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It's getting harder and harder for Steve Ballmer to point to his resume and be able to justify his work over the past decade. While Microsoft has pushed out upgrades to all its software, the big picture is gloomy enough to make him sweat at upcoming board meetings

You want the big picture:

MEASURED by profits, Microsoft trounces Apple and Google. In the most recent three months, Microsoft earned $4.52 billion, versus Apple's $3.25 billion and Google's $1.8 billion. Lost from view is what arguably is Microsoft's very best story -- its transformation into a powerhouse supplier of the specialized software that meets the complex needs of large corporations, what the trade calls selling to "the enterprise."

Microsoft's enterprise software business alone is approaching the size of Oracle. But despite that astounding growth, Microsoft must accept that, fair or not, victories on the enterprise side draw about as much attention as being the No. 1 wholesale seller of plumbing supplies. Microsoft won't receive the adoring attention that its chief rival draws with products like the iPad.

"Tech investors pay for growth," says Sarah Friar, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, who believes that those investors do not appreciate the durability of Microsoft's cash cows, Windows and Office. She has many positive things to say about Microsoft's ability to innovate, pointing in particular to the robust sales of server and database software, which are now almost equal in size to Windows revenue.

BRENDAN BARNICLE, a software analyst at Pacific Crest Securities...praised its enterprise software business, formally labeled "Server and Tools," as "an incredible business," accounting, he said, for about 24 percent of the company's revenue and with an operating margin of 40 percent. Even With All Its Profits, Microsoft Has a Popularity Problem

Twelve of the Top 100 Software Bestsellers at Amazon.com are editions of MS Office 2010 or the Win 7 OS retail boxed. MS Office Home & Student for the PC and the Mac are currently - and typically - #1 and #3.

There is not a single PC or console video game in the top 100 list.

These numbers are astonishing.

MS Office Professional 2010 is $10 if your employer participates in Microsoft's Home Use Program. $80 with student ID. Office Professional Academic 2010

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Windows-Windows-7/category/102

Could this be highly related to the fact that in Europe, as part of an anti-trust settlement, when you first log into a new Windows machine you are presented with a choice of internet browsers and no longer default to MSIE?

The international editions are a completely different thing from them coming out with near-identical "new editions".

In many countries they cannot afford to buy textbooks at the price that Americans do, so the publisher will make a version that is cheaper to produce (paperback, lower quality printing) and charge less for it. The publisher profits because once they have payed for the creation, editing, typesetting, etc. they need to achieve the maximum profit with respect to production and distribution costs. They have a higher margin in the US to cover more of the up front costs of the book because customers can afford it, and they accept a lower margin overseas because it is more than they would make by selling at the US price overseas. But they cannot easily prevent its sale in the US over sites like eBay and Amazon marketplace. Is it a fair practice by the publishers? Although I think the big textbook companies are kind of evil, this practice seems reasonable to me considering the great difference in purchasing power between different nations.

It's basically the same concept as Windows Starter Edition

When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads?

2007 and earlier.

I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason is they're afraid that it would be seen as an anti-competitive move against Google ...

Oh, it's very competitive. Whenever Microsoft arrives late to the game, you know they bring lots of money with them. Why has Bing Cashback stopped?

The problem with your post is that you can't imagine a company being both a "spooty ad company" and a company that actually makes actual products. You don't have to be one or the other.

If you have Microsoft Access, start with that.

No, don't. If you want to use a free Microsoft database, use a proper free Microsoft database: SQL Server Express Edition, or check out the even simpler file-based SQL Server Compact.

If you have Microsoft Access, start with that.

No, don't. If you want to use a free Microsoft database, use a proper free Microsoft database: SQL Server Express Edition, or check out the even simpler file-based SQL Server Compact.

It's worth noting that page nine of the Frankencamera team's paper mentions the work of Joshi et al when it discusses deblurring pictures. Neel Joshi was the lead researcher from the article we are discussing.

There are some full-size samples of the results of the technique, where you can compare the original image with the result of their technique, and the results of two older techniques. Their technique show some very obvious problems:

1. Doubling of high-contrast edges that are "ghosted" in the original because of the motion blur. In the original, presumably, the motion was something like this: start at position A, hold for a relatively large fraction of the exposure, then quickly move to position B, and hold for another large fraction of the exposure. This means that the photo records two copies of any high-constrast edges, one corresponding to A, and the other to B.

   There are several examples in the link that seem to be like that. The technique doesn't seem to figure this out in all cases, and renders the two ghost lines as separate, sharp lines. Most obvious example: the edge of the front rim of the red car in the second photo. Though compare with the result they got in the photo of the Coca-Cola cans, where it did figure it out for the rack, but not for the text on the cans, and where it introduced some artifact lines perpendicular to the rack.

2. Severe white sharpening halos around edges.

The more instructive comparison is the results of these guys' techniques with the older techniques. Clearly, they're doing a lot better than the older techniques. Still, this is very far away from primetime, IMO.

Here is a html5-demo that does the same. It works well on Chrome, but no so well in Mozilla Iceweasel 3.5.11 http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/DeepZoom/Default.html

Microsoft will be supporting IE6 until support for Windows XP SP3 expires, which is April 8, 2014. IE6 isn't going away for a while.

Lifecycle Supported Service Packs

Microsoft Support Lifecycle

Microsoft will be supporting IE6 until support for Windows XP SP3 expires, which is April 8, 2014. IE6 isn't going away for a while.

Lifecycle Supported Service Packs

Microsoft Support Lifecycle

The .LNK Binary File Format is an Open Specification provided by Microsoft via the following document:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd871305(PROT.13).aspx
~ king

A friendly warning to all Windows 2000 users out there, your OSs will remain vulnerable (unless you have a private agreement with MS).

Support for you ended two weeks ago.
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-us&x=17&y=3&p1=3071

Unless you decide to do it full time, anything that you develop that actually sees production will eventually need to be rewritten by someone else. If you're OK with that, go for it.

If you're serious about learning how to program, start with a strongly-typed language. Microsoft's Visual Studio has a wonderful (and possibly the best) integrated development environment. I recommend VB.Net, which you can get for free.

Couple points:

1. You have to get your mind in the 'programming' mindset. Learning programming isn't necessarily purely about being a techie. You need to have solid logic skills. Much of programming is spent just getting logic right. Check out Boolean Logic for an launch point. The knowledge you gain from briefing this area will carryover into many, many programming languages. Programming *is* logic.

2. Learn what you want to program for. Pick a startup project. Is it a website you want to make? HTML & CSS is very different than learning C or C++, likewise, SQL is very different than assembly. Not that certain concepts don't carry over, but much of being a jack of all trades is simply having the ability to have good conditional logic skills, and the ability to Google things quickly and learn to apply them as you go. You don't have to become a master of all languages, or hell, even one language, but if you are truly *interested* (thats the keyword, if your not interested, its just not going to happen), and you have done a little programming in a couple of simple languages, then you will be in a good position to progress to more difficult projects.

3. Learn what you want to program for. Again. Repeated point. There are hundreds of programming languages, platforms, architectures, styles, libraries, etc. Pick something you are interested in, read about it a little bit, and if it looks like the learning curve isn't too ridiculous, start there. Perhaps a simple text based JavaScript browser game. At the end of the day you will know a bit of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript if you put your mind to it. But thats just one example.

4. W3C. This website is a good starting point for all things web.

5. Chrome Experiments If you really like web, check out the future of browser bling. Heavy JavaScript and HTML5

6. Databases. Not the most mentally entertaining, but you will need the knowhow to connect, select, insert, update, and delete data if you are doing anything with data. I am a Microsoft guy, and I can tell you that the Express Editions of Visual Studio are a greating starting point for a newbie, at zero price-point, and bundled with SQL Express, thats a good place to begin.

7. Also, places like CodeProject, StackOverflow, and CodePlex are great tools for questions ranging from the most basic to the most advanced of topics, and downloading sample code and live projects for tinkering around with.

Couple points:

1. You have to get your mind in the 'programming' mindset. Learning programming isn't necessarily purely about being a techie. You need to have solid logic skills. Much of programming is spent just getting logic right. Check out Boolean Logic for an launch point. The knowledge you gain from briefing this area will carryover into many, many programming languages. Programming *is* logic.

2. Learn what you want to program for. Pick a startup project. Is it a website you want to make? HTML & CSS is very different than learning C or C++, likewise, SQL is very different than assembly. Not that certain concepts don't carry over, but much of being a jack of all trades is simply having the ability to have good conditional logic skills, and the ability to Google things quickly and learn to apply them as you go. You don't have to become a master of all languages, or hell, even one language, but if you are truly *interested* (thats the keyword, if your not interested, its just not going to happen), and you have done a little programming in a couple of simple languages, then you will be in a good position to progress to more difficult projects.

3. Learn what you want to program for. Again. Repeated point. There are hundreds of programming languages, platforms, architectures, styles, libraries, etc. Pick something you are interested in, read about it a little bit, and if it looks like the learning curve isn't too ridiculous, start there. Perhaps a simple text based JavaScript browser game. At the end of the day you will know a bit of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript if you put your mind to it. But thats just one example.

4. W3C. This website is a good starting point for all things web.

5. Chrome Experiments If you really like web, check out the future of browser bling. Heavy JavaScript and HTML5

6. Databases. Not the most mentally entertaining, but you will need the knowhow to connect, select, insert, update, and delete data if you are doing anything with data. I am a Microsoft guy, and I can tell you that the Express Editions of Visual Studio are a greating starting point for a newbie, at zero price-point, and bundled with SQL Express, thats a good place to begin.

7. Also, places like CodeProject, StackOverflow, and CodePlex are great tools for questions ranging from the most basic to the most advanced of topics, and downloading sample code and live projects for tinkering around with.

Microsoft are making money, and lots of it, so they're doing something right.
These sorts of research projects are the sort of things that are very cool and flashy, but probably would be hard to make money off, and probably don't represent the majority of MS research projects which we don't hear about which aren't flashy at all.

e.g. we've all heard of Photosynth and Songsmith, other flashy but uncommercialized projects, but probably fewer people know about Singularity (Or only know about it in reference to how MS admitted that Linux takes slightly fewer cycles to start a process up than Windows), and Singularity is a relatively very well known research project.

A research project about some abstract aspect of computer science of the sort that'd be applicable to Windows Mobile data compression or Office Visio data-map representations isn't going to get any slashdot attention but is going to help Microsoft's bottom line ultimately.
Check out http://research.microsoft.com to get a taste for the actual volume and flavor of research that goes on at MS

Hmmm. I thought that Ballmer said that SECURITY is "Job One" at Microsoft.

Oh, well...

They were back then. Microsoft called it a "Tablet PC".

In fairness, Microsoft has been pushing "slate" and "touchscreen" products for many years, and (with their hardware partners) delivered somewhat similar products that were available long before the iPad was. Windows has been touchscreen enabled for ages, and there were/are plenty of convertible laptop/touchscreen devices with Windows on them. They went by the name "Tablet PC" and we were told since before 2000 that they were the wave of the future.

The problem is, these products were expensive and they sucked. The iPad is only one of those ;-)

What should really be bothering Ballmer about the iPad isn't that they haven't been working on something similar, but that Microsoft has been working on similar things for sooooo long, and yet Apple still did a better job of it with the first product. Some of this can be ascribed to substantial hardware improvements in the interim, which aren't Microsoft's issue. The rest of it can be attributed to Microsoft's perennial problem of trying to make user interfaces too much like the "MS Windows you already know" rather than something new (the same problem with Windows Mobile). Rather than "sleeping at the switch" they've been throwing the switch over and over again, but Nothing Happens. I'd be rather annoyed too.

Your point is getting sillier and sillier. Xbox profits are a monolith. They sell the hardware at a loss, or barely break even on it. Their profits come from game licensing and xbox live.

MS disagrees with you. Xbox Live money belongs to the Windows and Windows Live. Xbox console money goes to the Entertainment and Devices Division. And the whole point of this thread was that MS has not yet shown a profit with Xbox hardware which you conceded. The reason they are separated is that XBox Live also services Zune which is another product. And may service other products like Win 7 in the future. It's the same reason that Apple does not classify iTunes Store revenue as iPad, iPod, or iPhone revenue. Hardware is separate from services.

But for the sake of argument you were to lump all of into one. The $1 billion MS made in Xbox Live is revenue not profit. MS does not divulge margin by product. Let's say it's a healthy 30% (which is very generous). At the current rate of 30% margin, Xbox Live would have to operate 27 years to make back the net loss of the Xbox hardware if nothing changes. If all Xbox owners subscribe to Xbox Live, it's only 13 years ($49/year, 41 million total units sales not current owners). That's still horrible ROI.

To payback the original investment in 3 or 4 years as you claim, Xbox Live would have to get about 136 million subscribers/year.

Did you read that article carefully?

• First of all Xbox Live is an online service. That's not Xbox hardware sales. By comparison, the iTunes store probably generates a small profit for Apple. In your world, that means that iPods, iPads, and iPhones are barely profitable. They're not the same thing.
• Second, it's an estimate by an analyst. MS does not break down each products' profits in its reports. MS recently released that the division where Xbox belongs had total revenue of $5.25 billion with a net loss of $172 million. What is in the ESDD?: Xbox, Windows Mobile, OS X software, gaming software, reference software, mice, game controllers, and other peripherals.
• And Third even your link concedes: "Success in online gaming is crucial for Microsoft because the other products in this unit include the barely profitable Xbox game console and mobile-phone software that's losing ground to Apple Inc. and Google Inc." Your link believes that Xbox is barely profitable now; they are not accounting over it's lifetime.
• Fourth while the cost of hardware might be getting cheaper, so is the price. To get any more revenue, MS has to sell more units. At this point, most people who want an Xbox already have one. Also while both price and cost go down, is MS making any more money if they sell more?

The article mentions attempts at simulating CRT display artifacts, but it doesn't mention the most serious problem. CRTs light up each pixel for a very short time as the beam crosses them. LCDs keep all pixels lit constantly. This makes a big difference to motion, especially scrolling as found in 2D games. The CRT will always look sharper because there is no error with respect to time for each frame. Each frame is shown as single point in time, and the human visual system is very good at reconstructing motion from that kind of sampling. With the LCD style sample-and-hold display you can think of each frame as being composed of many samples spread over time, all except one of them being incorrect (shifted into the past or future). Visually this shows up as blurring. It's completely independent of the response time of the display. Even with instant pixel switching speed you'd still see this kind of blur.

You can see diagrams explaining the problem here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/temprate.mspx

Between Vista and the economy it is hard to draw conclusions from the last few years, but they haven't exactly seen a downturn in those businesses (and they have both grown significantly in the last decade, even if you measure from some point where they had recovered from the dot com recession).

And most businesses would love to print money the way those segments do (which means they can deal with a great deal of price pressure):

http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar09/10k_fr_dis.html

(And I think Windows 7 is a pretty good answer to any problems Vista may have revealed (but really, I think that they made some tough/costly technical choices with Vista more than Vista was an absolute steaming crappile))

It's not quite the same thing. HTC is not an ODM, it's an OEM. It has its own software and brand name. When I talked to someone on the Microsoft stand at Computex he told me that HTC was irritated about Windows Phone 7. Since WinPhone can't run native applications HTC would have to rewrite their software (e.g. TouchFlo) in .Net to run on it. What they really wanted was a new version of Windows Mobile with the latest Windows CE kernel. Windows mobile 6.x uses Windows CE 5.x which has a 32MB per process limit because it uses FCSE on ARM. Windows CE 6.x has a 2GB per process address space.

So HTC want later versions of Windows Mobile. If Microsoft want to build Windows 7 Phone devices they'd be better off getting someone like Foxconn, Quanta or Compal to do it. They are ODMs and basically do whatever the customer wants. The end product would then be branded Microsoft (or Kin, Yo!, Hipstaah or something). Foxconn for example make the iPhone.

Now my argument is that they could do both. They'd sell Windows Mobile 7 based on WinCE6 with native app support to HTC who'd sell devices to me. And they'd get an ODM to make the Windows Phone 7 devices which they'd then sell effectively to operators the way Apple does with the iPhone. These devices would be slick and locked down and would have a low upfront cost like the iPhone does, though you need to sign up for an expensive monthly contract some of which would go back to Microsoft. This is how iPhones work.

I think the two markets are actually complementary. People that want an iPhone don't want Windows Mobile. And people that want Windows Mobile don't want an iPhone. And they certainly don't want a Microsoft knock off of an iPhone whch won't run their old apps.

May I offer you the cure for your open sores? http://www.microsoft.com/

The responsible thing to do, for the employer, is to ask for clarification.

I agree completely. It is unfair for an individual to continue to be punished for their mistake over and over because of a Google search. However, it is that very Google search that prevents employers from asking for clarification. If they can see in a quick glance that there's something -- anything -- wrong with you, they will not try hard to figure out the extenuating circumstances. They will simply move on to the next viable candidate that doesn't have a bad online reputation. It may not be right, but it's the truth.

"Research commissioned by Microsoft in December 2009 found that 79 percent of United States hiring managers and job recruiters surveyed reviewed online information about job applicants. Most of those surveyed consider what they find online to impact their selection criteria. In fact, 70 percent of United States hiring managers in the study say they have rejected candidates based on what they found." - http://www.microsoft.com/privacy/dpd/research.aspx

Better yet, if you have (or have a friend/family) with a .edu email address, Win7 Pro for $30! http://www.microsoft.com/student/en/us/windows/buynow/default.aspx I got one copy & it works, upgrading from XP.

I'm not afraid of the registry and use it for a lot of things, but there's no need to manually edit the registry to enable/disable startup items when there are easy to use GUI tools included with Windows. MSCONFIG is pretty popular and easy to figure out. A really easy troubleshooting step is to have them hide all Microsoft startup entries and then hit "Disable All". Then you can slowly work back and re-enable any third party entries that you discover you actually need. You can also edit the startup items fairly easily under the Windows Defender control panel. Any other entries related to drivers and services can be edited through their appropriate MMC snap-ins and are under the Administrative Tools section of the control panel.

I also usually like to install Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel on people's systems so they can find it easily and it has a pretty solid interface for editing startup items. SysInternals autoruns is the most powerful startup editor but is a bit too advanced for some people to use (since they can disable a lot of things they probably have no idea about like WinLogon modules).

I'm pretty sure either the IE 5 or 6 (or both) installers included Flash Player as one of the installable options which was visible under custom setup and enabled as part of the default IE install. Flash Player also does ship with non-OEM versions of Windows, I think XP ships with the Flash Player 8 ActiveX (check the "%WinDir%\Downloaded Program Files" directory). There are even Microsoft updates packages which update the Flash Player and are available on Windows Update. You might have seen the ActiveX notification to install the updated Flash Player ActiveX control, but could probably still view the Flash content if you don't install the update.

Microsoft has nothing against Flash Player. Before Silverlight, they had no competing product other than Liquid Motion (which was killed off a long time ago). Flash is a very popular format and IE looks better to the end user if they don't have to install it. They probably also have some kind of deal with Adobe.

What boop boop?

Try holding down eight different keys on your keyboard right now. Once you've held too many (where "too many" depends on the make and model of keyboard), the keyboard will stop accepting new input and your PC's speaker will beep until you release keys. Which keyboard do you recommend to maximize the number of keys that can be recognized at once?

Player Number two uses a second keyboard and a different set of keys then you.

Then player 2 can cheat by pressing your keys. DirectInput doesn't appear capable of separating out keypresses from different physical keyboards into different devices that an app can see. Quoting Using DirectInput:

If the computer has more than one mouse, input from all mice is combined to form the system device. The same is true for multiple keyboards.

From what I understand, Microsoft also offers "rebates" to hardware computer vendors that are primarily or entirely Windows only. It's the loophole in their consent decree (rebates instead of discounts).

It is conceivable that the public exposure Dell's Ubuntu pages made caused one of two scenarios (or a combination of both):
(1) Someone at Microsoft pointed out to Dell that their Ubuntu efforts (especially with Linux becoming more widely known) was flying in the face of Microsoft's rebate terms.
(2) Someone at Dell feared that the news exposure their Ubuntu offerings were gaining would cause backlash with Microsoft, and thus minimize or eliminate what "rebates" they were getting on Windows preloaded systems.

More information (with appropriate login) can be found on Microsoft's pages located here: Microsoft OEM pages where such wording as "This campaign is designed to help you communicate the value of Windows 7 Professional ... OEM Software Rebates Accelerate your OEM Sales and earn rebates!" (direct and full quote (from the rotating text at the top), including the use of ellipses) can be found.

"Help you communicate," has been determined by others to mean "Dont offer competing operating systems such as Linux so you dont "confuse" buyers with any option other than Windows" - such statements (and such a definition of the meaning) can be found by searching the web - often attributed to Microsoft themselves. Makes Dell's statement kinda suspicious in who actually came up with it.

That's exactly the point... it's too close to the hardware. Yes, it gives you really fine-grained control over what happens, and you can tweak it to make it as fast as possible. With the speed of today's computers, though, you shouldn't (usually) need that amount of optimization. Plus, the compiler should be robust enough to optimize the program nearly as well as you could anyway.

umm... did you miss the part where the guy also bitched that interpreted languages are "too slow"?

so which is it? where on this stone are you going to squeeze the blood from? it's a tradeoff and the menu of available programming language choices is already comprehensive. this guy expresses it better and more comprehensively than i care to in a /. comment:

http://eatthedots.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-is-c-faster-than-python.html

and compiler research has only yielded 4% annual improvement in performance per Proebsting's law
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/papers/law.htm
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2006/cmsc430/lec18.4p.pdf

and compiler researchers concede that a competent human will outperform a compiler for the foreseeable future. so your statement about compilers is total hand-waving away of facts inconvenient to your argument.

And full-on developer tools for free. Not an incentive for 99% of the Mac userbase, but I find it really nice.

While granted that it's not quite their kitchen-sink professional bundles, Microsoft does offer Visual Studio Express, Web Developer Express, and SQL Server Express for free to any Windows user.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

Just saying that first party dev tools aren't Mac exclusive.

A Windows machine, even the lowest comes with a video editor, DVD video authoring app, Photo manager and basic editor, Backup solution and media organizer. None are cripple ware or 30 day trials... they all are full retail versions.

The mac guys really want you to ignore that fact.

FTFY

A Windows machine, even the lowest comes with a video editor, DVD video authoring app, Photo manager and basic editor, Backup solution and media organizer. None are cripple ware or 30 day trials... they all are full retail versions.

The mac guys really want you to ignore that fact.

FTFY

A Windows machine, even the lowest comes with a video editor, DVD video authoring app, Photo manager and basic editor, Backup solution and media organizer. None are cripple ware or 30 day trials... they all are full retail versions.

The mac guys really want you to ignore that fact.

FTFY

It's not a "small number" at all

Do you even read what people write? For combinatorics in alphanumeric sequences it is very small. 2^n to be precise. That makes 32 possibilities for five letters. And people will probably only be able to remember it if they use one of three or four patterns.

Going through a dictionary attack now takes 100X longer, just by requiring mixed case.

A dictionary attack with combined with three common patterns will likely return the majority of successes positives and only take three times as long.

I don't believe for a second users would be using a 64 character passphrase if good password practices are enforced

So why not just increase the minimum length instead of forcing users to trial and error their way around inserting special characters they won't forget?

In theory, there's an INFINITESIMAL reduction in entropy.

It's actually quite large. But for any sane authentication system, even relatively weak passwords should be more than enough to rule out abuse.

In reality, you're PREVENTING the most likely scenario, which is users selecting only a tiny subset of the available key space. In short, small theoretical downside, huge, real-world up-side.

Au contraire. Theoretically the downside is huge. In the real world the benefit is marginal at best. Just check out what microsoft tells us about secure passwords. Try the following:

verylongpasswordsarebetterthannamesandnumbers
Password1!

They think the former is weak because it has only lowercaser characers. The latter is infinitely more predictable but fulfills every requirement designed to make it less predictable.

Windows 7 is not less bug-ridden, the only thing it scales is the number of CPU cycles it takes to do the same shit that XP did, the better security argument is dubious (XP is insecure because everyone runs as Administrator?), and while "new tech" is probably the only point I'll give you, most of this "new tech" doesn't do piss for the average user. DirectX 11, right, what does that do for the guy in the cubicle whose domain group policy locks the machine down to Word, PowerPoint, and Excel? Or for the user that only knows to use Word, PowerPoint, and Excel? Or what else, more RAM is available because finally people are using 64-bit OSes? Fuck, dude, even XP came in a x64 flavor, and all the extra RAM allows is for the developers to get lazier and write even more bloated code, and for end users to run even more crapware to bog their machines down with.

Gee - maybe the person(s) who wrote this should have gotten together with the folks who created this. If you try their suggested p@$$word - the result is weak! https://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx?WT.mc_id=Site_Link

You are mixing 2 events in your memory:
1) blue-screen due to a malware which modified a driver.
2) continuous reboots when updating an antivirus.

You're correct. I was referring to the first incident, and was under the impression that the MS update replaced (or failed to replace) the driver file, but apparently it wasn't supposed to.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, KB977165 updated the kernel, and would cause computer infected by the Alureon rootkit to BSOD on reboot.

If you really want an operating system based solution, you could make a separate "acrobat" user (which doesn't have any read/write permissions), run Acrobat as this separate user and do a "sudo" whenever you want to allow acrobat to read/write to a file on the filesystem.

Or you could add operating system support which would allow a program's manifest to declare that it is internet-facing and should run with lower privileges than the user launching the program, i.e. stripping the user's writing permissions and limiting reading rights.

To avoid the program (if taken over by an attacker) misusing the permissions for e.g. unsolicited downloads to an otherwise allowed download location we could restrict the process so severely that it would need another process to marshal files in and out. We could then ensure that this other process interacted with the user to make sure that he/she is aware what is going on.

If only someone would come up with such a solution. Oh, wait: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250462(VS.85).aspx

In the real world you'd create an Apparmor or SELinux profile which only allowed it to write to a few places and that would be it. Unless you're on an antiquated OS like Windows, anyway.

Uhm, you do realize that SELinux was developed for Linux because the Linux antiquated (inherited from 1960' era Unixes) security model was woefully inadequate? Only with SELinux did it become acceptable for government agencies to use Linux. It was missing basic security features such as ACLs.

Loadable security modules like Apparmor are necessitated by the fact that Linux permission system is, well, not very granular. Basically without a LSM you can only secure file system objects (and anything you can turn into a pseudo file system object).

Privileged operations in Linux are reserved for root, so to call those you need to become root. You cannot grant individual privileges like you can in Windows. Which leads to the idea of setuid and setgid which are security design problems akin to ActiveX: Hand over the keys to someone (you trust) and hope that he is well-behaved and doesn't contain vulnerabilities, because a single vuln can leads to a system-wide compromise.

Have you looked into the Speech API's baked into Vista and Windows 7? If you're familiar with .NET coding, version 4 of the framework provides easy to use hooks into the speech api. The only problem is it is designed to be used with fairly specific grammars/lexicons (programmer supplied) however it does come with a general speech recognizer - but you'll get some interesting results without training it first. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163663.aspx Downsides also include it only natively supports WAV files but that can be addressed with some rolling-your-own goodness.

> That's because IE's javascript engine treats javascript executed from the computer with extra privileges over javascript executed from the "Internet Zone".

Used to be you could modify that, not sure how it is like after Vista and Windows 7.

See this: How To Add 'My Computer' As the Fifth Internet Explorer Security Zone
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555599
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315933

If you make the security settings strict it breaks some Windows Explorer stuff in XP's "webview" mode. But it works fine in classic mode. In my opinion the classic mode is less likely to be exploitable than the XP "webview" mode, and I'm the sort who prefers classic mode anyway :).

> That's because IE's javascript engine treats javascript executed from the computer with extra privileges over javascript executed from the "Internet Zone".

Used to be you could modify that, not sure how it is like after Vista and Windows 7.

See this: How To Add 'My Computer' As the Fifth Internet Explorer Security Zone
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555599
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315933

If you make the security settings strict it breaks some Windows Explorer stuff in XP's "webview" mode. But it works fine in classic mode. In my opinion the classic mode is less likely to be exploitable than the XP "webview" mode, and I'm the sort who prefers classic mode anyway :).

Except of course if you check the radio button under:
Windows Explorer -> Organize -> Folder and search options -> Search -> Always search file names and contents.

Why this is not default is probably because MS thought people won't want to search inside files for non-indexed directories.

After you choose that, searching for something searches files and contents. Searching for name:somefilename will search for "somefilename" in filenames.

Also check this out for some more advanced search syntax.

Hmm. Not that I want to get too involved in reading MS licenses, but...

• The first link is to Visual Studio 2010 licensing: VS2010 is not an OS.
• The second link says that licenses are granted to a user, for perpetuity. So no problem there.

And if the GP is developing games (or email) then the license hasn't been broken. Now volume licensing is a completely different kettle of fish, and depends on what your employer has negotiated....

But before we delve too closely into the second link, we can read the actual agreement here.

Some notes:

• Section 1.b confirms the "per user basis".
• Section 2.b.i says that you inherit the original licenses that comes with the software, unless mentioned elsewhere in section 2. Windows 7 is mentioned, but only in the context of other license agreements in relation to media gizmos.
• Section 2.g.ii says you can use production desktop software with MSDN if you buy it.
• Section 9 on activation is interesting. We do a lot of hardware work with MSDN, so when we called for support about the hassle of having to reactivate 20 times a day, the recommendation was to not activate.
• Section 16 is hilarious. You may not "work around any technical limitations in the software". Umm... isn't that the definition of software development?
• Section 22 says you may transfer the license.

What did I miss?

Ugh, looks like Windows 7 is stricter with the password encryption. This conversation is going to save my ass because I would've stumbled across this very soon. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itpronetworking/thread/02476acb-aa5f-4fcf-8079-4a697a065610

It cost me nothing because I had 10 win7 licenses from an MSDN subscription paid for by my previous employer.

So these licenses are owned by a previous employer? It is my understanding that if the company owned it, your rights to use it were lost when you left the company. (from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=2b1504e6-0bf1-46da-be0e-85cc792c6b9d#Overview )

And playing games on an MSDN OS is explicitly forbidden in the FAQ.

Using the software in any other way, such as for doing email, playing games, or editing a document is another use and is not covered by the MSDN Subscription license.

(from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/cc150618.aspx )

If you're looking for a valid reason to run Windows, "just because you happen to have an (unlicensed) copy" isn't it.

That makes it pretty difficult to develop software for an OS if you're not allowed to use the OS.