Software vulnerabilities still dog operating systems

[Hammer]

"AFTER 30 years of progress in the IT business you would think that products are maturing and that software errors are be a thing of the past. After all, we would not expect car manufacturers to have made little progress on the safety of their cars, would we? Unfortunately it is clear from Bugtraq, Secunia and CERT.org that many operating systems, middleware and applications are still plagued by all kinds of vulnerabilities."

Read the rest at the Inquirer.

[Hammer]

@Waccoon

“Need for Speed: Underground” works on my PC even without any patches.

Test PC SPEC;
AMD Athlon XP 3200+(~2.2Ghz)
GA-7N400 Pro2 (nForce2 400 Ultra)/BIOS F3
nForce driver ver 3.13
1GB PC3200 Dual Channel Memory
Albatron Geforce FX 5900 VIVO/Driver ver 52.16
CL SB Audigy2 ZS 7.1
Windows XP (ver 2002) Pro SP1
Power brick: 420 Watts

This was also tested in another machines with various configurations;
Leadtek’s Geforce 4 TI /52.16 drivers
Leadtek’s Quadro 4 700 GL/52.16 drivers
No brand Geforce 2/400
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (1.04/106) with BIOS 1007.
Athlon T-Bird 1.4Ghz/Athlon XP 1800+ to Athlon XP 2600+.
SB Live Value to SB Live 5.1 DE
512MB PC2700 to 1GB PC3200
WinXP Home/Pro SP1.
Power bricks: range from 350 to 380Watts.

I haven’t play it with the other ATI Radeon 9200/9600/9800  nor on Intel Pentium II/III/Celeron based test machines (maybe later)… .

[Hammer]

The writer of this article starts right off by making a fool of himself, then continues to add on to it.

That was not the real substance of the article i.e. refer to the statistics.

[Hammer]

.…

That is utterly bunk. I used to administrate a flock of MacOS 8 systems, and they started crashing right after a fresh install

My MacOS 8.1 installation works fine after a fresh install. The Uni I use to go to uses Apple Macs (pre-MacOS X) for journalism subjects and they work fine i.e. usable without a crashing after 30 minutes.

[Hammer]

Then why does it tend to dump me to the desktop with no error messages after completing a race? Where are the log files?

Recalling, download the DirectX SDK for DirectX logging features. Note that MS Windows XP is targeted for mainstream users’ not technical savvy users.

I have an Abit IS7 motherboard, P4c, Geforce3 (original), SB Audigy...

Mentioning the hardware alone may not reveal issues related to your game.

PS; The version of “Need of Speed - Underground” that I have is Asia Pacific Edition. My current DirectX installation is at DirectX 9.0B.

[Hammer]

Wow. I'm ever so stunned that, even adding app problems in, Win XP is less vulnerable than Linux.

WinXP’s security flaws are more exposed in mainstream media than the said Linux/GNU distributions.

Kinda wish the author had included stats for Win ME, or has everyone done the right thing and dumped it?

The problems with WinME is that, it’s somewhat competing with Win2K.

[Hammer]

Cobblers. IE vulnerabilities alone outnumber a conservative (not world + dog packages) Linux distro.

The statistics was only for the year 2003 i.e. not including last year’s IE 6.0-SP1 issues. Alternative statistical numbers would be a good idea…