I should say that George Ou has been trying to put to rest some of the concerns people have about “will xyz program run on vista”. The All About Microsoft blogpost on virtual PC seems to have started all this. I should say that virtual machines seem to be a good way to make sure that whatever “ye olde application” doesn’t work perfectly well in a new OS can still run. (I have a couple of old DOS applications that I’ve revisited this way.) (By the way, this is a question many people ask whether it’s a new version of windows or if they run other Operating Systems..) I was a bit more interested to read about some of the licensing terms for the various Vista flavors…
Tag: George Ou
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Free (and legal) music downloads coming by Christmas 2006 and DRM
I’ve seen several news reports picking up this story from yesterday. SpiralFrog will provide an advertising supported, free music download service and is expected to launch in time for Christmas 2006. There is an agreement with the Universal Music Group and SpiralFrog and the concept is that users must agree to watch advertising before downloading the free music. Testing will begin in the US and Canada before the end of the year. It sounds as though they will use DRM from Microsoft on the free downloads…
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Intel Proset Wireless update
A couple weeks back, there was a pretty important security update for the Intel Proset Wireless driver. The big problem is that the update was a memory hog and caused porblems. Sans has info on the update to the update, also George Ou is encouraging everyone to make sure they’ve got things updated. It’s possible to JUST download and install the driver without getting the full proset management software. So…. CENTRINO users – this means you… update your wireless driver.
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Mac Wireless driver Security vulnerability revisited
A couple weeks ago the hot story was about the demonstration of a vulnerability in a 3rd party wireless card driver on a Mac. The individuals that demonstrated the vulnerability (in a video taped presentation) also claimed that many wireless drivers were vulnerable to this same flaw and it included the MacBook native drivers (among others.) There was immediate controversy over the fact it was a video demo. I thought their explanation for that was reasonable. (They didn’t want to give a room full of crackers a chance to sniff the wireless traffic and get TOO much detail on the exploit before vendors had a good chance to give updates.) Well… at this point it sounds like among other things, they have not yet demonstrated to Apple an effective use of this exploit against the wireless drivers on the macbook.
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Microsoft should use a /home partition….
I saw this yesterday or day before… George Ou has said that Microsoft should move user data to it’s own volume (or partition). He is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. I think these days the default install for any modern operating system ought to assume you care enough about your data to seperate it from the main OS. I find myself slightly annoyed at linux distributions that DON’T do this by default, although most will at least let you make changes to the partitioning in the install process. I had got to just assume this was the way things were since Mandrake always defaulted to seperate home and root partitions.
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Vista UAP (User Account Protection) – too much?
First let me tell you I have not seen first hand Microsoft’s Vista UAP (User Account Protection) I cannot then claim firsthand experience with it, the following is and will be based on what I have read plus how it relates and compares to linux and “run as” functionality. George Ou thinks that UAP is getting a “bum rap” from people, some of whom want it both ways, tighter file access security, but this is annoying… Another ZDNet columnist has done a more detailed look at UAP. One of the articles cited by George Ou is this post from Paul Thurrott which is highly critical of UAP
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WMF exploit and DEP
There’s a bit of controversy over the suggestion that Hardware DEP seemed to protect against the WMF zero day exploit. Sunbeltblog has responded to the controversy. George Ou in the first link above claims that there’s a lot of bad advice out about this exploit and that hardware DEP (Data execution prevention) doesn’t work to mitigate the problem.
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Improving KDE start time
One of the things about running KDE in linux is it can be a big resource grabber and be slow starting. By contrast “light” window managers can be up and running in a relative flash (xfce). OSnews has a story on SUSE/Novell KDe developers that have managed to get down to 4-5 second start time for KDE (which is fairly impressive.) Here are a few of their blog entries on the matter.