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OWA Premium for Exchange 2010 only runs on IE7+, Fx3+, and Safari 3+. No IE6. [source]

FUD about Re:FUD. While you are both right in theory ( http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean31 ) If you saw the weekly official patch cycle for WinXP from Microsoft you would feel mostly like... someone who had a crappy life testing and installing all of those patches.

According to MS, you can allocate up to 8TB in Windows x64 for a 64 bit process compiled with the default flags.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx

Exactly, logic says if you don't want it read by the public, don't host it on a public webserver. There are plenty of analogies here, but you're right, there was no lock or even a partially closed door. This doesn't equate well to the physical world unless you want to say they were invited into the room with no door on it, a room filled with artworks, and under a few of the paintings is a small sign with fine print that says 'please don't look at this painting'. Some of us are getting used to standards in web design and may attempt a uri by guess in case that common page is already created to save looking for it. This is not uncommon, so the practice of typing in a uri rather than clicking on links is not a felonious adventure. If you've already seen the painting, the fine print on the little sign is not going to be sufficient security. If you're not sure what I mean, try http://microsoft.com/search or http://ibm.com/search or http://any/ website/search I'm only guessing, but I bet the search box would have found the documents for them also?

"I hope you guys realize that this is Amazon's and MS way to battle iTunes? I think the iPad was the final push that Amazon needed to fall for going to Microsoft"

Please describe the correlation between Amazons core business and the iPad and iTunes and why Microsoft's Tablet computer and Microsoft's own online music service, the Zune Marketplace music service

-- spinn it all you can .. :)

The agreement provides each company with access to the other’s patent portfolio and covers a broad range of products and technology ...

Now Microsoft will be able to sell all its products with just one click!

But seriously where does this end? Will we see the death of Microsoft's .lit format in favor of Kindle's .azw? Will Amazon push out and offer Azure on EC2?

The agreement provides each company with access to the other’s patent portfolio and covers a broad range of products and technology ...

Now Microsoft will be able to sell all its products with just one click!

But seriously where does this end? Will we see the death of Microsoft's .lit format in favor of Kindle's .azw? Will Amazon push out and offer Azure on EC2?

Exactly! The principles of free software is transforming the world: Open collaboration. Wikipedia, Creative Commons.

In hindsight, it will likely be hard for people to understand how Stallman could be viewed as such a radical.

And it will be very hard to understand how some people became among the richest in the world by selling software.

WTF,

MS still hasn't fixed the storport driver with an OS release:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968675.

Nor does MS make it easy to write 3rd party drivers. There documentation is usually incorrect and the samples inoperative. If MS can't get their drivers to work, how is a vendor suppose to do it.

As for beta drivers, forget it. This guy expects every vendor to spend hours of dev time making drivers for a growing tree. No. No. No.

Nobody even tried to write a driver for 2008 until it was RTM, and that isn't much of a window.

Depends what you mean by "vetted"; the NSA created SELinux, so nothing really compares to that, but they've regularly put out security guides in conjunction with Microsoft for every major Windows release (as well as for other operating systems). They're always comprehensive and a very solid resource on hardening Windows systems to varying extents, not to mention good learning material. Just don't get too overboard, a lot of the suggestions take security to extremes, to the extent that you'll definitely break a large number of programs by removing permissions and modifying defaults that they'd never expect to encounter (I say this from experience). They definitely don't get the attention they deserve:

Windows 7 Security Compliance Management Toolkit

And Windows Media files play on a Mac. It's magic.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx

Really, Microsoft's OS hasn't changed much in the last decade. Almost everything runs under Windows 2000

That just means the Win32 Subsystem has remained insanely backwards compatible as MS promised they would do. The NT kernel has evolved quite a bit.

To be fair, you do seem like a non-technical user so I suppose the explanations would be a waste on you when you just want to foam at the mouth with anti-ms hate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Core_operating_system

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/XP_kernel.mspx

Most of this "upgrading" is planned obsolescence, not progress.

First you say Win2000 isn't obsolete by telling us how all new software runs on it, then you claim MS is "forcing" people to upgrade by obsoleting earlier OSs. You're really dumb. I'd come to expect a certain level of intelligence in trolls atleast on slashdot. What the hell guys?

Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here or here

AFAIK, the only safe and MS-supported way to run multiple versions of IE is to use MS Virtual PC. They even provide free images to run IE6-8 on XP and IE7-8 on Vista.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF

Use VirtualPC or VirtualBox to create an environment for legacy web applications. Then you're free to upgrade your OS and browser as you wish.

mmmm... they are here. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

To put it bluntly, the Linux Desktop missed the entire mass adoption of Personal Computers at home. Most of the desktop learning environment was done in the 90's and they have passed that skill on down to their children

It goes deeper than that.

Applications have been passed down from father to son, mother to daughter.

Microsoft Word 5.5 DOS [Patched For W2K] is a free download of a program first released in 1983. 27 years ago. Word for Windows took hold in 1990-1993.

I once went looking to see if there was a way to do it from within the application code itself - something like mlock()/mlockall() in posix - and I couldn't find an equivalent, which may just be a reflection of my own inexperience with the Windows API but I figured I would throw that out there anyway.

Use VirtualLock.

I once went looking to see if there was a way to do it from within the application code itself - something like mlock()/mlockall() in posix - and I couldn't find an equivalent, which may just be a reflection of my own inexperience with the Windows API but I figured I would throw that out there anyway.

The function you're looking for is VirtualLock. You may also look into increasing the process's minimum working set with SetProcessWorkingSetSize. This requires SeIncreaseBasePriorityPrivilege.

A process that is scanning through a file is supposed to use the FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN hint so that the cached pages are recycled first, but that doesn't always happen. It also doesn't help that csrss will ask the kernel to minimize a process's working set when its main window is minimized.

I once went looking to see if there was a way to do it from within the application code itself - something like mlock()/mlockall() in posix - and I couldn't find an equivalent, which may just be a reflection of my own inexperience with the Windows API but I figured I would throw that out there anyway.

The function you're looking for is VirtualLock. You may also look into increasing the process's minimum working set with SetProcessWorkingSetSize. This requires SeIncreaseBasePriorityPrivilege.

A process that is scanning through a file is supposed to use the FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN hint so that the cached pages are recycled first, but that doesn't always happen. It also doesn't help that csrss will ask the kernel to minimize a process's working set when its main window is minimized.

So,pray tell, where do I learn the meanings of the various stats in Task Manager?

You can press F1 while in task manager and then search for a particular metric, e.g. "available memory". This produces results that seem moderately useful, for example:

Under Physical Memory (MB), Total is the amount of RAM installed on your computer, listed in megabytes (MB). Cached refers to the amount of physical memory used recently for system resources. Available is the amount of memory that's immediately available for use by processes, drivers, or the operating system. Free is the amount of memory that is currently unused or doesn't contain useful information (unlike cached files, which do contain useful information).

For more details about particular counters you can check the Windows Internals book, or Memory Performance Information on MSDN. Also, many counters in task manager have similar or identical perfmon counters, and perfmon has its own help (IIRC there's a "show description" option in the counter selection dialog)

.

Because there is no way to prioritize I/O!

Because there is no way to prioritize I/O!

There used to be a ramdrive.sys but turns out the OS is smarter than us when trying to use RAM as a cache. Here's a reference to it in an article for troubleshooting memory problems: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/142546

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/07/28/browser-ballot-screen-isn-t-just-for-windows-7.aspx

who has time to do that? I'll just point to something that's more than 6 months old (albeit this one mentions just 10, other sources shortly thereafter were mentioning 11 or more such as
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/18/0210240/How-Europes-Mandated-Browser-Ballot-Screen-Works
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142416/FAQ_How_the_IE_ballot_screen_works
which listed:

The first five are Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, Microsoft's IE, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera. On a second screen, the ballot will list AOL, Maxthon, K-Meleon, Flock, Avant Browser, Sleipnir and SlimBrowser.

so ...)

It also would appear as though Microsoft wanted to do a "top ten" http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-24statement.mspx so I believe that they are using the "top ten" plus IE8, thus making 11.

Also, it's important to note that three or four of these browsers (at a minimum) are rebranded IE experiences, using the IE rendering engine. A couple are rebranded Firefox builds.

Also:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/24/1927255/Microsoft-Agrees-To-EU-Browser-Ballot-Screen?from=rss

Already happened for Chicago. Just need some more cities. http://www.microsoft.com/games/midtown/

I don't know that it's documented in detail anywhere. The beginning priority seems to be based on the process's priority (5 for normal apparently) and is adjusted by usage heuristics and superfetch. There is a overview here. It may help to raise the priority of FF to AboveNormal if it seems like its pages are being discarded unnecessarily.

What the other posters said in reply to your other post about the OS not really knowing what memory belongs to what tab, instead having a page level view of things, is correct. When the CPU accesses a page, it sets a flag in the page descriptor that the page was accessed. The memory manager checks these flags periodically to see what pages are being used. When the MM thinks the process has too many pages, it takes away those that haven't had that flag set in a while. I guess the frequency of usage has some effect on the priority, but I'm not sure.

I'd recommend something like SmallBasic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

But, oh, I guess according to the grandparent it's impossible to learn computers with Microsoft products, so nevermind.

At least it wasn't Soulja Boy.

Or this.

Hey--slow down there. At least it wasn't this

Well it appears that MS10-015 patch was for a locally logged on user using a specially crafted app to gain privilege escalation, so it doesn't appear to be designed for that specific rootkit in mind.

That said considering how many third party apps run on Windows I was always impressed by how few times a MSFT patch caused a problem, and if anything this BSOD should serve as a wake up call to those affected to actually clean up their systems and put on a decent AV. Just this Monday I had a PC cross my desk that had over 1000 infected objects. The user hadn't changed squat from when it had been bought new, which unfortunately thanks to truly shitty security policies at most OEMs and retailers means that it had NO autoupdates and was in fact still at SP2, with a Norton crapware AV install that of course had been out of date and non functional since 2004.

We geeks really need to raise the alarm and shame these OEM and stores like Best Buy into having decent defaults on their PCs. I have yet to see one from an OEM cross my desk that didn't have autoupdates turned off and some 30 day trial of crapware AV installed instead of something decent. I make sure any PC I sell has Comodo AV, autoupdates turned on, and Firefox with ABP installed and you would be surprised how just these few changes really cut down on the malware. Too many home users think their PC should just work out of the box (and IMHO rightly so) and end up with a badly pwned machine because the defaults are so shitty. There should really be a policy in place to shame these companies until they set more decent defaults.

Then they have a compatibility set somehow as the older drivers would not be able to operate in Kernel Mode as they would expect, which was part of XPDM. The Win2k driver model won't work, nor will NT4's. So the point still stands.

The Windows XP Display Driver Model (XPDM) is the display driver model used in the Windows XP and Windows 2000 operating systems.

So is Microsoft rushing out an update to their Malicious Software Removal Tool to clean up this rootkit?

Virus:Win32/Alureon.A Definition: 1.69.77.0 Released: Oct 23, 2009

There are many, many few third-party, binary-only drivers for 32-bit Linux, and I'd be willing to bet that a number of them don't work properly on PAE systems.

It's not that you can't have 32-bit PAE systems with more than 4 GB of memory, it's that precompiled third-party Windows drivers crash on such systems.

For that matter, a process can only use 2 or 3 GB of memory, since the kernel shares address space with the process. And the system as a whole can't have a full 4 GB of memory -- it's restricted to 4 GB of address space, some of which is consumed by device memory.

Note that some versions of Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 lift this fake limit, allowing you to use more than 4 GB physical memory on 32-bit systems (with PAE).

This is all covered in Windows System Internals. You can also read a bit about the driver issues here.

The system as a whole can't have more than 4GB of memory with PAE? What do you think PAE is for then? It's obvious that pointers are still 32 bit, you don't have to restate it.

The 32 bit/4 Gig system ram limit was fixed in hardware and in serious OS's a long time ago. Windows isn't keeping up with the basics.

There are many, many few third-party, binary-only drivers for 32-bit Linux, and I'd be willing to bet that a number of them don't work properly on PAE systems.

It's not that you can't have 32-bit PAE systems with more than 4 GB of memory, it's that precompiled third-party Windows drivers crash on such systems.

For that matter, a process can only use 2 or 3 GB of memory, since the kernel shares address space with the process. And the system as a whole can't have a full 4 GB of memory -- it's restricted to 4 GB of address space, some of which is consumed by device memory.

Note that some versions of Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 lift this fake limit, allowing you to use more than 4 GB physical memory on 32-bit systems (with PAE).

This is all covered in Windows System Internals. You can also read a bit about the driver issues here.

Version | Limit in 32-bit Windows | Limit in 64-bit Windows:
Windows 7 Starter | 2 GB | 2 GB

Seriously? Microsoft, you brought this on yourself.

Bull(2). The OS does not spend any time to "free up that RAM cache". the RAM is simply overwritten with new data, just like if it was free. The original data was just a copy of data from the HDD.

Almost correct - before handing out the memory to satisfy a memory request, Windows makes sure it's all zeroed out, for security concerns. Look at the various lists used by NT to organize memory pages, this link has a rudimentary description

Zeroing out pages is fast, though, and done with SSE write-through (i.e., no cache pollution). Iirc the SSE operations were done already in Win2k, and is definitely there in XP and later. So it's going to run at pretty much full RAM bandwidth... and outside of memory-starved situations, this zeroing happens in the background.

You can do it during the install:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236621

such as verifying that all team members successfully clear a background investigation

I have as much of a right to verify their background. After all, you don't want to deal with convicts.

running Winblows.

Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout

P.S.: without even reading the article !!! Take that Windoze fans.

I love your optimism, but I want you to try something: get a router that's not brand-new and relatively expensive, and put the "100Mb" WAN port on your LAN, put a machine on the LAN side, and copy data through it from something on your actual network. Not to say technology is standing still; we will have this soon enough. A $1400 Cisco router is only rated to 40Mb of WAN speed.

Although your test is accurate in general (most "home" routers can't handle more than about 25Mbps), you can get far more than 40Mbps for far less than $1400. Cisco is the Bose of the networking industry.

I've benchmarked some $300 Netgear router/firewall boxes at over 50Mbps both in and out at the same time. Since these boxes are rated at 60Mbps, I suspect that the $500 Netgear equipment rated at 127Mbps will have no problem hitting 80-90Mbps. As a router only (without NAT), I'd expect to see even better, as I can hit 80Mbps on commodity hardware using Windows RRAS

So, let me get this straight. A media company wages an 18-month lawsuit against private companies, trying to force them to disclose private data. The media company is doing this purely out of malice, as there is no good that can come from release of this data. On what planet is this sort of thing acceptable?

"Those damn reporters are trying to hurt us.
No good can come from such a disclosure."

There isn't a black man, a woman or Jew above a certain age who hasn't heard that refrain a thousand times before.

The geek celebrates the anonymous wikimedia leak - when it is damaging to those he hates.

When the open and legal pursuit of inside information cuts too close to home - he bleeds for the innocent.

_____

Women at Microsoft is the women's employee affinity group at Microsoft.
More than 10,000 women employees worldwide are currently members of WAM. [2010] More than 3,000 of Microsoft's women employees turned out to network and listen to more than 30 speakers at the Microsoft Women's Leadership and Development Conference [Oct 26-28 09]

There are around forty of these Microsoft affinity groups. The Chinese, with 1,500 members, is the largest ethnic group. Diversity Advisory Councils

So, let me get this straight. A media company wages an 18-month lawsuit against private companies, trying to force them to disclose private data. The media company is doing this purely out of malice, as there is no good that can come from release of this data. On what planet is this sort of thing acceptable?

"Those damn reporters are trying to hurt us.
No good can come from such a disclosure."

There isn't a black man, a woman or Jew above a certain age who hasn't heard that refrain a thousand times before.

The geek celebrates the anonymous wikimedia leak - when it is damaging to those he hates.

When the open and legal pursuit of inside information cuts too close to home - he bleeds for the innocent.

_____

Women at Microsoft is the women's employee affinity group at Microsoft.
More than 10,000 women employees worldwide are currently members of WAM. [2010] More than 3,000 of Microsoft's women employees turned out to network and listen to more than 30 speakers at the Microsoft Women's Leadership and Development Conference [Oct 26-28 09]

There are around forty of these Microsoft affinity groups. The Chinese, with 1,500 members, is the largest ethnic group. Diversity Advisory Councils

So, let me get this straight. A media company wages an 18-month lawsuit against private companies, trying to force them to disclose private data. The media company is doing this purely out of malice, as there is no good that can come from release of this data. On what planet is this sort of thing acceptable?

"Those damn reporters are trying to hurt us.
No good can come from such a disclosure."

There isn't a black man, a woman or Jew above a certain age who hasn't heard that refrain a thousand times before.

The geek celebrates the anonymous wikimedia leak - when it is damaging to those he hates.

When the open and legal pursuit of inside information cuts too close to home - he bleeds for the innocent.

_____

Women at Microsoft is the women's employee affinity group at Microsoft.
More than 10,000 women employees worldwide are currently members of WAM. [2010] More than 3,000 of Microsoft's women employees turned out to network and listen to more than 30 speakers at the Microsoft Women's Leadership and Development Conference [Oct 26-28 09]

There are around forty of these Microsoft affinity groups. The Chinese, with 1,500 members, is the largest ethnic group. Diversity Advisory Councils

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqltools/thread/b2668b56-f021-4680-9997-4413620c1474

Is the one about SQL Management Studio. The Apple one, I no longer remember... sadly.

Windoze.

Yours In Minsk,
K. Trout

Reporting a bug is pretty easy in MS-land: http://connect.microsoft.com/

You get to vote on issues, comment, see responses from engineers, etc. Kinda like you'd expect.

What the essay fails to capture is the nature of the functioning of the eyeballs in practice, between open source and closed source. In closed source, the eyeballs only look at what they are paid to look at, if the code is just barely good enough to sell, then out it goes and nobody looks at that code again until the complaints start rolling in and then and only the do they fix it, well, sort of fix it, they of course only fix it just barely enough to silence the noisiest of complaints and the only if there are real consequences for failing to do so. Don't think so then try this http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Search/en-GB?query=this%20is%20a%20know%20fault&ac=8 and a huge number of them have never been fixed.

Open source follows a completely different series of routes;
1) People looking for faults because they get a kick out of finding them and fixing them.
2) Tweaks to functions that indirectly remove bugs by simply replacing them with better code.
3) Discoveries in user interactions, less of a complaint because there is no force in pushing the fix.
5) Governments and government departments directly pursuing more secure code.
6) Corporations seeking to build a public reputation by demonstrating coding expertise.

So in the case of open source software there are many 'different' kinds of eyes, so those eyes all working from different perspectives do in reality make bugs very shallow. In the closed source proprietary world the bugs are buried in the depths of the code, hiding in the dark, basically because of profits versus workmanship issues, which means no light is shone on them because only one set of eyes looking from a single 'shallow' perspective looks at them.

There is of course one other set of eyes looking at code, the saboteurs both private and government, looking for faults to exploit. Hard with open source because it can rapidly turn around and bite you on the arse if you use it (if you protect against it everybody notices). Closed source (mostly but a lot of less than honourable eyes lend up looking at it), of course can be targeted as long as you, well, use open source code yourself whilst promoting closed source to everybody else (hmm, kind of reminds me of all those mainland China computer companies, odd that, isn't it).

After all, these businesses bring in major direct (income taxes) and indrect revenue (local employees' property taxes, sales taxes etc) to the state. Nine years ago, Boeing ditched Seattle and moved to Chicago partly because of tax breaks offered by Chicago.

40,000 employees.

15 million square feet of office space - 133 sites - owned or leased in the Puget Sound area. Fun Facts About Microsoft

The median family income in Redmond itself? $97,000.

There isn't a city in the world that wouldn't like to land a prize like this.

To put that into perspective, if you look at their SEC filings, that would mean 0.484% of, worst case, a little over $19 billion, or $92 million for the 2nd quarter of 2010. Of their net income (i.e. profit), that would account for 1.4% of their total profit; needless to say, MS can probably absorb that. Of course, that $19 billion was their gross revenue, of which a good chunk of that probably isn't taxed per Washington's corporate tax law (IANAA) and certainly doesn't apply as licensing revenue (gross revenue would also include XBoxen, Zunes, and other hardware, among other things). That said, I will point out that most businesses don't operate at a 33-50% profit margin or somewhere thereabouts; I would have to imagine that a 0.484% on gross retail would be particularly painful, since most retail establishments are lucky if they can break 5%.

I will, however, point out that I live about five minutes away from MS Licensing's office in Reno, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.

Oh, it's much funnier than that, given that we were told by Gates years ago that tablets were the wave of the future, with Microsoft's OS as an integral part of their future success. Check out the 2001 picture. And what's happened? Not much. Apple's taking a terrible risk by trying to deploy something only a little different from what already hasn't taken off. It may or may not work, but certainly Microsoft and Gates can't point at their own success story in this area as an indication they understand the market for this type of device.

From Gates' 2001 Comdex Keynote:

"Gates' presentation demonstrated how the power and flexibility of Windows XP, combined with the innovative work of numerous industry hardware and software partners, is already spawning an entirely new, breakthrough generation of the PC -- the Tablet PC. For the first time, Gates unveiled prototypes of the Tablet PC made by leading computer makers such as Acer Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Fujitsu PC Corp. and Toshiba America Information Systems, and announced that these machines will go on sale in the second half of 2002.

The size of a legal notepad and half the weight of most of today's laptop PCs, the Tablet PC is a full-powered, full-featured PC that runs Windows XP and combines the power of desktop computing with the flexibility and portability of a pen and paper notepad.

"The PC took computing out of the back office and into everyone's office," said Gates. "The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I'm already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."

Oh, it's much funnier than that, given that we were told by Gates years ago that tablets were the wave of the future, with Microsoft's OS as an integral part of their future success. Check out the 2001 picture. And what's happened? Not much. Apple's taking a terrible risk by trying to deploy something only a little different from what already hasn't taken off. It may or may not work, but certainly Microsoft and Gates can't point at their own success story in this area as an indication they understand the market for this type of device.

From Gates' 2001 Comdex Keynote:

"Gates' presentation demonstrated how the power and flexibility of Windows XP, combined with the innovative work of numerous industry hardware and software partners, is already spawning an entirely new, breakthrough generation of the PC -- the Tablet PC. For the first time, Gates unveiled prototypes of the Tablet PC made by leading computer makers such as Acer Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Fujitsu PC Corp. and Toshiba America Information Systems, and announced that these machines will go on sale in the second half of 2002.

The size of a legal notepad and half the weight of most of today's laptop PCs, the Tablet PC is a full-powered, full-featured PC that runs Windows XP and combines the power of desktop computing with the flexibility and portability of a pen and paper notepad.

"The PC took computing out of the back office and into everyone's office," said Gates. "The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I'm already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."