[NOISE] Re: FW: websurfer 4.6

[Ed Carp]

> Date:          Thu, 7 Dec 1995 15:49:09 -0600 (CST)
> From:          Aleph One <aleph1 at dfw.net>
> To:            Rich Graves <llurch at networking.stanford.edu>
> Cc:            cypherpunks at toad.com
> Subject:       Re: [NOISE] Re: FW: websurfer 4.6

> On Thu, 7 Dec 1995, Rich Graves wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> > Microsoft's strategy is to support VB.
> [snip]
> > -rich
> > 
> 
> Its interesting to note that all the people that were raving mad about Java
> seem to be quiet now that MS is proposing to use VB. At least Java was 
> designed from the ground up with security in mind. But VB? Actual binary

Well, at least it's easy and fun to program in (if you can call 
drag-'n-drop "coding").  Of course, until 4.0, their setup utility 
didn't check what version of DLL you were installing, so it's easy to 
get your DLLs out of sync on your system and blow your applications 
all to hell, and 4.0 throws all thos OLE crap in, even if you don't 
need/want/use OLE in your code and makes a 300K application into a 3M 
one, and they won't tell you what really goes on underneath the hood 
(I guess they're paranoid about getting ripped off), and never mind 
that it's almost trivial to write a VB decompiler (the .EXE is just a 
big jump table into offsets into VBRUN300.DLL), etc., etc., etc...

And all this from a software company that took over 10 years to make 
their "operating system" do preemptive *anything*.

But I guess I shouldn't complain.  After all, VB has made me a pretty 
decent living for the past year or so...