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What? The scheduler for Larabee doesnt run on the host - it runs on the graphics chip (cite). Note, this is different from scheduling that happens in the traditional graphics driver (shader compiling etc). Even if it did run on the host, it would have its own scheduler, just like DirectX10 adapters do today with WDDM drivers, and just like OSX.

What is so special about Grand Central Dispatch? It is a decent thread pool implementation. NT has had one of those for a LONG time (cite). The .NET base class library supports it directly (cite). We have some really cool stuff in Parallel LINK (PLINK). C# 4.0 (and .NET4.0) provide a set of very sophisticated mechanisms for data and task level parallelism (cite, cite, cite) .

Said another way, Windows has supported task level parallelism for a long time and .NET makes it super-duper easy to use. (the Win32 stuff isn’t as clean as it could be..., but it works just fine and isn’t terribly difficult to use).

Regarding Snapdragon, the article you linked to on semiaccurate.com is the worst kind of yellow journalism. It is the inter-tubes after all - nobody realizes they are a dog... Windows Mobile has run on ARM forever. Its not exactly the dominant OS.

Talk about dominance, Qualcoms chip sets and software are way, way more proprietary and closed than anyting from MSFT. I have a friend who is a mobile developer (doesnt work for MSFT) and it just drives him batty how controlling and closed Qualcom is with their stuff.

-Foredecker

What? The scheduler for Larabee doesnt run on the host - it runs on the graphics chip (cite). Note, this is different from scheduling that happens in the traditional graphics driver (shader compiling etc). Even if it did run on the host, it would have its own scheduler, just like DirectX10 adapters do today with WDDM drivers, and just like OSX.

What is so special about Grand Central Dispatch? It is a decent thread pool implementation. NT has had one of those for a LONG time (cite). The .NET base class library supports it directly (cite). We have some really cool stuff in Parallel LINK (PLINK). C# 4.0 (and .NET4.0) provide a set of very sophisticated mechanisms for data and task level parallelism (cite, cite, cite) .

Said another way, Windows has supported task level parallelism for a long time and .NET makes it super-duper easy to use. (the Win32 stuff isn’t as clean as it could be..., but it works just fine and isn’t terribly difficult to use).

Regarding Snapdragon, the article you linked to on semiaccurate.com is the worst kind of yellow journalism. It is the inter-tubes after all - nobody realizes they are a dog... Windows Mobile has run on ARM forever. Its not exactly the dominant OS.

Talk about dominance, Qualcoms chip sets and software are way, way more proprietary and closed than anyting from MSFT. I have a friend who is a mobile developer (doesnt work for MSFT) and it just drives him batty how controlling and closed Qualcom is with their stuff.

-Foredecker

What? The scheduler for Larabee doesnt run on the host - it runs on the graphics chip (cite). Note, this is different from scheduling that happens in the traditional graphics driver (shader compiling etc). Even if it did run on the host, it would have its own scheduler, just like DirectX10 adapters do today with WDDM drivers, and just like OSX.

What is so special about Grand Central Dispatch? It is a decent thread pool implementation. NT has had one of those for a LONG time (cite). The .NET base class library supports it directly (cite). We have some really cool stuff in Parallel LINK (PLINK). C# 4.0 (and .NET4.0) provide a set of very sophisticated mechanisms for data and task level parallelism (cite, cite, cite) .

Said another way, Windows has supported task level parallelism for a long time and .NET makes it super-duper easy to use. (the Win32 stuff isn’t as clean as it could be..., but it works just fine and isn’t terribly difficult to use).

Regarding Snapdragon, the article you linked to on semiaccurate.com is the worst kind of yellow journalism. It is the inter-tubes after all - nobody realizes they are a dog... Windows Mobile has run on ARM forever. Its not exactly the dominant OS.

Talk about dominance, Qualcoms chip sets and software are way, way more proprietary and closed than anyting from MSFT. I have a friend who is a mobile developer (doesnt work for MSFT) and it just drives him batty how controlling and closed Qualcom is with their stuff.

-Foredecker

What? The scheduler for Larabee doesnt run on the host - it runs on the graphics chip (cite). Note, this is different from scheduling that happens in the traditional graphics driver (shader compiling etc). Even if it did run on the host, it would have its own scheduler, just like DirectX10 adapters do today with WDDM drivers, and just like OSX.

What is so special about Grand Central Dispatch? It is a decent thread pool implementation. NT has had one of those for a LONG time (cite). The .NET base class library supports it directly (cite). We have some really cool stuff in Parallel LINK (PLINK). C# 4.0 (and .NET4.0) provide a set of very sophisticated mechanisms for data and task level parallelism (cite, cite, cite) .

Said another way, Windows has supported task level parallelism for a long time and .NET makes it super-duper easy to use. (the Win32 stuff isn’t as clean as it could be..., but it works just fine and isn’t terribly difficult to use).

Regarding Snapdragon, the article you linked to on semiaccurate.com is the worst kind of yellow journalism. It is the inter-tubes after all - nobody realizes they are a dog... Windows Mobile has run on ARM forever. Its not exactly the dominant OS.

Talk about dominance, Qualcoms chip sets and software are way, way more proprietary and closed than anyting from MSFT. I have a friend who is a mobile developer (doesnt work for MSFT) and it just drives him batty how controlling and closed Qualcom is with their stuff.

-Foredecker

What? The scheduler for Larabee doesnt run on the host - it runs on the graphics chip (cite). Note, this is different from scheduling that happens in the traditional graphics driver (shader compiling etc). Even if it did run on the host, it would have its own scheduler, just like DirectX10 adapters do today with WDDM drivers, and just like OSX.

What is so special about Grand Central Dispatch? It is a decent thread pool implementation. NT has had one of those for a LONG time (cite). The .NET base class library supports it directly (cite). We have some really cool stuff in Parallel LINK (PLINK). C# 4.0 (and .NET4.0) provide a set of very sophisticated mechanisms for data and task level parallelism (cite, cite, cite) .

Said another way, Windows has supported task level parallelism for a long time and .NET makes it super-duper easy to use. (the Win32 stuff isn’t as clean as it could be..., but it works just fine and isn’t terribly difficult to use).

Regarding Snapdragon, the article you linked to on semiaccurate.com is the worst kind of yellow journalism. It is the inter-tubes after all - nobody realizes they are a dog... Windows Mobile has run on ARM forever. Its not exactly the dominant OS.

Talk about dominance, Qualcoms chip sets and software are way, way more proprietary and closed than anyting from MSFT. I have a friend who is a mobile developer (doesnt work for MSFT) and it just drives him batty how controlling and closed Qualcom is with their stuff.

-Foredecker

What? The scheduler for Larabee doesnt run on the host - it runs on the graphics chip (cite). Note, this is different from scheduling that happens in the traditional graphics driver (shader compiling etc). Even if it did run on the host, it would have its own scheduler, just like DirectX10 adapters do today with WDDM drivers, and just like OSX.

What is so special about Grand Central Dispatch? It is a decent thread pool implementation. NT has had one of those for a LONG time (cite). The .NET base class library supports it directly (cite). We have some really cool stuff in Parallel LINK (PLINK). C# 4.0 (and .NET4.0) provide a set of very sophisticated mechanisms for data and task level parallelism (cite, cite, cite) .

Said another way, Windows has supported task level parallelism for a long time and .NET makes it super-duper easy to use. (the Win32 stuff isn’t as clean as it could be..., but it works just fine and isn’t terribly difficult to use).

Regarding Snapdragon, the article you linked to on semiaccurate.com is the worst kind of yellow journalism. It is the inter-tubes after all - nobody realizes they are a dog... Windows Mobile has run on ARM forever. Its not exactly the dominant OS.

Talk about dominance, Qualcoms chip sets and software are way, way more proprietary and closed than anyting from MSFT. I have a friend who is a mobile developer (doesnt work for MSFT) and it just drives him batty how controlling and closed Qualcom is with their stuff.

-Foredecker

Or, the admins download and roll out the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack and leave the CEO with his new shiny-shiny.

Our office is doing the Compatibility Pack thing, and it... mostly... works... sorta. You still can't open 07 files from within Excel. You have to downgrade to save them after doing any edits. It's a constant reminder that it sucks.

Here is the official press release with the answer: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-15statement.mspx

Hmm... that is most definitely Microsoft’s favicon, but requests for http://perens.com/favicon.ico gives this response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Via: 1.1 ISA03
Connection: Keep-Alive
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 0
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:50:07 GMT
Content-Type: image/x-icon
ETag: "dc1-0-46da9de6675c0"
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:24:15 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=100

Looks like you found a bug in the way Chrome reacts to a zero-length favicon.ico! :o

Microsoft Investigating Questions over MSN China joint venture's Juku feature
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-14Statement.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

By deep Deep Googling, I guess that meant skipping the first and second results and having to click on the third result?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126492

https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/sitemaintenance.html

The Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center is undergoing maintenance as part of a series of enhancements to improve the licensing management experience for partners and customers.

We apologize for any inconvenience and our goal is for the site to be available on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. Please check back on the website sign-in page for regular updates.

And yet, when you get a Microsoft Open License Order Confirmation, the first section directs you:

Volume License Keys

      Also included on the eOpen site, are your applicable Volume Licensing Product keys for installation of products requiring a VLK. If you are unable to find your VLKs, you can obtain them by calling the Activation Call Center for your region. Procedures for obtaining your VLKs and for Activation Center phone numbers can be found by going to http://www.microsoft.com/licensing and clicking on the Volume Licensing Product Keys link.

And, when one tries teh OTHER routes for keys, one is directed to THIS STATEMENT:

"Media Fulfillment
While VLSC is undergoing scheduled maintenance, please visit the Product Activation Call Centers for assistance activating your product. You can find a phone number for your region by visiting
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/activation-centers.aspx."

And yet, when you get a Microsoft Open License Order Confirmation, the first section directs you:

Volume License Keys

      Also included on the eOpen site, are your applicable Volume Licensing Product keys for installation of products requiring a VLK. If you are unable to find your VLKs, you can obtain them by calling the Activation Call Center for your region. Procedures for obtaining your VLKs and for Activation Center phone numbers can be found by going to http://www.microsoft.com/licensing and clicking on the Volume Licensing Product Keys link.

And, when one tries teh OTHER routes for keys, one is directed to THIS STATEMENT:

"Media Fulfillment
While VLSC is undergoing scheduled maintenance, please visit the Product Activation Call Centers for assistance activating your product. You can find a phone number for your region by visiting
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/activation-centers.aspx."

I hate to comment on my own post, but I just found out that another service window for the VLSC site was planned on the 12th, it actually states that in the second link I posted below. Anyone in IT will tell you a weekend outage lasting into Monday morning is not a basis for front page news.

eOpen was closed on december 6th and replaced by VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) at the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/home.aspx

Morte info can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/manage-my-agreements.aspx

The VLSC site also appears to be down now, but maybe the swap is taking longer then planned or they are working out a bug on the week old site.

Not saying Microsoft doesn't screw up, but lets get all the facts, eOpen is closed for good and has been replaced.

I hate to comment on my own post, but I just found out that another service window for the VLSC site was planned on the 12th, it actually states that in the second link I posted below. Anyone in IT will tell you a weekend outage lasting into Monday morning is not a basis for front page news.

eOpen was closed on december 6th and replaced by VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) at the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/home.aspx

Morte info can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/manage-my-agreements.aspx

The VLSC site also appears to be down now, but maybe the swap is taking longer then planned or they are working out a bug on the week old site.

Not saying Microsoft doesn't screw up, but lets get all the facts, eOpen is closed for good and has been replaced.

eOpen was closed on december 6th and replaced by VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) at the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/home.aspx

Morte info can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/manage-my-agreements.aspx

The VLSC site also appears to be down now, but maybe the swap is taking longer then planned or they are working out a bug on the week old site.

Not saying Microsoft doesn't screw up, but lets get all the facts, eOpen is closed for good and has been replaced.

eOpen was closed on december 6th and replaced by VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) at the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/home.aspx

Morte info can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/manage-my-agreements.aspx

The VLSC site also appears to be down now, but maybe the swap is taking longer then planned or they are working out a bug on the week old site.

Not saying Microsoft doesn't screw up, but lets get all the facts, eOpen is closed for good and has been replaced.

as the site http://www.microsoft.com/BusinessSolutions/MBSRegistration does not resolve;

You can't "resolve" a URL. You resolve a DNS name which is part of the URL.

</nitpick>

Uhhhh...I hate to ruin a perfectly good rant and all, but you DO know they could just choose to get the compatibility pack if they wanted to, right? It is absolutely free, and works on any version of MS Office from Office 2K-2K3. Now if they are still using Office 97 I think they got bigger things to worry about than getting a newer version.

Now I can't tell you how well it does/doesn't work on Office XP or 2K3, since I don't have those, but so far I haven't had any problems with my Office 2K opening 2K7 files with the compatibility pack. Supposedly you can now save to the new format with the compatibility pack, but since I just save as the Office 2K .doc file, which I've found opens just fine in 2K3 and 2K7, I can't comment on that.

So while you may hate Office 2K7 for the bloat or the ribbon (man I hate that thing!) it really isn't hard to open the new formats in the old Office with the compatibility tool, at least that has been my experience.

Eventually the bigwigs get tired of the fact that they cannot understand how to use save-as-older-format, and they dislike having their underlings telling them to do things, and they cannot bear to find all the files they saved and re-save them before they downgrade back to the old version... So the entire company naturally has to pay to upgrade everyone.

Or, the admins download and roll out the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack and leave the CEO with his new shiny-shiny.

"I doubt that too many MCDBAs have quite wrapped their heads around using SQL Server on a Core (read: non-UI) install of Windows Server just yet.)"

Installing SQL Server on Windows Core isn't supported, though I wish it were.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143506.aspx

I haven't tried it, is this something that you've been able to successfully accomplish?

Look to MS Halloween documents and especially the part they say "easily divided" to Free/Open Source community and tell me it has nothing to do with the current situation.

Slashdot users and thousands of bloggers are calling each other names because some DEAD project, which doesn't progress, took MS money to show an ad on their semi official site. Prejudice my ass really.

I don't care what Icaza or your future intentions are, the open source is healthy and good as never before (check iPhone license sometime) and some MS reject idiot tries to divide community with his half ass clone which doesn't do a SHIT. Just because some MS lawyers/IT suits designed something which suits to GPL, it doesn't make it GPL. It is GPL in a IT Lawyer sense, it is not really GPL otherwise.

Want to code with MS technologies? Look nowhere else than http://www.microsoft.com/NET/ , there, all features, performance, a perfect roadmap which isn't tied to some almost chapter 11 company. I am sure the actual .NET apps and frameworks already shows Mono as some dinosaur. MS Net 3.5 SP1 shipped, 4.x is already at beta stage... What is the functionality level of Mono? What is the functionality level of Sun Java in 4 platforms? Equal right? Equal... Will always be equal.

The community promise only applies to core .NET though.

Even less than that: it only coves the ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 specifications (the most recent revisions of which, by the way, currently date back to 2006); the .NET framework, which is effectively the target for users' applications (even free software ones), is a much richer superset of those specifications, and is completely MS-proprietary. There's no mention of .NET in the standards, nor in MS' promise.

Good summary. I for one ain't that crazy about seeing my FSF dues going to host a MS/Silverlight ad. What's next, a rave review of Office 2010? Windows 8? Is MS so impoverished they can't afford to buy ads anymore? Wouldn't this be a better place for a Sliverblight endorsement? With all the money those parasites have, you'd think they'd be too ashamed to leech off of GNU!

As long as I'm ranting, Dear GNOME, if you find that the 4 freedoms make you philosophically uneasy, feel free to leave GNU. While you are at it why not re-write GNOME in .NET to work on the the NT kernel?! Won't be any skin off my butt, XFCE, KDE, and Fluxbox, are all better alternatives. /end rant.

About your bruised feelings: Tough shit. Now, feel free to use your sock-puppets to mod me down: "-1 unympathetic."

Tomboy is LGPL; Mono is LGPL/GPL/X11. C#/CLI is covered by Microsoft community promise ( http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx ). Why do you call that software "non-free". I don't get it.

Oh, do you mean these :)

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Protocol Documentation

Here is the announcement from Feb 2008: Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability.

Bing is your friend.

-Foredecker

Oh, do you mean these :)

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Protocol Documentation

Here is the announcement from Feb 2008: Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability.

Bing is your friend.

-Foredecker

From Bing's privacy policy:

We take additional steps to protect the privacy of stored search information by
__removing the entirety of the IP address__,
__cookies__ and
__other cross session identifiers__ , after 18 months.

I like that a LOT more than randomizing the C class and keeping everything else forever, even if it's 18 months in the future.

I can't even find the word "anonymize" in Google's new privacy policy.

SDelete on Windows. I'm not aware of such a tool for other OSs.

I don't see a problem with XP users and exFAT since Microsoft provides it for XP. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955704 Now Mac and other OS users may have problems since exFAT isn't currently available for their OS but that will likely change should this file system take off.

Has Asa not seen EntityCube? http://entitycube.research.microsoft.com/
Microsoft is trying to build a Who's Who of everyone who has their name on the internet. I have two major variants of my real name, and the more common one has three times the relational information (a third of which is actually myself) including a location link with Iraq (a military base shares the name). Worse, putting my name in quotes doesn't reduce NEAR results.

I have to wonder how long until such tools are used to populate No-Fly lists.
Name your kids after popular celebrities, folks. They'll thank you later.

You just have to apply the update, which you can get here. So has anybody benchmarked it to see how it compares to FAT?

And for those in Linux that want exFAT support according to the wiki an opensource experimental driver is in the works, or you can purchase a proprietary driver derived from licensed MSFT source code from Tuxera.

That said I doubt we will be seeing FAT go anywhere for awhile, even though FAT is pretty long in the tooth. Sadly FAT is the only format that I know of that can be truly read by all three OSes out of the box.

Microsoft realeased an updated SDHCI driver for windows XP which is supposed to support SDHC cards. But since it has not been distributed with Windows Update, I suppose it could have some problem. I've never tested it.

The SD Association has adopted exFAT for its SDXC memory card specification.

So a mediocre but patent encumbered technology gets adopted as a standard because it runs out of the box on Windows. As Microsoft itself puts it, "exFAT is relatively simple". Hello, antitrust regulators? Hello, patent office?

Regarding "This application requires the Image Mastering API v2":

Are you using Windows XP? From the bottom of the download page:

"Microsoft Image Mastering API v2 must be installed. It can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B5F726F1-4ACE-455D-BAD7-ABC4DD2F147B&displaylang=en"

Yes, their contrib to the linux kernel a few months ago. Some virtualisation stuff that helps them run linux on their OS I think. More news here

It looks like the page serving out malware is suffering from the Slashdot effect.
You will have to manually install the trojan.

You can get it here:
http://microsoft.com/ :)

Hi APK,

Im unclear on what you are arguing about. Im not arguing with you and Im not asking you to apologize for anything.

Of course, larger files take longer to load.

In any case, like I said before. I appreciate your questions and points about the host file. They are interesting and Im working on finding an answer. Again, please be patient.

At this point, I dont know why the 0 thing was removed from the hosts file parser. Maybe it was an oversight, maybe there was a good reason for it. Maybe you are right and it needs to be supported again.

On another note, I have a few questions for you.

1. How many entries do you have in your HOSTS file?
2. What OS are you running and is it 64 or 32 bit?
3. How do you manage such a large HOSTS file? Do you edit by hand? Do you have tools that do it? If so, what tools?

You mention the proper channels. Again, I encourage you to use Microsoft Connect. Thats the proper channels. Im only doing this because its interesting. Slashdot anonymous posts are most definitely not the proper channels.

Thanks
- Foredecker

the "secret" vulnerabilities will be fixed on OSS, while they still exist in secret source software.

Huh? In either case, they only get fixed if someone finds them and reports them as bugs. Users are not expected to be OS and Kernel developers/experts. But even then, You have to deal with users who don't patch their systems.

Conficker worm:

Vulnerability patched: - October 23, 2008 ( http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx )

Worm seen in wild: - November 2008 and still spreading to this day

I wonder if the press gave MS a pass on this, since it they had already patched it prior to the first report of the worm was logged. If the tables were reversed I'll bet 100% of Slashdot and the other online Linux cheerleaders would claim it wasn't the fault of any distro. You'd see snide posts like
"Unpatched computers get infected. News at 11" , "Idiots who don't patch their system get infected" , etc. No, its not a strawman, its an informed opinion ;)

I think that you know that I disagree. Linux does not have any form of autorun. Most distributions lack open ports. That's a lot of attack surface missing right there relative to Windows on a per system basis. After all, if your computer isn't listening over the network, it can't be compromised over the network by a remote initiator; if it isn't running a file on the root of a mounted share, CD or pendrive then it can't be automatically compromised by software placed in those locations (or mailed or dropped in the parking lot or in the Men's room at the clubs where your high-value targets hang out) without further user interaction. Then there are the thousands of object formats like images, spreadsheets and wordart that Microsoft seems to think should be embedded in every application. That's how you wind up with a buffer overflow in font rendering that gets system privileges. Even without these things the embedding of Turing Complete scripting languages in every application with hidden execution renders the Windows platform's security horrendous.

Both can be rendered more secure of course. Here, for example, are some NSA recommendations for Windows. With good system administration by a skilled staff it's possible to build an image and policies for either that can carry most users through a year without being compromised despite heavy online research and heavy communications on the part of the end user. I think we can both agree that this is not what's actually happening in the field.

I argue that if Linux became as popular as windows that it would face security problems at a similar scale.

This argument is beaten to death. Linux runs the Internet. There is no higher value target than the server that stores the files and databases for thousands of users or processes their credit cards and here market share is more evenly matched. And yet... where is the Linux equivalent of the SQL_slammer worm that compromised 90% of all the vulnerable servers in the world in under an hour? Nowhere. The "When Linux is popular it will have problems too" story is just getting silly. There are more than enough Linux users both for commercial software vendors and malware vendors and they're both avoiding it like the plague. Kudos to your marketing team for making the former happen. I have to think the latter made that decision on their own, but perhaps the marketing does help, so thanks for that.

Did you know that the Windows Malware ecosystem is in dollars actually far larger than the Windows market? I thought it odd too, but if you count time and money lost, development and marketing and sales on both sides (attack and defense), hardware and services, it's not even close. Maybe you're on the wrong side of the business.

I'm going to summarize with a truism you should engrave on your desk: "Anything a program can do, another program can do."

Hi APK - thanks for the posts. I see them.

A few things.

• Ill respond to you on my blog. Please be patient. You have three long posts for me to consider and I have a lot going on right now.
• Im sure it takes you time to look for and reply to every single one of my slashdot posts. You can do one (or both) of the following things to make it easier for me (or others) to spot your messages:
  • Get a slashdot login. That way, I can easily spot your posts and not confuse them with other posts from Anonymous Cowards.
  • Post comments on my blog. Note, I adjusted the settings so people do not have to login to Wordpress to leave comments.

Also, did you have a chance to get signed into Microsoft Connect and apply for a connect relationship with the Windows networking team?

Thanks,
Foredecker

Here are my handy hints from having given a number of talks and lecture courses:

• Read Simon Peyton-Jones' "How to give a good research talk" notes. SPJ is one of the most lucid and entertaining speakers to whom I've had the pleasure of listening.
• A talk is essentially a one-sided conversation with the audience. If you read from the slides or from prepared notes then your talk will be awful: the audience can read things for themselves.
• Relax; be somewhat casual. The audience is on your side. (Except for undergraduates: these guys will just stare at you for weeks, like an inert zombie horde, until you finally connect with them.)
• If you are interrupted with many questions then this is a sign of success: you are engaging the audience.
• Avoid slides full of bullet points. It's much better to put up some example code or a diagram and talk around that.
• I loathe slides that incrementally reveal points. Don't patronise the audience.
• Be careful when attempting humour: if you're not sure it's funny, don't say it.
• In a half-hour talk, you can get one key point across. Let the full paper provide all the other details.

Richard M. Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Linus Torvalds, and Bruce Schneier on Microsoft's board.

I don't see them there.

Windows really only has the concept of ONE Desktop. If you create 4 desktops (as Systinternal's desktops does), you CANNOT move programs between the desktops.

This is the CORE reason why Windows never supported virtual desktops, and Mark Russinovich's solution is the simplest.

Quote from Mark Russinovich Sysinternal's Desktops.
Sysinternals Desktops uses a Windows desktop object for each desktop. Application windows are bound to a desktop object when they are created, so Windows maintains the connection between windows and desktops and knows which ones to show when you switch a desktop. That making Sysinternals Desktops very lightweight and free from bugs that the other approach is prone to where their view of active windows becomes inconsistent with the visible windows.

Desktops reliance on Windows desktop objects means that it cannot provide some of the functionality of other virtual desktop utilities, however. For example, Windows doesn't provide a way to move a window from one desktop object to another, and because a separate Explorer process must run on each desktop to provide a taskbar and start menu, most tray applications are only visible on the first desktop. Further, there is no way to delete a desktop object, so Desktops does not provide a way to close a desktop, because that would result in orphaned windows and processes. The recommended way to exit Desktops is therefore to logoff.

Same reason why newspapers and magazines print in columns. Unfortunately, proper columns still aren't a part of the CSS specification, meaning that it'll be several years before we see them in the wild on the web.

A draft specification has languished within the w3c for 8 or so years. Firefox and webkit both offer their own proprietary implementations that should be vaguely compatible with the draft specification.

IE doesn't offer support for anything of this sort. (In fact, Microsoft's own documentation offers a surprisingly handy reference to the many bits of CSS that IE chooses to ignore)

Well, Linux does have problems dropping or corrupting bits, and can't detect corrupted bits like ZFS can, which means that silent data corruption is possible.

It's not necessary that Linux causes the corruption. The problem is corruption occurs that Linux can't fix / deal with reasonably, or the way Linux filesystems work is high-risk, and ext3 fsck is horrible, in that data loss or inconsistency of I/Os results and cannot be corrected, despite the fact the filesystem is "journaled": in fact, ext3 journaling is not true journaling, by default, ext3 operates in the less-reliable journal_data_ordered, and not journal_ordered; thus, only metadata is journaled, and data corruption is likely if power or access to storage is disrupted.

The ext3 / ext4 filesystems do not live up to the "journalling" promise.

It's happened too many times to count, that I have lost important data, database, or even entire systems due to Ext3 shenanigans, on Debian Etch, Ubuntu, Redhat Enterprise Linux 4, and Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.

Usually how it happens is a kernel panic, power outage, reset (due to system lock-up), or something of that nature occured, and upon boot, the journal is aborted -- however, there is still data corruption after abort of the journal, or even, the abort of the journal fails, and it becomes necessary to manually run fsck, which "tinkers around with the filesystem" trying to make the metadata consistent again.

I have yet to ever have any issues with ZFS-based or NTFS-based systems; they handle it seamlessly. Windows 2003 or 2008 may show a blue screen once every 2 or 3 years, but the system doesn't require an expert to travel out and manually run chkdsk (Windows equivalent of fsck). And ZFS handles this quite elegantly....

By the way, even NTFS is ahead of ext3 in some ways, in this regard, as far as self-healing is concerned.

Just because it runs Linux doesn't mean the physical disks are magically immune to common issues that effect all storage.

Linux isn't the worst choice for a NAS. (In fact, I would be really scared of the idea of using NTFS for a NAS).

However, it's just as dishonest to suggest Linux Debian is rock-solid for a NAS as it is to suggest Windows 2000 is.

FreeBSD or Solaris is a really good choice for a NAS.

Systems that utilize certain versions of the Linux kernel can be a good choice, with the right configuration, and right supporting programs installed.

For example, a dedicated NAS appliance, can easily provision its ext3 filesystems using SAFE journalling options, instead of the defaults.

And can also pick just the right kernel version and library versions to be as stable as possible under the supported hardware list...

It's not necessarily good for a NAS to support as much hardware as possible: The Number 1 cause of system crashes is faulty hardware or faulty hardware drivers.

It's best to stick with old hardware and driver code that has been around for 5+ years, without major bugs detected.

And to have kernels with isolation features such as IOMMU and NX bit.

This article explains it pretty well. The thing is, when you set that up, what's actually happening is that the same driver is running both the Quadro FX570 and the GTS250, because it happens that the latest drivers will support both those cards.

If you wanted to use e.g. an old GeForce FX5200 (in a PCI slot) plus the GTS250, you just can't do it in Vista or Windows 7, because the last driver which supports the FX5200 (96-series nvidia drivers) won't support the GTS250.

The device you plug into is a single point of failure anyways (potentially). If the same device exposes a DHCP equivalent to its direct ports, and handles inter-plugin-device addressing properly (when multiple plugin-devices interconnect), then the DHCP equivalent's not an additional point of failure.

Also, DHCP doesn't have to be a single point of failure even on a LAN -- multiple DHCP servers can be used, with a supernet split according to the 80/20 rule.

Also, unless the static IP addresses are of the IPv6 sort, or EUI-64/48 (64-bit or 48-bit MAC addresses), there is a point of failure introduced -- as in the equivalent of an IP conflict.

the software required to develop your own windows apps (in c, c++, or C#) is a FREE DOWNLOAD from M$! Granted for free you don't get the "enterprise" version of the thing, but all you are missing is the mission critical networking stuff that only server apps need.

The Windows Mobile SDK explicitly does not support the free "express" edition of Visual C++.