after the other:
n) Do you consider yourself a fully object-oriented developer, familliar with the concepts of inheritance, extension, abstract classes, interfaces, with the ability to both understand and work with the boundaries/"layers"/"tiers" between classes for a given software project (e.g. Database/Business Objects/User Interface)?
m) If so, what do you consider the most effective way to transmit an instance or instances of a business object from one .NET application to another (either client -> server or server -> client)?
The answers are invariably n) Absolutely, yes, I am God's gift to rational software development; and m) [whirr-clunk as Microsoft gears engage within brain] Using disconnected System.Data.DataSets since they're already XmlSerializable!
Always gives me a laugh. Nevermind that employing such an approach basically necessitates the creation of a FOURTH boundary/"layer"/"tier" -- call it Middleware, or specifically in this hideous world, Serialization/Deserialization.
Anyway, on to my question!
Due to the headaches raised by the above subject, and the deeper object replication that goes on using .NET Remoting (e.g. regardless of what is actually transmitted down the wire, you get a complete, functional, fully type-specific object with its public/private members/properties/methods intact, with NO Reference.cs or any other whiz-bang class-redefinition machinery thrown in your face), I come upon a quandary.
In my mind, at least up til the present moment, .NET Remoting is great for applications over whose general operational control you or your company or your trusted partner will maintain for the lifecycle of said application. With this kind of organizational scenario, routers and firewalls are generally surmountable, or at least negotiable, obstacles, since you know exactly from which machine(s) or subnet(s) certain TCP packets will be sent, and exactly to which machine(s) or subnet(s) those packets will be transmitted, and on what TCP port(s).
.NET WebServices, on the other hand, are a better choice for software with an eventual goal of wider distribution to CUSTOMERS rather than colleagues or partners -- entities whose firewalls you do not control, and who will regard something as little as a request as to its status wrt your application's performance as reflecting an incredibly unprofessional design. In other words, it's not much of a limit to place on your customers that they can transmit HTTP over port 80, and/or HTTPS over port 443.
But, as I finish up the previous 4 hours of banging my head into various WebService-related walls attempting to get class instances (or even just their public data -- I know how WebServices work and I understand it's for good reason) to replicate, I have to wonder -- what kinds of problems might there be lurking in, say, a widespread commercial application, some of whose clients employ .NET Remoting to communicate with their remote servers using TCP port 80? I don't see any particular *TECHNICAL* problems that are unsurmountable -- obviously, as usage scales, there will be more of a hassle doing load-balancing types of activities compared to, say, turning on IIS clustering and walking away. But that's a problem that is entirely out-of-scope for me -- if I get there with the subject of this question, and it's my biggest problem, I will be very happy.
Anyone consider or try this in a relatively large/Enterprise-level "ASP" (in its original disambiguation, that is, an Application Service Provider hosting the requests of potentially hundreds or thousands or more clients) environment? I pulled the better part of a decade as a systems/network admin and general TCP/IP geek (UNIX/Linux), so I know that, at least as of ~2003, you couldn't tell your router (unless it had more processors than most mainstream servers in 2007) to ONLY allow traffic fitting the profile of HTTP requests out on port 80. So I don't really see any technical problems.
However, any feedback is welcome. Thanks for reading this -- my fingers tend to run away from me. :)
Oracle's database has a reputation for being hard to install. This video might persuade you otherwise. Over to you IBM and Microsoft. Can you do any better? Link courtesy of Justin Kestelyn at OTN by Dennis Howlett
Microsoft plans a relatively light haul of two security bulletins on Patch Tuesday, but one of them is rated critical and dings Vista. Thursday's preview, which is an advance notice for folks that need to prepare for Microsoft's patches on Jan. 8, highlight two issues. ...