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That page you reference requires Silverlight and it doesn't work under PPC.

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx?reason=macPPC&v=2.0

Not just that, idiots still keep publishing Webkit incompatible pages. Microsoft logo is exactly on "Privacy Policy" text.

Do you know how easy to make a major media company to "support" your product? Give its IT manager some money under the table, give free servers, give a entire fscking grid for free. Right under this story "related items" you will see companies gave up Silverlight because of its horrible performance.

It is not racing with "VLC media plugin", it is racing or daring to race with THIS

"72% of online videos are viewed worldwide using Adobe Flash technology, making it the #1 technology for video on the web.*
99% of Internet-enabled desktops can view content compatible with Adobe Flash Player." (Adobe)

And the only actual, working, supported plugin is coded for Windows. In this age when people asks the very same desktop apps on their smart phones, iphone. They can't even support PowerPC, their code is tied to i386 and Windows in this ARM/MIPS/OS X/Linux/BSD circus.

Let me tell the unfortunate truth. There is no money to spend in media industry to Microsoft's another "Me too" junk. People had their lesson with Windows Media while converting millions of hours to h264 later. Silverlight is only interesting to some idiots who thinks they can get a job at MS as if Ballmer reads slashdot comments and browses some stupid open source sites.

I think it's both.
See also.
See also. [PDF]

I think it's both.
See also.
See also. [PDF]

MS Research

All in all, i think it is a great idea for them to be researching things like this.
But the fact they are still with Trident hurts me and the web greatly.
Please Microsoft, switch to Webkit or anything else.
Or even scrap it and make a new one and don't force it to replace IE-whatever if you update, just move away from Trident!
Trident was a horrible idea and always will be. The quicker it is killed off, the better for them and us. (especially since Microsoft have now realized it is a futile attempt to build their sites around IE since the numbers of users are dwindling)

Also, i lol'd at the URL
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/helenw/papers/gazelleSecurity09.pdf
"um" indeed, Microsoft.

DirectShow and Direct3D are part of DirectX

Still, since the OP was unaware of exploits targeting DirectX, I provided an example. If we are worried about online gaming exploits, here's another one for DirectPlay which would affect multiplayer games.

Not surprisingly, there isn't much focused on Direct3D specifically since D3D content isn't typically delivered over the internet like audio and video. Yet... That may change if we "start to see DirectX like games directly in web browser."

Unless if by new you mean:
From february at least, seems older to me: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=79655

Has already appeared on slashdot and a hundred other tech sites.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/22/1724244

Its hard to google before you run to try and get a story submitted isn't it?

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-050: Vulnerability in DirectShow Could Allow Remote Code Execution (904706)

I suggest you look at System.IO.FileAttributes enumeration before you tell someone else that .NET's APIs aren't designed for Windows first. This enumeration contains values not only specific to Windows, but specific to NTFS.

I'm sure there are lots of other Windows specifics as well... places like System.Security.Policy would be a likely place to start...

I suggest you look at System.IO.FileAttributes enumeration before you tell someone else that .NET's APIs aren't designed for Windows first. This enumeration contains values not only specific to Windows, but specific to NTFS.

I'm sure there are lots of other Windows specifics as well... places like System.Security.Policy would be a likely place to start...

Ups! Sorry, that would be the Wheel Mouse instead. Specially nice in white!

...for programming, but for everyday tasks (which include pouring down code), i keep coming back to the Microsoft basic optical mouse. Very cheap, rugged, accurate and damn comfortable.

I know bashing Microsoft is sort of a recreational activity here, but they sure sell some nice hardware.

Actually, there are two parts to a video driver on Windows NT, in all versions up to 5.2. In the "Windows 2000 Display Model" (the same one used in NT4), the vendor supplies a display driver, and a miniport driver.

The miniport handles things like resource allocation, memory mapping, handle interrupts, etc. This has always been in kernel mode, because it has to talk to the hardware.

The display driver is for high level drawing and rendering commands. It provides accelerated interfaces for GDI, DirectDraw and Direct3d. This, along with the Win32 windowing and graphics servers (left side of original diagram), used to live in user mode int NT3.x inside of csrss.exe with winsrv.dll. CSR still contains many functions that were never moved into kernel mode in win32k.sys.

Performance was one reason to move the display driver and winsrv into kernel mode, but I guess the biggest reason was to simplify the interface between the Win32 server and user mode clients by eliminating all the IPC marshaling. Win32k can now just reach into the client process's memory, same pointers and everything, instead of packing things into shared memory or an LPC messages.

Vista's new display model is more complex, but for the most part has a user mode display driver again.

Actually, there are two parts to a video driver on Windows NT, in all versions up to 5.2. In the "Windows 2000 Display Model" (the same one used in NT4), the vendor supplies a display driver, and a miniport driver.

The miniport handles things like resource allocation, memory mapping, handle interrupts, etc. This has always been in kernel mode, because it has to talk to the hardware.

The display driver is for high level drawing and rendering commands. It provides accelerated interfaces for GDI, DirectDraw and Direct3d. This, along with the Win32 windowing and graphics servers (left side of original diagram), used to live in user mode int NT3.x inside of csrss.exe with winsrv.dll. CSR still contains many functions that were never moved into kernel mode in win32k.sys.

Performance was one reason to move the display driver and winsrv into kernel mode, but I guess the biggest reason was to simplify the interface between the Win32 server and user mode clients by eliminating all the IPC marshaling. Win32k can now just reach into the client process's memory, same pointers and everything, instead of packing things into shared memory or an LPC messages.

Vista's new display model is more complex, but for the most part has a user mode display driver again.

Actually, there are two parts to a video driver on Windows NT, in all versions up to 5.2. In the "Windows 2000 Display Model" (the same one used in NT4), the vendor supplies a display driver, and a miniport driver.

The miniport handles things like resource allocation, memory mapping, handle interrupts, etc. This has always been in kernel mode, because it has to talk to the hardware.

The display driver is for high level drawing and rendering commands. It provides accelerated interfaces for GDI, DirectDraw and Direct3d. This, along with the Win32 windowing and graphics servers (left side of original diagram), used to live in user mode int NT3.x inside of csrss.exe with winsrv.dll. CSR still contains many functions that were never moved into kernel mode in win32k.sys.

Performance was one reason to move the display driver and winsrv into kernel mode, but I guess the biggest reason was to simplify the interface between the Win32 server and user mode clients by eliminating all the IPC marshaling. Win32k can now just reach into the client process's memory, same pointers and everything, instead of packing things into shared memory or an LPC messages.

Vista's new display model is more complex, but for the most part has a user mode display driver again.

Actually, there are two parts to a video driver on Windows NT, in all versions up to 5.2. In the "Windows 2000 Display Model" (the same one used in NT4), the vendor supplies a display driver, and a miniport driver.

The miniport handles things like resource allocation, memory mapping, handle interrupts, etc. This has always been in kernel mode, because it has to talk to the hardware.

The display driver is for high level drawing and rendering commands. It provides accelerated interfaces for GDI, DirectDraw and Direct3d. This, along with the Win32 windowing and graphics servers (left side of original diagram), used to live in user mode int NT3.x inside of csrss.exe with winsrv.dll. CSR still contains many functions that were never moved into kernel mode in win32k.sys.

Performance was one reason to move the display driver and winsrv into kernel mode, but I guess the biggest reason was to simplify the interface between the Win32 server and user mode clients by eliminating all the IPC marshaling. Win32k can now just reach into the client process's memory, same pointers and everything, instead of packing things into shared memory or an LPC messages.

Vista's new display model is more complex, but for the most part has a user mode display driver again.

well you can download the dotnet SDK for free if that's what you mean, it ain't open source but it's free.
- true, java beats dotnet here although dotnet is getting there, also lots of java stuff is being ported over to dotnet.

You're better off getting a keyboard without a numberpad, so that the mouse is closer to your right hand when you are typing and switching to the mouse.

I totally agree on this, but what I recently discovered is that there are no affordable curved keyboards such as this one from MS available.

200+ is for all the developer goo.

The Client Profile for .NET 3.5 SP1, which is all that's needed to install a .NET app on a machine that doesn't have .NET 3, is 28 MiB.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc656912.aspx

And Silverlight is less than 5 MiB if the app can run entirely in the Silverlight sandbox.

Mono is 75 MiB on Windows, 56 MiB on Mac, . Moonlight is (really?) 941 KiB.

WCF with a Duplex Contract comes to mind. Or just sockets (as somebody above mentioned).

Fact is: Java and .NET can do pretty much the same things and it mostly comes down to prefference. I prefer C# because I still have nightmares from Java 1.3 (not to mention making GUI's in AWT/Swing ... *shudder*). Java 1.5 looked like a big improvement though with some nice stuff I felt was missing.

...an informative result.

That's a little egg on my face; a previous clipboard entry that hung around. This is where that link should have gone.

Yes.

The poster is not correct. He stated that "Only the language features themselves are covered, which were already in the ECMA spec, so it offers theoretical coverage to people reimplementing C# without implementing *any* of the .net framework." The Community Promise covers ECMA 334 and 335, and ECMA 335 is part of the .NET Framework. Is it all of the .NET Framework? No. But it is without question part of it.

HTC Titan with GPS Chip

I've had the HTC Titan (Sprint Mogul PPC-6800) phone since it came out and it has a real GPSOne chip inside for aGPS satelite reception and not just cell tower ID triangulation for fake GPS. Before that I had the HTC Apache (Sprint PCC-6700) that required a separate GPS Receiver connected by Bluetooth and that also worked great since I only had to turn on the receiver when navigating.

Mount and Charger

I use the cheap Arkon CM929-S phone mount to keep my phone in-front of me connected to an air-vent while I drive and also the Motorola Mini-USB Car Charger for keeping my phone powered up during long trips.

TomTom Navigator 6 and 7

I've been using TomTom Navigator version 6 and now 7 installed on this phone running Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1, and soon 6.5. I've used my phone to navigate here in the US, Canada, and also in Europe without any problems at all, except for having to copying the 500MB maps to my storage card before I go, since I only had a 1 GB storage card. If I had a large capacity SDHC storage card then I could keep all the maps on it for the entire world.

PPCKitchen BuildOS and Radio ROM Firmware

I've been taking advantage of the phone customization software such as PPCKitchen BuildOS software for creating and loading customized and updated versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system builds on to my phone that allowed me to go from 6.0, to 6.1, and now to 6.5. I've been updating the Radio ROM firmware on my phone with the instructions from XDA Developer Wiki page for HTC Titan to the latest releases to enable GPS functionality on this phone since the original release of the phone did not have the Radio ROM firmware to allow interfacing with the GPS chip until Sprint released it a year after the phone became available.

Little Inconveniences

Since Sprint uses the US only CDMA network cell phone standard I couldn't use my phone in Europe to make calls but I still retained the full GPS functionality. On top of this we use Google Maps software loaded on these phones for locating stores and saving them as contacts so we can then use TomTom to navigate to those contacts. Everything works great except when Google Maps decides to be lazy and not save the zip-code in the address in the contact or when the address line in the contact includes additional numbers such as apartment or suite then TomTom gets confused thinking those are street numbers since they match European address standards such as "16 Main Street Suite 2" to "16/2 Main Street". We then have to manually edit the contact to remove the apartment or suite number and add the zip code, it is a pain and we are waiting for TomTom to fix their software since this bug existed sine version 6 and now with 7.450.

Convenience Through Convergence

My wife also uses the same exact phone since we share the same phone plan and company and she loves the ability to be able to take the car and go anywhere she wants with her friends without worry

Well, there's this:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/browser-comparison.aspx

Like it or not, Windows 7 is just Vista with a new Taskbar, a major video display bugfix, a few new control panel applets (at least one of which (ClearType Tuner) used to be a Windows XP PowerToy), some new fonts and the first upgrade to the Font Control Panel Applet in 15 years, and some other misc bugfixes.

Seriously, you're still using the same Vista you all decided to hate on before; you've just fallen victim to the marketing hype.

The only problem with Vista was based on falling for derogatory marketing hype. 7 has a few nice UI features that could mostly be added to Vista with 3rd party programs, and for people with 2 or more GB of RAM, the smaller memory footprint doesn't bring much either. Vista failed solely on marketing, so I think it was the right decision to focus on the presentation of 7.

Someone should let this guy know!

Like it or not, Windows 7 is just Vista with a new Taskbar, a major video display bugfix, a few new control panel applets (at least one of which (ClearType Tuner) used to be a Windows XP PowerToy), some new fonts and the first upgrade to the Font Control Panel Applet in 15 years, and some other misc bugfixes.

Seriously, you're still using the same Vista you all decided to hate on before; you've just fallen victim to the marketing hype.

Knowing Microsoft, they see it as the new term for Vaporware, without the negative meaning.

Yup, Microsoft clearly has no interest in launching a cloud computing service.

Oh, wait...

Oh man. WMI is evil! How do you get it through firewalls? The amount of configuration just to get it working is really quite silly. Hint to Microsoft - next time you setup a distributed monitoring tool that needs to go over firewalls, don't use DCOM.

Then again, this is the company that decided that a good idea would be to add binary blobs into their Exchange RPC mail protocol, which is what, by default, MAPI is using. This leads to articles on troubleshooting like this one. Ugh. And yet, MAPI is often seen as more secure that IMAP. Sorry, I digress. WMI is evil, that's all you need to know. Just use SNMP.

Oh man. WMI is evil! How do you get it through firewalls? The amount of configuration just to get it working is really quite silly. Hint to Microsoft - next time you setup a distributed monitoring tool that needs to go over firewalls, don't use DCOM.

Then again, this is the company that decided that a good idea would be to add binary blobs into their Exchange RPC mail protocol, which is what, by default, MAPI is using. This leads to articles on troubleshooting like this one. Ugh. And yet, MAPI is often seen as more secure that IMAP. Sorry, I digress. WMI is evil, that's all you need to know. Just use SNMP.

Oh man. WMI is evil! How do you get it through firewalls? The amount of configuration just to get it working is really quite silly. Hint to Microsoft - next time you setup a distributed monitoring tool that needs to go over firewalls, don't use DCOM.

Then again, this is the company that decided that a good idea would be to add binary blobs into their Exchange RPC mail protocol, which is what, by default, MAPI is using. This leads to articles on troubleshooting like this one. Ugh. And yet, MAPI is often seen as more secure that IMAP. Sorry, I digress. WMI is evil, that's all you need to know. Just use SNMP.

Hate to point this out, but didn't somebody else already come up with an operating system that was tightly integrated with their web browser? That worked out so well for them!

Why is this insightful? The Google's OS is free, so the browser won't be used to promote it. It's also free software, so anyone, including their competitors, can change it and ship it with their products.

This subject has already been discussed.

Here's an interesting discussion on the topic ;)

SCOM R2 integrates native unix and linux agent , supported systems are :

HP-UX 11i v2 and v3 (PA-RISC and IA64)
Sun Solaris 8 and 9 (SPARC) and Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (x86/x64) and 5 (x86/x64) Server
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86) and 10 SP1 (x86/x64)
IBM AIX v5.3 and v6.1

For application awareness, you can check bridgeways management packs .

Maybe it's because most people only surf for a limited time and with a minimal amount of tabs open vs the typical net geek who needs to have 56 tabs and leaves the browser open 24/7, so it does not matter to most people if a tab runs in a separate process, that is if they even use tabs...

Have they ever advertised against Firefox? I'd be surprised if they did. To compare oneself to a rival is to legitimize that rival.

You're wrong, what about here or here? So, MS has indeed validated Firefox and open-source in general as a potential rival. Good for them, I suppose

Maybe it's because most people only surf for a limited time and with a minimal amount of tabs open vs the typical net geek who needs to have 56 tabs and leaves the browser open 24/7, so it does not matter to most people if a tab runs in a separate process, that is if they even use tabs...

Have they ever advertised against Firefox? I'd be surprised if they did. To compare oneself to a rival is to legitimize that rival.

You're wrong, what about here or here? So, MS has indeed validated Firefox and open-source in general as a potential rival. Good for them, I suppose

Yes, they have

Have they ever advertised against Firefox?

Oh, yes they did!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/browser-comparison.aspx

That link is the only thing I've seen, IE8-wise, comparing it to other browsers. But generally IE doesn't get advertised at all-- I haven't seen an IE ad in ages. (Of course, I don't watch TV, so there's a whole world of advertising I get no exposure to.)

Hate to point this out, but didn't somebody else already come up with an operating system that was tightly integrated with their web browser? That worked out so well for them!

Yes, but they don't give it away for free.

Hate to point this out, but didn't somebody else already come up with an operating system that was tightly integrated with their web browser? That worked out so well for them!

There's a blocking tool for that, or you can just set Automatic Updates to "notify" and then ignore it and check "never show me this again."

I don't recommend anybody set Automatic Updates to automatically download.

Here's the blocking tool.

I tell them that "they can't, but they can use Firefox instead".

You can switch back by uninstalling it, as detailed here.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957700/#altsteps

That is...

%windir%\ie8\spuninst\spuninst.exe

generally does the trick. IE7 has a similar spuninst folder and executable, if you wanted to roll it back to IE6. It's a very clean uninstall, too, in both cases.

Then you track down a copy of the IE7 full install. The link still works as I type this.

It's a pain, but you can do it. I would recommend Firefox, but I wouldn't tell someone who specifically asks me how to get IE7 back that it "can't be done." That would be untrue.

I tell them that "they can't, but they can use Firefox instead".

You can switch back by uninstalling it, as detailed here.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957700/#altsteps

That is...

%windir%\ie8\spuninst\spuninst.exe

generally does the trick. IE7 has a similar spuninst folder and executable, if you wanted to roll it back to IE6. It's a very clean uninstall, too, in both cases.

Then you track down a copy of the IE7 full install. The link still works as I type this.

It's a pain, but you can do it. I would recommend Firefox, but I wouldn't tell someone who specifically asks me how to get IE7 back that it "can't be done." That would be untrue.

Sounds closer to the power I get with Python whilst still offering me the potential for efficient JIT and arguably better structuring / type-checking at development-time (though I have used tools that help with this issue in Python).

It's a fairly close assessment. Of course, dynamic languages offer a lot of power that no statically typed language could possibly offer (just consider the possibility of defining classes and methods inside "if" in Python); and C# is definitely a static language, even though it will get opt-in duck typing soon, mostly to improve interop with dynamic languages (such as IronPython).

If you want to take a look specifically at the features I've listed (and you're generally proficient with C++/Java language family), here are the links covering them specifically:

• Generics
• RAII / automatic resource management
• First-class functions and lambdas, and some standard framework operations that use them
• Operator overloading
• Raw pointers, direct allocation of memory from the stack, fixed-size non-bounds-checked buffers (effectively C-style arrays), and explicit struct member layout (unions are a special case of that)

Sounds closer to the power I get with Python whilst still offering me the potential for efficient JIT and arguably better structuring / type-checking at development-time (though I have used tools that help with this issue in Python).

It's a fairly close assessment. Of course, dynamic languages offer a lot of power that no statically typed language could possibly offer (just consider the possibility of defining classes and methods inside "if" in Python); and C# is definitely a static language, even though it will get opt-in duck typing soon, mostly to improve interop with dynamic languages (such as IronPython).

If you want to take a look specifically at the features I've listed (and you're generally proficient with C++/Java language family), here are the links covering them specifically:

• Generics
• RAII / automatic resource management
• First-class functions and lambdas, and some standard framework operations that use them
• Operator overloading
• Raw pointers, direct allocation of memory from the stack, fixed-size non-bounds-checked buffers (effectively C-style arrays), and explicit struct member layout (unions are a special case of that)

Sounds closer to the power I get with Python whilst still offering me the potential for efficient JIT and arguably better structuring / type-checking at development-time (though I have used tools that help with this issue in Python).

It's a fairly close assessment. Of course, dynamic languages offer a lot of power that no statically typed language could possibly offer (just consider the possibility of defining classes and methods inside "if" in Python); and C# is definitely a static language, even though it will get opt-in duck typing soon, mostly to improve interop with dynamic languages (such as IronPython).

If you want to take a look specifically at the features I've listed (and you're generally proficient with C++/Java language family), here are the links covering them specifically:

• Generics
• RAII / automatic resource management
• First-class functions and lambdas, and some standard framework operations that use them
• Operator overloading
• Raw pointers, direct allocation of memory from the stack, fixed-size non-bounds-checked buffers (effectively C-style arrays), and explicit struct member layout (unions are a special case of that)

Sounds closer to the power I get with Python whilst still offering me the potential for efficient JIT and arguably better structuring / type-checking at development-time (though I have used tools that help with this issue in Python).

It's a fairly close assessment. Of course, dynamic languages offer a lot of power that no statically typed language could possibly offer (just consider the possibility of defining classes and methods inside "if" in Python); and C# is definitely a static language, even though it will get opt-in duck typing soon, mostly to improve interop with dynamic languages (such as IronPython).

If you want to take a look specifically at the features I've listed (and you're generally proficient with C++/Java language family), here are the links covering them specifically:

• Generics
• RAII / automatic resource management
• First-class functions and lambdas, and some standard framework operations that use them
• Operator overloading
• Raw pointers, direct allocation of memory from the stack, fixed-size non-bounds-checked buffers (effectively C-style arrays), and explicit struct member layout (unions are a special case of that)

Sounds closer to the power I get with Python whilst still offering me the potential for efficient JIT and arguably better structuring / type-checking at development-time (though I have used tools that help with this issue in Python).

It's a fairly close assessment. Of course, dynamic languages offer a lot of power that no statically typed language could possibly offer (just consider the possibility of defining classes and methods inside "if" in Python); and C# is definitely a static language, even though it will get opt-in duck typing soon, mostly to improve interop with dynamic languages (such as IronPython).

If you want to take a look specifically at the features I've listed (and you're generally proficient with C++/Java language family), here are the links covering them specifically:

• Generics
• RAII / automatic resource management
• First-class functions and lambdas, and some standard framework operations that use them
• Operator overloading
• Raw pointers, direct allocation of memory from the stack, fixed-size non-bounds-checked buffers (effectively C-style arrays), and explicit struct member layout (unions are a special case of that)