Doug's Mailbag: Wake Up Windows 7, More
One reader shares his thoughts on a recent letter complaining about a Windows 7 quirk:
A couple of weeks ago you published a problem somebody had with Windows 7 not waking up cleanly and the person involved having to turn the computer off and resume Windows 7 from a reboot.
I have been having exactly the same problem along with intermittently coming back to the computer to find it had randomly rebooted itself. A few days ago I saw the dreaded BSOD and the memory dump screen.
I decided the Power Supply might be the root cause. After replacing it, I've had no repetition of the problems.
-Dave
Another reader comments on why it is that software can never truly be 100 percent flawless:
As long as software uses the von Neumann model where "code is data is code is" and there is no "hardware cop" to police the use of memory, the hardware/software combination will never be secure. Secondly, as long as one depends on OOP (with its current incarnation of classes begetting child and parent classes) where the day-to-day programmer has no clue about the mechanics of the processor's native implementation of those OOP kludges, software will never be secure. Thirdly, as long as the day-to-day programmer makes the assumption that "no reasonable user would ever do that" or "if the manual states packets are always n bytes, then EVERYONE will ALWAYS follow those rules -- DON'T need to check packet sizes," software will never be secure. In other words as long as humans and/or semi-sentient beings program machines, software will never be secure.
-Stephen
The following reader agrees with Doug's assessment of why users are switching to Google Apps:
Back in the day it was cheaper for me to setup my own servers to host my domain than is was to pay for the hosting. In December, I moved to Google Apps. I still have to pay for the domain name, but I do not pay for the server hardware or software. I also get Web and e-mail free. I've played with Google Docs. I don't need to share docs with many people, so I still use MS Office for my document heavy-lifting.
-Eric
Posted by Doug Barney on March 12, 2010