Quicktime Uninstall

Anyone running QuickTime on their Windows computer is being urged by the government to uninstall the program right away.

The US government is urging PC users to uninstall Quicktime from their computers, over fears that weaknesses in the software could leave them vulnerable to cyber-criminals.

As discovered by security firm Trend Micro, Apple, which develops Quicktime, is ending its support for the Windows version of the software.

This means it will no longer be issuing security updates, making it easier for hackers to use the software as a way into their targets' computers. The firm's experts also identified two "critical vulnerabilities" affecting the software, which could provide a window for hackers to launch cyberattacks against users.

Trend Micro's warning was echoed by the US Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which said users who still have Quicktime for Windows running on their machines could now be vulnerable to "loss of confidentiality, integrity or availability of data," as well as facing increased risks from viruses and other security threats.

The Department of Homeland Security issued an alert on Friday, noting that Apple will stop providing security updates for QuickTime for Windows. Ref: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA16-105A

“Computer systems running unsupported software are exposed to elevated cybersecurity dangers, such as increased risks of malicious attacks or electronic data loss,” the department said.

Directions for installing QuickTime for Windows can be found at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205771.

The department notes that QuickTime will still work for Windows, but the risk of getting a virus and other security threats will increase.

Visual Studio Code

Microsoft officials blogged about availability of the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) 1.0 release on April 14, noting that more than 500,000 developers are using VS Code each month. There have been two million installations of VS Code since the public preview was released in March 2015.

When Microsoft originally unveiled VS Code, the product was positioned as being for JavaScript and TypeScript developers creating Web apps. But since then, developers have built more than 1,000 extensions to the product, providing support for C++, C#, React Native, Python, PHP, F#, Node.js, JSON, Go and more languages and frameworks.

Full-blown Visual Studio runs only on Windows, and supports projects and solutions. VS Code is based on files/folders, and is especially suited to building cross-platform Web and cloud applications.

VS Code can trace its roots back to work done by Microsoft's "Monaco" team, which was charged with building a subset of Visual Studio that would run in a browser. It evolved to become an editing tool that could be installed on Windows, OS X and Linux and used for any type of code editing, navigating, debugging and working with Git.

It can be downloaded for free and works on Windows 7, 8 and 10; Linux x64 (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS), and OS X Yosemite and El Capitan.

Ref: http://code.visualstudio.com/Download

Sandesh Suvarna

Today, I read an interesting article @ IndiaTimes, related to technology show case by an Indian.

The US government airport security agency recently contacted tech giant IBM to create an app for managing passengers in airports.

The app didn’t do something particularly complicated; it randomly directed people in queues left or right on the press of a button. Just like any other big tech company IBM charged a premium amount, $ 1.4 million (9.5 crore) to be precise.

It was all fine till Ex-IBM employee Sandesh Suvarna entered the scene. He decided to make the app all by himself.

And it took him around 4 minutes to re-create a $1.4 million app.

And if that doesn't sound impressive enough, Sandesh completed the whole process while making a video of it.

Video is available at https://youtu.be/Yo9YD3zBiFs

Native Ubuntu in Windows

As a feather in cap of Open Source Strategy by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Linux BASH (Bourne Again SHell) and Ubuntu binaries are part and parcel of Windows 10.

During this week's BUILD conference, keynote speaker Kevin Gallo announced that you can now run "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows."  This is a new developer feature included in a Windows 10 "Anniversary" update, partners over at Canonical - creators of Ubuntu Linux.

Why does it matter? It lets you run native user-mode Linux shells and command-line tools unchanged, on Windows.

Strategic Hire
Wim Coekaerts is well known for transforming Oracle into a Linux-dominated company. Few hours ago, Fortune confirms his movement to Microsoft. http://fortune.com/2016/04/01/microsoft-snags-oracles-linux-guru/

In his Oracle tenure, he brought the company its first Linux products; moved Oracle's programming staff from Windows to Linux desktops; and turned Oracle into a Linux distributor with the launch of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, Oracle Linux.

Interesting times lie ahead for both Microsoft and Linux - MS-Linux, as part of his entry.

How do I start playing?
After turning on Developer Mode in Windows Settings and adding the Feature,
you just to need to run bash and are prompted to get Ubuntu on Windows from Canonical via Windows Store.

Isn't it so cool ?

Historical Model
Highly scaling IIT assignments, urged me to run Bash on Windows with few choices in recent times

1. Cygwin
Cygwin is GNU command line utilities, compiled for Win32 with great native Windows integration. But it's not Linux.

2. HyperV and Ubuntu
Run an entire Linux VM - Virtual Machine (dedicating x megs of RAM, and y gigs of disk) and then remote into it (RDP, VNC, ssh)

New Model
Now, the current release is not Bash or Ubuntu running in a VM. This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself.
This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight.
The binaries are downloaded using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on.

Let me put it in simple term. We used to access the local file system using Windows Explorer; the same can be accessed using Bash Linux command-line (ll) tools

Video Tutor
As the tutorial, Rich Turner and Russ Alexander recorded a Build 2016 session introducing and demonstrating Bash running on Ubuntu on Windows.

Interestingly, this product is fast and lightweight; itz the real binaries.

This disruptive technology is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me. Enjoy, if you wish.