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They outdid themselves

geekblog.oneandoneis2.org

66 pointschanux26 comments

This is related to Window's Data Execution Prevention (DEP) security feature. A detailed description can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875352

IE8 and Google Chrome interact with this feature for process isolation. I've seen reports online of this feature affecting both:

http://activerain.com/blogsview/763323/data-execution-preven...

I'm sure Microsoft discovered this problem during the very thorough testing of IE8 and added some code to fix/defend against this problem by editing the boot.ini. Clearly this is an issue which affects a very small number of users, so it is reasonable to expect that the fix can itself break for an even smaller number of users.

sigh So in the end, this is more mindless, ignorant Microsoft bashing. It simply isn't justified. There are many things to dislike about them, such as weak leadership and lack of "taste". But certainly not incompetence or malice.

sigh So in the end, this is more mindless, ignorant Microsoft bashing. It simply isn't justified.

Cut the guy a break. He's letting off some steam about something absolutely ridiculous that has happened to him. Don't always expect people to comment on their unpleasant personal experiences with a detached, unbiased, global, balanced, carefully worded judgment as though they had the full attention of an entire nation.

Not of an entire nation. Of the whole world!

It's one thing to be spiteful in public, but quite another to be spiteful in a medium that publishes immediately to the whole planet.

Let's be realistic here. Just because you can technically view a rant on some blog somewhere from anywhere in the world doesn't mean it's going to be on the minds of millions of people. This whole "publish to the world" idea is a kind of delusion.

So if we all read it, it's an intemperate, unjustified, mildly idiotic anti-M$ rant that wasted our time. But if we don't read it, it's just one understandably frustrated guy letting off a little steam. And that means whoever posted the link to HN transformed him from a normal guy into a global idiot.

The point is that it is a rant on a blog, and the real idiots here are you and I sitting here in a forum discussing its merits as a literary contribution to society.

"mindless, ignorant Microsoft bashing"

How exactly can a complaint over such a stupid program behaviour - a program installation overwriting a critical system file - be considered mindless ignorant Microsoft bashing?

I am really bothered by the strong pro-Microsoft bias I see here.

See, that just proves that the browser is an integral part of the operating system.

I guess we'll know that the browser has replaced the operating system when it starts deleting kernel32.dll.

Netscape was working on a Java browser before their "problems".

"I'm sorry XP, I'm afraid I can't let you jeopardize the mission"

It is remarkable how quickly they have managed to redesign the entire operating system to remove the integral IE when an anti-trust ruling is about to hit them.

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO...

I don't think they removed anything other than iexplore.exe, which is a very simple shell application any programmer can quickly knock together in Visual Studio in one day. This shell uses COM objects integrated with the OS so tightly that nobody can every remove them. But who cares, it's the fact that users will have a choice of browsers that matters.

Sounds like a story Raymond Chen would tell. I don't know how an IE8 installation would somehow mess with boot.ini, but it would be interesting to find out the true cause of such an odd bug.

Someone pointed out that this:

http://activerain.com/blogsview/763323/data-execution-preven...

Is the bug they were trying to prevent by editing boot.ini, which apparently went wrong. So this is a bug in the code that's there to try to disable a piece of buggy code by editing boot.ini facepalm

I'm sure there's no good reason why IE8 messes with this file. I'll take this random bloggers word over the thousands of smart geeks working for Microsoft any day.

I am not sure what you are disagreeing with here. If the result is people's machines not booting, surely something must have gone wrong, and it can't be a bloggers mistake. Unless you think that the thousands of smart geeks are intentionally crippling the machines (it's not a bug, it's a feature!)

Remember however,that the worst architectural decisions (coupling windows + IE?) have been taken for business purposes. Legacy and bad management can and does wipe out the benefits of legions of smart programmers.

What is the "business reason" for KDE's coupling of KHTML thoroughly into its shell? Why do we assume that such a decision would be made only for business reasons?

I thought they were going towards embedded with that.

Browser as OS, like the Crunchpad.

I mean that's why I was looking at it.

From poking around some support forums, it looks like the beta versions of IE8 would not function properly if you had certain non-default options in your boot.ini file. I'm guessing that in the RC, they tried to fix this by rewriting the boot.ini to a default state. Perhaps this process failed due to non-default permissions on that file.

You might be on to something here. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a boot flag (PAE is a common troublemaker) that causes some sort of problem for IE's new process isolation feature, which I understand to be a real rabbit hole.

I'm not wild about Mac OS (no focus-follows-mouse, no davidw), but it's a fantastic OS for parents. Mine use it, like it a lot, and have a generally pleasant time using it.

When my mother decided her Power Macintosh was too slow for her, I decided she would use Linux.

I wanted her to have no trouble with viruses, malware and, most of all, I did not want to have to fix her computer and, if I ever had to, I wanted to be able to do it remotely from a remote terminal (I have ssh on my phone). I also wanted to use cheap commodity hardware and grabbed an inexpensive IBM desktop (built like a tank) for her.

She is very happy with it and she is enjoying her third major OS upgrade. She never noticed them.

Yay for Linux for mums! Put my mother on Linux, too, and she is doing fine.

Explaining how to do stuff in OS X would have been a nightmare. Start with "actually clicking the 'x' does not close the application".

Everybody should have a mum to explain computer apps to, puts things into perspective.

Never, ever trust M$. They have no interest whatsoever in doing things right, on purpose or by ignorance. That's imprinted in their dna.

What a spiteful post about a bug. Flagged.

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