Paul Smith's Blog

  • About
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

 

Supreme Commander demo released

All real time stratagy fans should check out the Supreme Commander demo out. Here's the link to Gamespot's download (you need to be registered). Although I got better speeds from a torrent.

Supreme Commander

It weighs in at just over 1GB, and features some of the single player campaign and skirmish (one map).

I suppose the main attraction of this game is the scale of it. Some of the maps are 80km x 80km in size. You can also zoom all the way out to see the entire battlefield. Makes a change from Battle for Middle-Earth and the late Command and Conquer games which just felt too zoomed in.

Highly recommended. We'll be reviewing the final game on Gamercast when we get our hands on a final copy (probably for the episode on the 18th).

Leave a comment »

Go beyond Mac OS

I saw over on Channel 9 a new ad Apple have been apparently e-mailing spamming people with. Here it is in all its glory:

Go beyond Vista

Well I couldn't help myself. I mean its just too easy isn't it?

Go beyond Mac OS

On a more serious not however, Apple need to grow up a bit more with their whole advertising campaign, putting down your competitors is extremely unprofessional and seriously puts me and I'm sure many other people off having anything to do with them. You don't see Microsoft spending half their marketing budget on telling people why everything else sucks.

8 comments »

Windows Mobile Device Center released

Windows Mobile Device Center for Windows Vista has made an appearence on Windows Update.

Windows Mobile Device Center for Windows Vista released

This is the application that provides the same functionality as ActiveSync did in the past.

Leave a comment »

Apple lacks Microsoft's security investment

Bill Gates has been taking some flak lately in the Apple circles for some comments he made on the state of security in Mac OS. He was being interviewed for Newsweek:

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

Bill Gates: You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it's fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let's be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

OK so Bill Gates is basically saying because Microsoft invested so much in security for Windows Vista, Apple was able to copy interface features that Microsoft already developed and release them first, and as a result of that more vulnerabilities are being discovered on Mac OS than Windows.

At first I didn't buy the every single day thing and assumed he was exaggerating by quite a large degree. But after doing a bit of research I stumbled into this. They list a new vulnerability discovered on Mac OS every day, in many cases with code ready to exploit it. So Bill Gates wasn't far off the mark at all in his comments. Let's just quote a few examples:

1st of January:

A vulnerability in the handling of the rtsp:// URL handler allows remote arbitrary code execution.

3rd of January:

A vulnerability in the handling of the HREFTrack field allows to perform cross-zone scripting, leading to potential remote arbitrary code execution.

5th of January:

A vulnerability in the handling of BOM files by DiskManagement/diskutil allows to set rogue permissions on the filesystem. This can be used to execute arbitrary code and escalate privileges.

The list just goes on and on, a new one for every day of the month. Microsoft has made the investment in security, and it shows with fewer and fewer exploits being discovered. The media which you can imagine would love to throw out something about security on the Vista launch had to resort to using speech recognition, apparently the fact it responds to voice commands is a "hole" because it can be used to delete documents by issuing a delete command. Right, that's the best you've got?

I'm confident in saying that Windows Vista in its first year will have fewer security vulnerabilities than any other client release of Windows of the past and doing even better than their best server release, Windows Server 2003 wouldn't surprise me at all.

5 comments »

We see you're using Internet Explorer

I just ran into another one of these stupid things.

Website trying to push Firefox down people's throats

1) Internet Explorer 6 and 7 block pop-up windows.
2) Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista is more secure than Firefox.
3) OK let's hand control of the internet over to Mozilla Corporation.
4) Firefox still has plenty of bugs that impact developers and designers.
5) Internet Explorer 7 already has tabbed browsing.

Grow up. Your site works fine in Internet Explorer.

5 comments »

Games in Windows Vista Business

Where are Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc in Windows Vista Business? They are included with that edition of Windows, but they're not installed by default.

Install or uninstall Windows features

To install them go to Control Panel -> Programs -> Turn Windows features on or off.

6 comments »
  • 1
  • ...
  • 82
  • 83
  • 84
  • ...
  • 85
  • ...
  • 86
  • 87
  • 88
  • ...
  • 89
  • ...
  • 90
  • 91
  • 92
  • ...
  • 166

Copyright © Paul Smith 1996-2019, privacy policy & cookie policy.