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Wouldn't it be nice if there was a a tool that let you run outdated software, including all of its OS dependencies, in a little walled garden, allowing you to run modern software for all other uses?

It'd be even cooler if we could get major OS vendors to provide this functionality as part of the OS

From 1995 or so until March 2008, the browser wars were fought between browsers that supported standards (like Firefox and Opera) and browsers that did not (like Netscape version 4 and IE versions 1 through 7). In March 2008, Microsoft released IE 8 which supports standards. For the first time since 1995 or so, every major browser's current release supports web standards.

From now on, the same HTML, CSS, and Javascript should look and work pretty much the same in any browser, no matter what browser the user chooses.

Now the new browser wars are being fought over standards compliance, features, security, reliability, and performance. This is competition that will benefit end-users tremendously.

Unfortunately, usage of IE 6 continues for various reasons. This slows down the arrival of web nirvana.

Another milestone will occur in the future. Microsoft has announced that support for IE 6 will end on July 13, 2010. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps/#Internet_Explorer

That may have been true with old licensing but if you purchase any new licenses they all come with "virtual machine" licenses of some sort.

Windows Enterprise allows you to install that copy of Windows four times on the same physical hardware. If you buy Datacenter (which is licensed per socket on the physical machine) you can install as many copies as that physical hardware can handle.

And yes this licensing applies to any hypervisor not just Microsofts Hyper-V. (link)

Just send the X-UA-Compatible HTTP header or use the meta tag. Then people can use IE8 and it will go into compatibility mode automatically.

Oh no it won't.

That's because some things IE (6 and 7 at last test, don't have access to 8) just don't work the way they should.

Especially <BUTTON>; IE sends the contents of the button element, not the value attribute. And Microsoft's (original) page on the subject described the defective behaviour, and had a link to the w3c standard as if that document supported Microsoft's claims.

(I can't find that one now. What I can find is one that says IE 8 will work right in "Document compatibility mode". And you can't, necessarily, turn on document compatibility mode with a DOCTYPE of HTML 4.0 Strict. You may need an IE-specific HTTP header (or http-equiv tag). Or it may not work at all. I'm leaving all my stuff ugly for MSIE, I'm not going to go around adding headers all over the place. Because there's no way of telling if the browser really did go into HTML 4.0 Strict mode. Without doing IE-specific kludges, and I've already got those to make seriously-ugly INPUT elements instead of BUTTON elements. I'm not adding more, especially when Firefox and Opera are both fine and free.)

The answer remains: fuck ye!

Administrator's response: Fuck executables outside %SystemRoot% and %ProgramFiles%.

For other operating systems, I would recommend a VM.

Alternatively, you could always suggest - politely - that your classmate get a laptop of their own.

Here is a real answer:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx

This is software from Microsoft which helps prevent unpriveleged users from altering your computer in any way. Install this, enable the guest account, and switch users when people ask to borrow your machine. You'll need a password on your account, of course.

"As one of the most tech-oriented students

Tech oriented? Why don't you come up with a solution then? This is not a hard problem to solve.

in my art-oriented institution"

Aaaaaaaaah, OK. I see where you're coming from.

The most obvious solution I can think of (assuming you're on XP/Vista) is for you to set up a second user and Fast user switch whenever someone else wants to use your laptop.

Assuming your classmate's technical competence is below yours, that should be adequate security measures.

I find it ironic that someone would get snarky and denigrate the technical competence of an art student by suggesting that the security of their Windows computer is primarily related to the skill of the guest users. The main security threat does not come from a malicous guest who may or may not know anything about cracking computers. The threat comes from pre-packaged intrusion software, in the form of easy-to-click cracking tools, or more likely from viruses introduced from thumb drives and web sites.

A computer expert would know better than to propogate the myth that computers are breached by teh haxx0rs with elit3 knowledge. Those kind of exploits are available to anyone who can point and click. And the most likely threat is not from your friend in the art class, it's from the viruses he's got on that thumb drive he wants to stick in your computer.

The reason to provide a guest account is to keep someone from accidently deleting your files, messing up your settings, accessing email and the web with your credentials or accidently replacing them, and of course to keep them from reading your personal files.

I let my friends use a guest account on my Mac for the same reasons, even though the exploit and virus factor there is practically nil.

"As one of the most tech-oriented students

Tech oriented? Why don't you come up with a solution then? This is not a hard problem to solve.

in my art-oriented institution"

Aaaaaaaaah, OK. I see where you're coming from.

The most obvious solution I can think of (assuming you're on XP/Vista) is for you to set up a second user and Fast user switch whenever someone else wants to use your laptop.

Assuming your classmate's technical competence is below yours, that should be adequate security measures.

--

The Captcha is: Lars Traeger is full of shit.

The difference is that ClickOnce doesn't install it the same way regular setups work.

I've looked it up on MSDN: it's more like Java Web Start. Your app runs in a sandbox and gets only "Internet zone" privileges unless the user grants more privileges. It's unclear from the MSDN page whether an Authenticode digital signature from a trusted CA is absolutely required to prompt the user for elevation; if so, it'll be difficult for free software developers to use this deployment method without having to pay $200 per year to a CA for the privilege of updating his app.

... but they absolutely stated this Firefox extension was to be installed in the release notes for the patch; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=CECC62DC-96A7-4657-AF91-6383BA034EAB&displaylang=en

That's the "bucket and shovel" update after the original patch that installed the extension in the first place. The original update is described here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99342f-5d1a-413d-8319-81da479ab0d7&displaylang=en

There's no mention of Firefox.

... but they absolutely stated this Firefox extension was to be installed in the release notes for the patch; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=CECC62DC-96A7-4657-AF91-6383BA034EAB&displaylang=en

That's the "bucket and shovel" update after the original patch that installed the extension in the first place. The original update is described here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99342f-5d1a-413d-8319-81da479ab0d7&displaylang=en

There's no mention of Firefox.

First of all, there's the fact that you can't uninstall this add-on without uninstalling .NET. That's something that malware does.

I'm not trying to come across like a jack ass, so forgive me if that's how it sounds. But that's just not true.

First off, that's simply not true. For weeks, you've been able to. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cecc62dc-96a7-4657-af91-6383ba034eab

If Mozilla installed an IE plugin that made Firefox extensions available on IE whenever you installed Firefox, people would be understandably angry with Firefox. Modifying software that isn't yours in a regular update is not "playing nice."

FireFox is a WebBrowser. Windows is an operating system. You are talking apples to oranges. System-wide functionality SHOULD be provided by the OS. If you install the .Net Framework, you should expect to get .Net Framework functionality across your system. Also, the only people who received this update automatically are the people who have updates set to be automatically installed. That's hardly 'not playing nice'.

We aren't talking about an Internet Explorer update that installed a FireFox addon. We're talking about an OS level update for a Framework used across the system that added an 'addon' to the 2nd most common webbrowser so that the functionality provided by that framework would function in that browser. You don't have to install the .Net Framework. You don't have to have automatic updates turned on.

You talk about trust boundaries - but *Windows* is a system-wide OS. Installing an addon hardly violates that. And if you feel it does, you shouldn't have had automatic updates turned on. This type of thing is not new.

Microsoft wants Firefox so dependent on MS's proprietary stack that it doesn't matter if people are using Firefox or IE - just so they're using Windows. The browser is only a piece of the puzzle.

Firefox is NOT dependent on MS's proprietary stack. This addon has no impact to FireFox running. This is additional functionality that FireFox does not provide, for users of the .Net Framework.

Maybe you don't remember the days of 'Sorry, you must use IE6 to visit this website.'. Without ClickOnce support in FireFox, you end up in a situation where you NEED to use IE.

Because you can 'undo' software changes without any actual damages, unlike your example.

Basically, if you don't trust Microsoft to run automatic updates on your machine, turn them off. If you have automatic updates on your machine, Microsoft is going to update your software.

In this particular case, the changes are completely reversible.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cecc62dc-96a7-4657-af91-6383ba034eab

So, *if* you have automatic updates turned on, and you *don't* want this, but you've already got it; you can follow the link above and turn it off.

And that was released three weeks before this article was written. Why it's not mentioned in the article...I can't tell you.

Basically, if you care enough/know enough to be bothered by this update - you can get rid of it in about 2 minutes. That 2 minutes is the cost you pay for having automatic updates turned on.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cecc62dc-96a7-4657-af91-6383ba034eab [microsoft.com] .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, the .NET Framework Assistant enables Firefox to use the ClickOnce technology that is included in the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework Assistant is added at the machine-level to enable its functionality for all users on the machine. As a result, the Uninstall button is shown as unavailable in the Firefox Add-ons list because standard users are not permitted to uninstall machine-level components. In this update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and in Windows 7, the .NET Framework Assistant will be installed on a per-user basis. As a result, the Uninstall button will be functional in the Firefox Add-ons list.

This was released on 5/6/2009

Again, seems like a giant over-reaction.

The article was written 5/30/2009.

You'd think the author would take a few seconds before sticking his foot in his mouth, again.

It's a catch-22.

If MS makes it so that .Net/ClickOnce/Silverlight or anything else, ONLY works in IE; people get upset that MS is being anti-competitive.

If MS does make it so that everyone can use .Net/ClickOnce/Silverlight or anything else, then MS is just trying to force EVERYONE to use their technologies.

I'm completely okay with MS giving out an addon that gives you .Net Framework functionality when you install/update the .Net Framework.

---

Why would FireFox want to support ClickOnce? Because FireFox is a web-browser. FireFox has no offering that competes with something like ClickOnce. Before MS released this patch, there were already (unofficial, not-supported) addons that provided the same functionality. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1608)

FireFox supports the IFRAME. A tag that MS just made up, that didn't conform to any standards. Why did FireFox support it? Because FireFox wanted it's users to be able to use FireFox for anything they could use IE for. ClickOnce is no different. If a user wants to have the .Net Framework/wants to use ClickOnce on their machine - why *wouldn't* FireFox want support for it to be there?

Not supporting it means people HAVE to use IE to get that functionality.

---

Beyond that, you don't *have* to edit the registry to remove it. That's a hack.

When the plug-in gets installed, it's not for an individual user; it's for the entire system. Other FireFox plug-ins behave the same way. You can't remove those either, not directly, from FireFox. Because FireFox is treating you as an individual user. You, as a user, can disable the Add-on.

Everything else about the .Net Framework is also installed for everyone on the system. The same way security patches are installed. Individual users on the machine don't have to each update critical windows crap.

You can go here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cecc62dc-96a7-4657-af91-6383ba034eab

(That's right, Microsoft.com)

And you can download an update that will make the addons to FireFox work on a per-user level. At which point, FireFox allows you to easily uninstall it with the in-FireFox GUI.

I haven't tested it, but I'm fairly confident removing the .Net Framework will remove the FireFox addons as well.

So again, I'm *not* saying Microsoft is in the right here. But I am saying, 99% of the people I hear talking about this are grossly over-reacting.

We're talking about an Update to the .Net Framework that added .Net functionality to FireFox. If you didn't install the Update, you wouldn't get the functionality.

At best, this is a reminder to turn off 'Automatic Updates' if you don't trust Microsoft to be updating your files. It's hardly a case of Microsoft trying to 'discredit' FireFox or anything else.

MS has instructions here for the extension's manual removal, for any who want them:
 
  How to manually remove the .NET Framework Assistant for Firefox

however, who knows what else this does.

I guess this was released nearly a month ago, but here's the update that lets you uninstall it: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cecc62dc-96a7-4657-af91-6383ba034eab

1. RTFM http://msdn.microsoft.com/ , http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y23kc048.aspx.
2. Microsoft provides a guide for migrating from POSIX to Windows. See comment 1.
3. If your clients internal or external demand it and you need it to maintain profitability, you will do it and stop bitching because it makes you money.
4. Hire someone else to do it if you're not comfortable doing it yourself, don't have the resources, or are intolerant and wealthy enough to do so.
5. If most of your clients are on Windows and it is your primary means of profitability, what percent of your sales are the other platforms? If those sales are insignificant, only develop windows and get rid of the rest. Or visa-versa...
6. All your bitching about Visual Studio is simply that, bitching. You can build MS programs with other build tools. You can use makefiles (ms or gnu flavored), your own build tools, SCONS, choose the right tool for the job.
7. assert works on windows, and you can get core dump files just like in the posix world. Read comment 1 and learn to configure your machine appropriately.
8. You had to RTFM to program in the posix world. Why should Windows be any different? See comment 1.

1. RTFM http://msdn.microsoft.com/ , http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y23kc048.aspx.
2. Microsoft provides a guide for migrating from POSIX to Windows. See comment 1.
3. If your clients internal or external demand it and you need it to maintain profitability, you will do it and stop bitching because it makes you money.
4. Hire someone else to do it if you're not comfortable doing it yourself, don't have the resources, or are intolerant and wealthy enough to do so.
5. If most of your clients are on Windows and it is your primary means of profitability, what percent of your sales are the other platforms? If those sales are insignificant, only develop windows and get rid of the rest. Or visa-versa...
6. All your bitching about Visual Studio is simply that, bitching. You can build MS programs with other build tools. You can use makefiles (ms or gnu flavored), your own build tools, SCONS, choose the right tool for the job.
7. assert works on windows, and you can get core dump files just like in the posix world. Read comment 1 and learn to configure your machine appropriately.
8. You had to RTFM to program in the posix world. Why should Windows be any different? See comment 1.

Why exactly is it a legitimate complaint to whine about how Windows doesn't support posix functions when it isn't a posix system. If you really want posix on windows, use one of the add-ons like Cygwin or Services for Unix Apps. Oh, and point of fact, NTFS has supported symlinks for some time now. They can be created programmatically with the CreateSymbolicLink function.

You do realize that Windows is not a posix system right? Why would it have lots of POSIX features. As a side note, there are a number of add-ons that provide a posix environment such as Cygwin or Services for Unix Applications. Also, the for equivalent is called CreateProcess
and windows symlinks are called junctions although NTFS also has support for symbolic links which can be created with the aptly named CreateSymbolicLink function.

You do realize that Windows is not a posix system right? Why would it have lots of POSIX features. As a side note, there are a number of add-ons that provide a posix environment such as Cygwin or Services for Unix Applications. Also, the for equivalent is called CreateProcess
and windows symlinks are called junctions although NTFS also has support for symbolic links which can be created with the aptly named CreateSymbolicLink function.

You do realize that Windows is not a posix system right? Why would it have lots of POSIX features. As a side note, there are a number of add-ons that provide a posix environment such as Cygwin or Services for Unix Applications. Also, the for equivalent is called CreateProcess
and windows symlinks are called junctions although NTFS also has support for symbolic links which can be created with the aptly named CreateSymbolicLink function.

IE, in addition to not allowing it to be uninstalled. (You can remove the icon)

You can get rid of iexplore.exe, but getting rid of mshtml.dll will cause no end of problems.

mshtml.dll contains the rendering engine of IE, and is a public API on Windows, including being used internally by the WebBrowser ActiveX and .NET objects.

IE, in addition to not allowing it to be uninstalled. (You can remove the icon)

You can get rid of iexplore.exe, but getting rid of mshtml.dll will cause no end of problems.

mshtml.dll contains the rendering engine of IE, and is a public API on Windows, including being used internally by the WebBrowser ActiveX and .NET objects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_installation_software Because Windows only has one installer.

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/41531554-d5ef-4f2c-8fb9-149bdc5c8a701033.mspx because Windows has only one binary.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Top-10-Windows-7-Features-3-XP-Mode/1243378978 because different versions of Windows all work the same way.

These are all chosen for you by whoever makes the software. Or you can compile it yourself on Windows. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/BuildingWinPidgin

Look, if you go with a distribution that is modern, you'll have none of those issues unless you go out of your way to the point that you'd have the same problems on Windows. Ubuntu is going to have you use one package manager that will make you not even have to think about binary formats or package formats.

Where exactly are you seeing software that isn't niche that requires any extra work on Linux? I've had to shoe horn software badly made at work into working on Linux. Through Wine and various other methods since I prefer a Linux Desktop. I found it easier than the headache that most people there go through with Windows. Am I just crazy? I consider what I had to do out of my way and annoying as a Linux desktop goes.

Except Microsoft makes about $0.75 of income on every $1 of OS sales that they do. See the client segment here:

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/10k_fr_dis.html

Apple doesn't break out their revenues and income by product segment, so a direct comparison is difficult; also, they don't publish a fancy Annual report, just a 10-Q for the SEC, which is available here (and probably lots of other places), so no linking to the pertinent section:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=107357&p=irol-sec

It is probably reasonably fair to compare Microsoft's above operating income for client sales to Apple's overall operating margin of about 20%:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL

The big difference is that Microsoft is selling OEM's licenses to Windows, with essentially no production costs (just development costs) and Apple has to buy all the parts for those computers from somebody, with costs that comprise a substantial portion of the eventual revenue that they bring in.

It's possible that computer hardware sales are more lucrative than other Apple products, but I doubt that it is a factor of 2 or whatever. So Microsoft could halve the revenue they are bringing in for OS sales and still probably be making more income on those revenues than Apple makes.

I think the biggest reason Apple doesn't want to license OS X for sale is that they would lose control over the experience ("It just works" is a big marketing point for them). Next in line is that they have significant hardware operations that would face lower margin competitors, likely eroding their revenues.

They're in a bind no matter what way you look at it. They've saturated their market three times over. There's no room left for growth in the places where people have money to pay for a desktop OS, and all the people in the other places have tried a pirated Vista already. In the supercompute market their share is 1% despite coming out with their own supercomputer OS(*), and in the server room they're not holding their own either. Their traditional hardware and software partners are starting to come out with their own branded Linux distributions. Because of the Sendo thing they're getting nowhere on the phone.

If Vista 7 tanks, they're in a world of hurt. Like a wise man once said... Outlook not so good.

(*)Some people say that Windows' place on this list is mostly a result of marketing, where the supercomputer sites were given some subsidy to build their supercomputer, with the caveat that they had to report to the Top500 with "Can Run" Windows HPC, and with the Windows HPC benchmark. But for serious work of course they run Linux.

150$ for 3 licenses for personal use

Less than that at work for the full thing, thanks to volume licensing, including a free copy for home use there too via the professional home usage program that microsoft offers. Oh, and another "free" (to some extent) license of all Office client products from the MSDN subscription.

"$98 is too much even for Word itself! "

Why? How much did you pay for it?
Suggested retail price is $229.

tying it to a platform,

What does copyright have to do with whether something is cross-platform or not?

My entire post was pointing at a specific company's tactics.

Too many DRM schemes (with companies that still operate) have already gone under and taken the protected files with them. Relying on the promises of a company instead of a contract is ridiculous. They're handing you sales fluff and you're eating it up. I would love to buy a lot of steam-only games, but _never_ will, because I want to play them X years from now.

BTW, you can't stop a "Steam sucks" thread in an anti-DRM post.

I can't parse this statement no matter how hard I try.

For starters, what's a ".NET compiler"? There's no ".NET programming language". Do you mean C#?

Compilation in windows involves 3 steps

1) Language to MSIL
2) MSIL to JIT native
3) JIT native to low level runtime instructions

Those 3 steps are called the ".NET compiler"

C# -> MSIL is an example of the first step, as is VB.NET -> MSIL.

As far as the rest I'm including Visual Basic.NET. As for GCC that would include: C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada using the GCC front ends and unified back end (i.e. compiled under GCC).

I think the rest was hinging on a one language assumption.

If you're playing in Windows C#Net, you really want to take a look at WPF. Microsoft basically "embraced" the SVG spec into the System.Windows.Media objects, and "extended" the objects to mesh with the rest of the architecture, and wrapped it all with binding properties so it can do some pretty interesting stuff. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742562.aspx

You might want to try hosted Microsoft CRM which is available pretty cheap per seat.

It's just a fake BSOD.

FYI, he's talkin' about the Red Ring of Death.

Didn't they say much the same things about Vista?

And so we put it in the same state as Washington. Now, I'm guessing this is a PR company and we have a perfect match of Arbitron Ad agency listing Michael Sharp as Manager, Agency & Advertiser Services for several different regions of the US. Ok, from there if you google Arbitron Asus and Arbitron Microsoft you come up with two very juicy powerpoints from Microsoft on Arbitron's site.

I just noticed those two powerpoints only come up because they're Microsoft Powerpoints so that's not a very strong link.

But that linking is probably unnecessary considering I just found this bio on Microsoft of a Michael Sharp as Director with the Information Security Team. Yes, it's a pretty common name but I'm pretty sure this ad work reeks of Microsoft and not Asus.

Your setup just seems weird to me though. If I had to make a comparison to a linux system I would say that you have created an account named root2 in the administrator (or wheel is it still called) and configured sudo to not require passwords to elevate. Then you do all your work with the oter account.
I was actually aware of the fact you have to type in Administrator credentials for limited accounts, but it just seemed so foolish to have 2 accounts when the administrative account really does run with limited credentials until it needs admin ones. [1] Since I could have the exact same effect, why bother with two accounts.

I'll ignore your trolling sibling and reply to you, since I think you might listen.

You (and the rest of Slashdot, it seems) think that Microsoft is one big entity all acting towards the same ends. That each team works with every other team directly, that we control product direction, et cetera. This is far from true, and I cannot answer why upper management steers various products in different directions. Personally, I'm involved in Windows 7 development. I have no bearing whatsoever on Vista service packs (except those fixes that we deem needing backports to Vista), Visual Studio, Office, Zune, et cetera. To me, they are loosely coupled under a larger brand name, but might as well be different companies.

I do, however, know that your complaint is either wrong or completely misses the boat. For one, Visual studio is add on based. This fact you could have gleaned from a five second wikipedia glance. Your complaint about Team System is also unfounded, as it is available as an add in for VS 2005/2008, and it functions as a standalone browser if you don't have the IDE. The SERVER, however, is a different product than the IDE. Complaining about that is similar to asking why Mozilla doesn't ship release Apache, that's how loosely coupled MS feels.

Moreover, you miss the business side of the equation. One hundred dollars may seem a large amount to you, but it's trivial for any company that produces and sells professional-level software. The fact is that many of those companies use Visual Studio because, whole-package, it is best in class. If the same tool can compile one or one billion copies of software to be sold, it has immense long term value to the person who owns it. Speaking economically, it makes sense to try to maximize the value to our business while not exceeding the value-utility equilibrium that would lead to an alternative being a better choice. Hence, a price higher than $100. Moreover, this ignores the other options for professional teams - MSDN subscriptions that provide not only software, but operating systems, tools, et cetera, at minimum marginal costs.

One of the things I have done to describe things in the past where a consensus had not been reached is tell clients something was a "common practice". I think any practice has to spend time in the common practice area before it can become a best practice, and I would be explicit with my clients if something did not match best practices. I have also many times told clients that there is more than one "school of thought" when it came to something with contradictory common practices.

Sources of best practices that I have used beyond my personal experience:

• Companies such as Cisco, Altiris and Microsoft typically produce whitepapers and publish other work that describe best practices.
• Any number of forum sites also produce best practices.
• I read books that cover best practices, and study for new skills (presently getting ready to take my CISSP which is all about best practices)
• I read trade journals, attend user groups and hear what the vendor has to say
• I spend time on forum sites
• I continue my education taking classes at night.
• The best resource of all without question have been the people that were senior to me that were willing to let me ask 101 questions on "why" they did something. Learning to listen when someone describes why something was or wasn't done a certain way and to look past the immediate technical solution I thought was best was the most important thing I ever developed.

> But even better than that - actually just a basic expectation - would be for them to fix the software in the first place.

What if the bug is coming from a third-party software (in this case, the Oracle driver)?

My point is: this is not a fair example of a stupid workaround. The OP could have picked a better one, like this one:

*** Messages that start with the word "begin" are received as blank attachments in Outlook 2000. ***
Workaround: Use a different word such as "start" or "commence."
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260822

Oh that is easy my friend. A price tag of $320 is a problem. Vista for free is a close call vs. Ubuntu, and Ubuntu probably only makes real sense for users with specific high performance needs (I would still use it, but for most users Windows would be a solid choice too). At $320 MSFT can dispatch its programmers to wipe windshields at rural intersections for all I care.

I'm not sure it was a mistake, at least not in Microsoft's view, once you consider the reason why it was implemented and the (probable) reason why they've removed the limitation.

The reason why it was implemented according to various sources was to limit the damage of all those infected Windows machines spamming networks looking for new vulnerable hosts to infect, and also, slow down the rate at which they would cause bedlam. By enforcing such a limit, the aim was to impede an infected machines ability to propogate the infection; of course, we're primarily talking the nasty to catastrophic Windows worms we've seen in the past from gaping truck-sized security holes in critical system components.

However, if you look at Vista, you'll note that contrary to what some people would like you to believe, the exploitability of the OS has gone down drastically versus XP, in particular, with regards to worms. This is of course due to several reasons: better OS security architecture, defence-in-depth (DEP/ASLR/etc...), properly enforced user permissions, the list goes on. Take the most recent Conficker worm as an example. Vista infections will almost certainly be a lot lower, for one, the exploit path that uses the MS08-067 vulnerability that forms its primary exploit vector can not be exploited anonymously on Vista and newer machines. The vulnerable code is still present unless patched, but it requires valid user credentials.

At a guess, I'd say Microsoft came to the conclusion that the TCP limit was no longer necessary on Vista, as the improved security of the OS made the need for such connection limitations redundant. On the other hand, I'll be surprised if they ever remove it on XP, because no matter how much you patch it, it is fundamentally more insecure by its architecture than Vista. And if they don't remove the limitation on XP, I'd argue that's quite telling as to the motivation and reasoning behind removing it on Vista only.

That's almost certainly low. Looking at it, they take in more than $1 billion a month just on operating systems sales (look under client):

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/10k_fr_dis.html

That figure is probably going to be higher for 2008 than for 2009, but it will still be healthy in 2009. The discussion there implies that they spent $115 million more on Vista in fiscal 2008 than the prior year (that figure is separate from a $150 million increase in marketing costs), so they actually increased spending, in one year, by most of your entire estimate.

I apologize if it is not the case, but this (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165528(VS.80).aspx) looks like a nice enough list. I suppose any other desired behavior can be added.