1. Having made one long and painful foray into the world of driving IE from Perl via OLE (never again), and from the sounds of things in almost exactly the same time frame as you, I'll tell you that the cause of your problem was almost certainly cauased by unprocessed messages in IE message queue.

    If you could revisit that code now, and insert a few strategic Win32::OLE->SpinMessageLoop, you'd probably be able to cure that 1 in a 1000 event.

  2. However Windows has a history of being particularly bad in this regard.

    Yep. It was really bad in Win95/98/ME running third-party VB apps. That was quite a while ago...

  3. I was saying that uncertainty over whether your machine has been hacked or infected results in perceived non-determinism.

    That's like perceiving Fords as having bad fuel economy when you don't bother to keep your tyres correctly inflated.

  4. Read on a little further:
    OEMs may install third-party applications that launch in place of Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger, or Windows Firewall as enabled by Windows registry settings and other documented mechanisms.

    So, the OEMs are not "prevented by contract with Microsoft from doing anything more serious for security than installing a third party anti-virus product."!

    If every OEM installed (say)the free version of ZoneAlarm and configured it, there would be no botnets. I don't know for sure that Zone Labs would allow them to do that for free, but it seems like a reasonable bet that the opportunity for product placement and potential upsell would be pretty pursuasive.

    That one step alone wouldn't make user experts or careful, but it would at least make them aware.

    And then there is the whole thing of "or as permitted in the license agreement.". I don't know what is in there as they are not published, but if you've ever used a newly purchased Sony VIAO laptop and seen the amount of customisation, and mostly useless preinstalled crap, on their systems, you'd think they could find the time to install a decent firewall, browser and email program, rather than a bunch of root kits.

I'm no apologist for MS and roundly critisise them for their failings, but laying the blame for problems caused by badly installed/corrupted Perl modules, at their door, doesn't help anyone.

Yes. Windows system dominate the bulk of cracked hacked and rooted systems, but then they dominate the bulk of all installed systems, by a huge margin. And if even the US military fail to secure them properly, how do you expect the average non-geek to do so?

And as other systems and software become more prevalent, so they are being targeted. Witness the recent spate of Apple hacks; pdf and Flash hacks; Firefox hacks. The list goes on.

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
"Too many [] have been sedated by an oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion."

In reply to Re^10: Time::HiRes sleep does not always work by BrowserUk
in thread Time::HiRes sleep does not always work by tone

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