Windows Vista and Windower

[divisortheory]

I don't think it's fucked up to have to pay for an operating system. The Windows XP codebase is over 50 million lines, and that is not an exaggeration. Seriously, the technology in the Windows OS is a software engineering feat of unimaginable proportions. It would be silly if you didn't have to pay it, there are probably literally a few centuries worth of man hours in the Windows operating system, how can you possibly not expect them to charge for it?


PS: I have a boxed copy of XP Home, and one of XP Professional
PPS: The version that comes with a new computer is actually added in full to the price of the computer.

[Sonomaa]

No other MMORPG, or any game on the market for that matter continuously goes out of their way to block people from windowing their program.

actually everquest used to do this all the time with eqwindows, finally they gave in, put things that SHOULD be server side there, and secured thier game
but yeah, the reason they dont want you using a window is because they coded it sloppy and there are variables that people can use (abuse) to get things done easier (the speed control variant for fleetool, the monster codes and location codes for mrargus)

eventually, if they want the game being popular after other games start really beating it down, they will do a recode, update graphics, probably ditch ps2 support, and life is good

[MisterBob]

Name 10 people with a legit WinXP? I can start by naming myself.

I know at LEAST 20 people who purchased it. Not everyone likes to resort to stealing to get an OS.

And if WinXP didn't sell often, do you really think that MS would have bothered continuing to support it? Look at Windows ME. That pile of shit was rejected by pretty much everyone, and as a result, MS pretends it doesn't exist.

EQ did Window their game, but they did not change a lot of things to server-side. I have an RL friend who abused EQ Radar to pretty much farm the hell out of 15+ named mobs, getting them as soon as they were up. The radar range was HUGE, you could spot a mob just by zoning in. As a Wizard, he could pretty much check on all the big money spawns in the course of 30min.

[Tymon]

I don't plan on using vista on the pc I play ffxi on, so who cares 8)

[AriaEminence]

I actually bought Windows XP, legit. The downside was I got a new BIOS chip in this PC I'm using now, so I had to illegitimately activate my already-activated-on-another-PC version of XP on here.

[Wizerd]

I don't think it's fucked up to have to pay for an operating system. The Windows XP codebase is over 50 million lines, and that is not an exaggeration. Seriously, the technology in the Windows OS is a software engineering feat of unimaginable proportions. It would be silly if you didn't have to pay it, there are probably literally a few centuries worth of man hours in the Windows operating system, how can you possibly not expect them to charge for it?


PS: I have a boxed copy of XP Home, and one of XP Professional
PPS: The version that comes with a new computer is actually added in full to the price of the computer.

Okay fair enough, and with that last line, are you sure? I know that windows systems used to cost a buttload to buy... something like 250-400 bucks I think? I don't remember exactly, but this was back during Win95/98 days. There was a discount on the windows OS (usually customized windows depending on who you bought your system from) when you bought it with the computer. Ever since then, I've used an illegal version of Windows 98 and now XP, because it was ridiculous.

What does Windows XP cost now and how much does Vista plan on going for upon release? Anything under $100-150 and I'd probably think about picking up a copy for myself. Anything over that, and I'll just keep using what I use now.

[AriaEminence]

WinXP home edition is about $99 still.

[MikedeeFenrir]

Be nice if SE did make a windower...Not trying to start a flame war but Blizzard did hit a homerun letting you play windowed in WoW.

[Xavier]

WINDOWER IS ILLEGAL STOP HACKING

[Mufferino]

WINDOWER IS ILLEGAL STOP HACKING

lol

[Bleu]

Wow. Way to go off topic on the Windows threads.

Anyways, interesting find. From the way I read this blog, I think this is specific to randomizing the address space of system DLLs only. That would certainly make the most sense in this context. This can't fully prevent buffer overruns, so I think the idea is to make buffer overruns less of a threat.

For example, any program on your computer could have a bug which makes it vulnerable to a buffer overrun. Somebody could exploit this and run code designed to comprimise your machine. That code would use a "memloc" to call into the entry point for one of these system functions and do something bad... only now, it's not there.

In this case, the windower is hooking onto FFXI and intercepting DirectX calls. From that point they are drawing to the windower with legitimate DirectX calls, no funky system injecting. As far as I can read into that post, this shouldn't be a problem for a user process like FFXI.

I *could* be totally mistaken. However, this looks like a positive step. On that note, POL checks Windows versions and *refuses* to launch on Vista for the time being, so I can't test this out. I imagine SE will update POL to launch on Vista as well before it is released.

[divisortheory]

They are drawing with legit directx calls, the question is about things like tparty, for example, that read your TP from memory. Will it still be able to read those values, for exmaple? Will bots still be able to read mob IDs by using fixed memlocs? etc etc.

[aurik]

The answer is yes, otherwise a lot of complicated windows apps will mysteriously break.

[Raineer]

The answer is yes, otherwise a lot of complicated windows apps will mysteriously break.

This is likely true, unless Bill wants to go with COMPLETELY proprietary software, it would have to.

If he does that you'll see Linus Torvald's face on the $100 bill in a few years.

[Bleu]

Tens of thousands of software engineers work at Microsoft. Most likely this was a 2AM idea from a overcaffinated security engineer. I doubt it has much to do with what "Bill" wants.

Hooking and code injection is used for a lot of other stuff though, so I doubt this will be eliminated in user space applications. On the system side, I think this makes a lot of sense.

If he does that you'll see Linus Torvald's face on the $100 bill in a few years.

Or an Apple logo.

[Nitecon]

Good discussion on running Windower+FFXI on Vista here:

http://ffxi.archbell.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4477