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Besides, standards mode is the default; there is no meta tag to explicitly force standards mode.

There is. In meta tag, you indicate which mode you want, and you can ask for "IE8 mode" by specifying IE=8.

As for the override control - too bad. In the end, if the webpage author explicitly states that his page renders in IE best with IE8 settings, then it most likely does. I think the proper priority handling should be: meta is more important than user blacklist, and mode switch on the toolbar is more important than meta (so that user has a final say).

IE6 traffic drops quite a bit at weekends - showing that work machines have a higher percentage of IE6 than home ones. So convincing organisations to change will be the biggest win.
Biggest of them all? Well the UK NHS (National Health Service) is the biggest employer in the UK, and 3rd biggest in the world, after the Indian State Railway and the Chinese Army (who I doubt has the same amount of internet access!). It uses IE6.
Why? Because Connecting for Health, the multibillion pound IT project that's massively over budget and late, doesn't support IE7. Yes, on the Microsoft website it tells the NHS not to push out IE7.
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/nhs/content/articles/ie7-guidelines-for-all-nhs-organisations.aspx
IE7 didn't really break much, so to have very expensive and supposedly new apps still not working in IE7 seems crazy.
Until that is fixed the largest employer in the UK with millions of PCs will be stuck on IE6. And I wouldn't hold your breath for a fix considering this was identified back in Nov 06.

Maybe because it is a HTML (version 1?) standard for GET and the other browsers ignores it?

No, it isn't. Even Microsoft admits as much.

RFC 2616, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1," does not specify any requirement for URL length.

It's their own made-up lousy limit.

Unfortunately, we have to wait for the discovery phase of their next trial to get more recent internal emails. In the meantime, is there some reason to believe that their corporate culture has improved in Ballmer's sweaty hands?

Well, for starters, the IE team has been communicating with the web development community, they've been working with the Mozilla foundation (licensing Firefox's RSS logo for use in IE7, and helping to improve Firefox's support for Vista), they cleaned up IE's CSS handling enough to make it pass ACID2 (and added support for various other W3C standards), and they changed Windows Update so it no longer runs in IE. That's definitely non-evil behavior, and there appears to be a non-evil culture behind it.

However, Microsoft is a huge company and is rather famous for the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Just because there's a non-evil culture driving certain parts of the company doesn't mean the rest of the company has a non-evil culture as well. It's also possible that appearances are deceiving, and their good behavior really is stemming from an evil culture. I don't have any internal connections, so I don't know.

yahoo's mapping service (formerly mapquest)

No, MapQuest is now owned by AOL but they were never part of Yahoo. Yahoo developed their own online mapping service called Yahoo Maps that came not too long after MapQuest got popular. Back then Microsoft was only pushing a desktop application called Microsoft Streets and Trips.

Does hardware Data Execution Prevention stop it from happening, in that this exploit would crash Reader instead of cause an exploit if DEP is enabled? I wish companies would suggest that as a possible mitigation, even if not all computers support it.

I did dumpbin /headers and saw that the EXE header for AcroRd32.exe has the "NX compatible" bit set. This means that DEP will be automatically enabled for Reader on Vista.

However, that doesn't cover XP. XP 32 SP3 has an API call named SetProcessDEPPolicy to request enabling DEP for your process. Adobe should modify Reader to call this function if it exists. (It exists on Vista SP1 as well, but Vista SP1 will already enable it due to /NXCOMPAT.)

XP 32 SP2 and XP 64 SP2, even though they have DEP, don't have a way to enable it if the system-wide DEP setting is "opt in" - the default. And there's no way to opt in that these support. (Google Chrome has code to use an undocumented system call to enable it, but it actually has no effect.)

Are you kidding? It drives me bat guano nuts when I CAN'T download Windows updates/patches from LINUX/Firefox. Just because I have one machine with say Vista/MS Office why should I have to use IE and FFS pass some stupid WGA/OGA test just to download patches for things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place!

Except of course if you were a sysadmin for windows boxes I'd expect you to know that if you want to download the patches you don't go to windowsupdate at all, you either use SUS to have a box internally on your network that acts as a central update server for your machines. Even if you don't have a server to use as a system admin you'd know that you can download the security patches with no WGA checks altogether, from any browser on any OS. Admittedly if you want to browse and download from the entire patch catalog you do need IE (because it uses an ActiveX control for the downloads), but again there's no WGA checks. And complaining that MS doesn't have checksumming isn't true - all the MS downloads are signed via X509 and that signature's checksum is validated when the updates are ran.

Bonus - even your rant about preserving metadata information about the date/source of the download that just doesn't happen on Windows makes no sense, first you blame the download tools and then you blame the operating system.

Are you kidding? It drives me bat guano nuts when I CAN'T download Windows updates/patches from LINUX/Firefox. Just because I have one machine with say Vista/MS Office why should I have to use IE and FFS pass some stupid WGA/OGA test just to download patches for things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place!

Except of course if you were a sysadmin for windows boxes I'd expect you to know that if you want to download the patches you don't go to windowsupdate at all, you either use SUS to have a box internally on your network that acts as a central update server for your machines. Even if you don't have a server to use as a system admin you'd know that you can download the security patches with no WGA checks altogether, from any browser on any OS. Admittedly if you want to browse and download from the entire patch catalog you do need IE (because it uses an ActiveX control for the downloads), but again there's no WGA checks. And complaining that MS doesn't have checksumming isn't true - all the MS downloads are signed via X509 and that signature's checksum is validated when the updates are ran.

Bonus - even your rant about preserving metadata information about the date/source of the download that just doesn't happen on Windows makes no sense, first you blame the download tools and then you blame the operating system.

This is exactly right. I don't know why but this company seems to be doing everything ass backwards and still getting away with it. I work at a very large organization, and a lot of Office documents get sent back and forth on email. Most people have not "upgraded" to the latest version of office (2007/8). The few who have send everything in the new xml format (docx etc), which is not compatible with older versions. This is annoying as hell when I have to explain that Word is incompatible with Word, or Excel is incompatible with Excel. Thankfully there are tools on the microsoft site that can convert these documents, but there is no reason people should have to jump through these hoops. Even worse, these programs have expiration dates -- just today I tried to open a docx document and was told the program had expired. I had to go to the MS website and download a minor point upgrade to the converter program (the link was hidden on a page that was mostly about Microsoft Messenger. Then I ran the program and it told me to quit Entourage, Word, and Excel - each of which had about 10 windows open - just so I could update this external application. Even as I'm typing this I just realized there is yet another minor point update on the website, so I'll need to upgrade to 1.0.2 now. What a nightmare.

Here's another example of this sort of nonsense -- if you own MS Office 2004 for OS X, it has been updated to 11.5.3. But you can't just update from version 10 to version 11.5.3 in one swoop. If you installed Office years ago and kept it up to date it's a minor nuisance but if you're installing Office 2004 on a new computer, you need to use AutoUpdate like 15 times to get it up to date, one point upgrade at a time. Seriously, who has time for this nonsense? And who thinks up this crap?

I'm cat, and I'm fouranahalf

That is not true.

See the following:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/2/3/d23b9533-169d-4996-b198-7b9d3fe15611/downgrade_chart.doc

http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/8/6/2860872a-35dc-4a10-8617-3927aacd189a/downgradeOEMversion-020707.pdf

For OEM and End User licenses, Vista Business and Ultimate alone have downgrade rights, and the list of what they may be downgraded to is short.

That is not true.

See the following:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/2/3/d23b9533-169d-4996-b198-7b9d3fe15611/downgrade_chart.doc

http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/8/6/2860872a-35dc-4a10-8617-3927aacd189a/downgradeOEMversion-020707.pdf

For OEM and End User licenses, Vista Business and Ultimate alone have downgrade rights, and the list of what they may be downgraded to is short.

Set the default viewer for msWord docs to the Word Viewer, make normal.dot read only, disable auto-opening of macros ..

If you want to muck with Dlls, build your own version of Gimp

Or write a program that acquires backup and restore privileges for your process.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa375202(VS.85).aspx

A face or a finger are a claim of identity that still needs authentication with some form of secure credential, e.g. a password.

Yup, it's Lenovo et al.'s mistake, for using face recognition for both identification and authentication, The two functions are different, and should remain separate. Via Schneier's Cryptogram, here's a good article explaining why merging them is a bad idea

Gees, but if you but if you block the articles you wont be able to complain about them, now how is that going to work for you? Personally the by line in the heading doesn't seem to say much at all except to provide a couple of quotes from the web page. So it would seem your complaint is with that article or perhaps the use of the word monetize.

Maybe you will be happier here http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/ozzie/03-05-08MIX.mspx, talk about monetize on the brain, the word appears 12 times, PR jargon much, I personally prefer gouge as much profit out of the customer as possible, it really is far more accurate than monetize (look, monetize has been way over abused and now just comes of as really lame PR=B$).

This article of course is all about IE8 and M$ silverfish, written by M$ for M$ (I know this will also irritate you). Honestly if you don't like articles about M$ (see done it again) don't read them, or go here http://forums.microsoft.com/ for your stories.

PS as it seems you have missed it, the way people gauge the value of an thread on a forum is via the number of replies and reads, so you are promoting Kdawson threads rather than demoting them by reading those articles and posting in them.

Gees, but if you but if you block the articles you wont be able to complain about them, now how is that going to work for you? Personally the by line in the heading doesn't seem to say much at all except to provide a couple of quotes from the web page. So it would seem your complaint is with that article or perhaps the use of the word monetize.

Maybe you will be happier here http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/ozzie/03-05-08MIX.mspx, talk about monetize on the brain, the word appears 12 times, PR jargon much, I personally prefer gouge as much profit out of the customer as possible, it really is far more accurate than monetize (look, monetize has been way over abused and now just comes of as really lame PR=B$).

This article of course is all about IE8 and M$ silverfish, written by M$ for M$ (I know this will also irritate you). Honestly if you don't like articles about M$ (see done it again) don't read them, or go here http://forums.microsoft.com/ for your stories.

PS as it seems you have missed it, the way people gauge the value of an thread on a forum is via the number of replies and reads, so you are promoting Kdawson threads rather than demoting them by reading those articles and posting in them.

There is a process to put a driver in the box with Windows, thousands of devices do so. The RAZR didn't exist when Windows XP shipped and Motorola hasn't seen fit to either identify the device over USB generically (so an in-box driver would be used) or gone through the WHQL process to put their driver on Windows Update (for example, by providing driver verifier results to Microsoft to demonstrate a minimum quality bar) so that it would be automatically downloaded and installed when you first plugged in the phone.

Microsoft provided a way for Motorola to solve this problem for customers; Motorola made the choice not to do so. It's not Microsoft's problem or fault.

We do work with Novell on running Windows Server on Novell SUSE Linux (Xen), as well as Novell SUSE Linux on Microsoft Hyper-V. This work is done by a dedicated engineering and testing staff working for me both in Redmond, WA and in Cambridge, MA. We do joint engineering, low-level white-box testing, and hardware validation and support proof-of-concept work. This lab also does Windows-Samba compatibility testing in concert with Novell and the Samba team.

Cheers,

Sam Ramji
mailto:sramji@microsoft.com

I would assume that they allow installers signed by Microsoft-approved certificates to modify the firewall. This would mean that any only joe-the-hacker with a compiler can not do it.

A quick google search shows that this is wrong. Here is the officially published API. Or if you want, you can just write to the registry. Here is the code in C#. The C# compiler comes with .NET, so everyone can do this.

I guess this means that if you beef up the security on those registry keys then you could prevent any software from adding themselves to the exception list. Just make an Administrator account for installing that does not have access to those keys... I might have to try this out.

I thought part of the point of UAC was to virtualize many of the filesystem parts of being an administrator so you could install programs without actually being administrator

No, it's the other way around. UAC removes lots of privileges of an administrator from the administrator until they explicitly approve them.

So, if a normal user tries to install some system software, they won't be allowed to. If an administrator tries to install it, they will be prompted 'are you sure this is OK?' first.

You're only partly right. As Inside Windows Vista User Account Control explains, UAC is joined with something called Virtual Store to allow normal users to have virtualized access to various parts of the registry and filesystem for programs not designed for Vista. But, it seems this is, at best, half-assed. As you note, once you try to do anything complex, real-admin access starts to be needed, and UAC kicks in to ask a normal user for a password. I'm not sure if "real" admins have any virtual store or if any sort of admin access kicks in the UAC password-less authorization.

So, while UAC and Virtual Store could have likely handled installs for a lot of programs, it seems to have been crafted more towards running already or admin installed programs as a normal user, leaving the admin to basically get an "are you sure" for programs that require admin access or an 'enhanced "run as"' (as Russinovich puts it) for regular users.

Of course, that all seems rather contradictory. If the point of UAC and Virtual store was to merely to make normal user's lives easier (to encourage their usage), then admins should have been left with their full authority. But, putting in UAC for the admin seems to imply that either (a) UAC was put in to make admining more annoying or (b) UAC was put in to help admins administrate. Of course, (a) makes the most sense if one considers that it's easier to go half-assed with supporting normal users and cripping the admin experience than it is to make UAC really useful for either admins or normal users.

So, your overall point seems to be half-right. I should have said something like, "UAC could be extended to install programs without actually being an administrator."

Bullshit, it's not even remotely close in the opposite direction.

M$ - $50 bil http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY07/earn_rel_q4_07.mspx

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:hee_LWB259IJ:adage.com/images/random/mediafamilytree07.pdf+paramount+pictures+%22net+revenue%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

vacuuming (a PostgreSQL-specific database maintenance operation)

PostgreSQL isn't the only SQL DBMS that can defragment a database. SQLite has VACUUM, MySQL has OPTIMIZE TABLE that makes a dummy ALTERation, and Jet has "Compact and Repair".

That assumes, of course, that they *PAID* for it.

No. This is a shitty, shitty "covenant" (it only covers Moonlight 1.x ferinstance). It doesn't need folks making up stuff about it... it's terribleness can stand on its own. Go back and re-read this, then consider the definition of "Intermediate Recipients":

"Intermediate Recipients" means resellers, recipients, and distributors to the extent they are authorized (directly or indirectly) by Novell or its Subsidiaries to resell, license, supply, distribute or otherwise make available Moonlight Implementations (whether the resale, licensing, supplying, making available, or distribution is on a stand-alone basis, or on an OEM basis as bundled with hardware or other software of the reseller or distributor, or otherwise, so long as it is not bundled with a Linux operating system other than Novell-branded operating system software), except for resellers, recipients, or distributors who are in the business of offering their own branded operating system software.

From:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight_definitions.aspx#intermediate

That assumes, of course, that they *PAID* for it.

No. This is a shitty, shitty "covenant" (it only covers Moonlight 1.x ferinstance). It doesn't need folks making up stuff about it... it's terribleness can stand on its own. Go back and re-read this, then consider the definition of "Intermediate Recipients":

"Intermediate Recipients" means resellers, recipients, and distributors to the extent they are authorized (directly or indirectly) by Novell or its Subsidiaries to resell, license, supply, distribute or otherwise make available Moonlight Implementations (whether the resale, licensing, supplying, making available, or distribution is on a stand-alone basis, or on an OEM basis as bundled with hardware or other software of the reseller or distributor, or otherwise, so long as it is not bundled with a Linux operating system other than Novell-branded operating system software), except for resellers, recipients, or distributors who are in the business of offering their own branded operating system software.

From:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight_definitions.aspx#intermediate

If you buy Vista Business or Ultimate, you have the right to downgrade to XP Pro even if you have only OEM license. The only possible issues are install media and winxp drivers.

Downgrade Rights Chart
"Rights to OEM versions of systems software are granted in the OEM License Terms. The OEM License Terms for most OEM versions of systems software do not grant downgrade rights. The exception is the OEM License Terms for the Windows® XP Professional operating system and the Windows Vista(TM) Business and Windows Vista Ultimate operating systems, which grant downgrade rights. See the full text of the OEM License Terms for the specific downgrade rights. "

No. I worked for Microsoft tech support and I can tell you that we were not allowed to push customer issues back to the OEMs...

... On top of that, I regularly received calls from customers who were told by HP or Dell or whoever to call MS because it wasn't an issue on their end. The OEMs may or may not offer decent Windows support, but they're under no obligation to. All of the companies involved have strict support boundaries, and if something appears to be an issue with something one of the other parties is responsible for, the support call basically ends there.

If it is a bug in Windows sure, obviously the OEM can't fix it, but I was under the impression that the point of the OEM license was that Microsoft does not directly support it, and as such it is cheaper for that reason.

According to this OEM license on Microsoft's website http://www.microsoft.com/oem/sblicense/default.mspx microsoft does not provide end user support for the license. In particluar section 7 states:

7. End User Support. You must provide end user support for the Software or Hardware. You will provide support under terms at least as favorable to the end user as the terms that you provide to support any Customer System. At a minimum, you will provide commercially reasonable telephone support.

Also, there is a covenant not to sue if that's your concern. http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx

Which means all of nothing to anyone not using a novell distro (aka probably most home users).

We know emerging markets have unique needs and we will offer Windows 7 Home Basic, only in emerging markets, for customers looking for an entry-point Windows experience on a full-size value PC.

We'll also continue to offer Windows Starter edition, which will only be offered pre-installed by an OEM. Windows Starter edition will now be available worldwide. This edition is available only in the OEM channel on new PCs limited to specific types of hardware.

Source.

Tepples is the one who corrected me and linked that, from here.

But it's designed to drive Windows sales

Yeah, which is why MS makes the plugin for OS X as well, and directly supports the development of Moonlight. As well as publishes the specs for free with a promise not to sue (look up "Silverlight" on that page; C# and CLR are ISO standards already, which is why they aren't on that list).

New Windows ISO

Fix'd

In particular, I'm looking for something that goes like "IE8 implements x, y and z, but it implements y wrong, and still doesn't implement important standards a, b and c.".

I thought you asked for a rant? ;-)

Getting a comprehensive list of features support/not supported is hard given the scope of what a browser encompasses. You could use a tool like wttjs to test against the HTML5 WebIDL, but the output might be a bit more than you're looking for. From my perspective I'm worried about the big stuff that makes projects possible/not possible. So from my perspective, it's:

- No DOM2 Events support (Bug closed as "By Design")
- No CSS Opacity support (Bug closed as "By Design") and IE filter syntax is changed
- No SVG support
- HTML5 localStorage implementation is wrong
- Cross-Document messaging is wrong (lack of DOM2 Events here)
- A new Cross Domain XML Request object that incompatibly ignores the existing HTML5 work
- No Canvas support (not required, but pisses me off when they are supposedly adding HTML5 support)
- CSS is only slightly less borked. I defer to the earlier link for a description of this issue.

Here's a few articles covering these items and more:
http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/03/ie8-bad
http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/10/ie8-bad-update
http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/01/gettters-setters
http://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=333958
http://webbugtrack.blogspot.com/

As an aside, make sure you read this:
http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/03/office-sucks

I'd go digging for more, but I'm afraid I don't have the time right now. Hopefully those links will get you started! :-)

By the way, I see you're also using the ACID3 test to make a point. You shouldn't. While ACID2 was very relevant in how it tested standards everyone was asking for, ACID3 is content testing for little very specific rendering bugs in various rendering engines and CSS3 (which isn't even a standard yet!).

That's a fair argument. Mostly lack of ACID3 compliance is just more to be annoyed about. Other browsers have extremely high scores on these tests while IE manages a paltry 20/100. I wouldn't care so much if IE wasn't such a piece of crap in other areas, but it is. So if anyone brings up ACID3, I get to complain that it is also terrible there too. :-P

My experience with setting up Windows XP boxes with limited users is that a lot of software will just work. For those that don't, FileMon and RegMon will help you figure out where it is trying to write. You will have to add excludes for explorer because, for some reason, it access the registry and file system at an ungodly rate. Oh, and my experiences were that there was a fairly even split between OSS and proprietary software working correctly. I'd say that Macromedia can go die in a fire, as they were a particularly bad offender, but they merged with Adobe so... I guess Adobe can go die in a fire now? Hopefully its better now.

My experience with setting up Windows XP boxes with limited users is that a lot of software will just work. For those that don't, FileMon and RegMon will help you figure out where it is trying to write. You will have to add excludes for explorer because, for some reason, it access the registry and file system at an ungodly rate. Oh, and my experiences were that there was a fairly even split between OSS and proprietary software working correctly. I'd say that Macromedia can go die in a fire, as they were a particularly bad offender, but they merged with Adobe so... I guess Adobe can go die in a fire now? Hopefully its better now.

It probably hasn't even occurred to them that the programmers ran their random name generator out a long way in advance, registered the domain in the name of some perfectly innocent third party long ago and that they're too late because launch day for downadup is tomorrow since they always kick these things off of the eve of a holiday weekend.

Microsoft has published a complete list (in CSV form) of all the domain names that Conficker will try to contact through June 30, 2009. That's 249 of them a day, for a total of 113,500 domain names.

http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2009/02/12/conficker-domain-information.aspx

If you admin Windows desktops, I wouldn't invest too much in your plans for this weekend.

Why? The patch for this vulnerability was released four months ago, and the latest round of Windows Updates (a couple of days ago) include a scan & remove of Conficker.A and Conficker.B. As for the Autorun variant of this attack, Microsoft has published a KB article covering various ways to prevent it. Of course, if you don't have anyone working in your offices over the weekend, nobody's likely to come in and plug in infected USB devices.

I'm sure MS has a patent on this. So why would I want to use something that will *always* work better on Windows and put Linux developers in the cross-hairs?

The client-side logic for Smooth Streaming is all in managed code, using published APIs. Moonlight should be able to support it fine. IF you're worried about this, jump on the Moonlight 2.0 effort.

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Moonlight-10-is-released/

Also, there is a covenant not to sue if that's your concern.
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx

Retail Experience Center

I especially like the photo with the shopping cart ...

Summary is misleading. Microsoft has tried retail before. (before apple and dell, even.)

Visual Studio's free. It doesn't come with Windows, and if it did somebody would throw a screaming walleyed fit, but you can download it free with very few limitations (lack of MFC and 64-bit target support is about all I can think of.) Not a bad deal.

"To answer somebody's earlier question, Moonlight 1.0 is licensed under LGPL"

"Moonlight Implementation" means only those specific portions of Moonlight 1.0 or Moonlight 1.1 that run only as a plug-in to a browser on a Personal Computer and are not licensed under GPLv3 or a Similar License.

It's used in a number of other web properties. For example, the 2008 Summer Olympics website had hundreds of hours of coverage and highlights viewable via Silverlight. It was also used for online streaming of the Obama Innagural Events. It's also used for showing highlights, news conferences, game recaps, etc. on NBA.com.

When you make things up, you look like an idiot. Microsoft has published their support lifecycles for all versions of Windows. Here's the one for vista. Mainstream support ends in 2012, while extended support ends in 2017. So that's a little over 5 years for mainstream support, and a little over 10 years for extended support. Compare that to WinMe (here) which was only supported for 3 years and 5.5 years.

When you make things up, you look like an idiot. Microsoft has published their support lifecycles for all versions of Windows. Here's the one for vista. Mainstream support ends in 2012, while extended support ends in 2017. So that's a little over 5 years for mainstream support, and a little over 10 years for extended support. Compare that to WinMe (here) which was only supported for 3 years and 5.5 years.

Hitachi had agreed to license BeOS, and ship a dual-boot system using Be's boot loader and an icon on the desktop that enabled a Windows user to reboot into BeOS with one click.

"Microsoft sent two U.S. managers to Japan who expressed their 'anger' with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be, and 'reminded' Hitachi of the terms of its Windows license," according to the claim"

Microsoft Settles Anti-Trust Charges with Be

Microsoft Corp. and Be Inc. Reach Agreement to Settle Litigation

BeOS

No, JSON is a notation for an 'Object' in Javascript. The JSON Object is new.
See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc836458(VS.85).aspx

There are other sources because this wasn't a MS invention but I'm having a hard time finding them at the moment.

And if XP and Vista starter editions are any indication, the Win 7 won't even be available outside of basically Asia and Africa.

In Windows XP and Windows Vista, "Home Edition" (XP) or "Home Basic" was for cheap boxes in the developed world, and "Starter Edition" (essentially Home Basic with a 3-app limit) was for less-developed countries. Microsoft has reversed the roles of these SKUs in Windows 7: "Starter Edition" is for netbooks and "Home Basic" is exclusively for LDCs. See press release.

Like usual you can count on Microsoft to unnecessarily require some random propriety technology.

http://mediadl.microsoft.com/mediadl/www/w/windows/videos/kylie4.wmv

Clearly you've never used the beauty and wonder that is Entourage. [/sarcasm]

You're right, and you're wrong. The assumption is that you just don't need fancy calendar apps, and mail server based collaboration and crap like that if you're a unix/linux shop. I know how it is. Even mutt is decadent to a hardcore unix freak, just grep the mail spool you pussy!

And really, the Exchange infrastructure is massive overkill if you're a small shop anyway.

But for a decent sized corporation it really helps to be able to manage all that crap. Where I am we have about 40 major business units, and we're forever passing off projects from one property to the next, so it makes for constant meetings and crap, and it's really nice to just have a massive shared calendar and scheduling system that works with your email.

Even the subset (of which I am a member) of the corp that does only linux/unix stuff gets a lot of mileage out of Exchange. We hate to admit it, but it's impossible to coordinate it on a traditional mail system, and our various message boards are too crowded for that crap, and it doesn't manage groups well, so you have to know everybody you want to talk to at 40 properties, etc.

I guess I'm saying, it can still be nice, even if you're all about the unix.

I remembering going to a microsoft conference a few years back and was given marketting material on "get the facts" which is a website http://microsoft.com/getthefacts hosting 3rd party case-study in favour of microsoft technology over linux. I made a lot of my friends laugh at them simply by telling them this website existed and I gladly gave them the promotional material as a gift =)

Microsoft looses a lost of credibility by only presenting this one-side of the story and as long as they deny that alternatives have their advantages in specific scenarios nobody will take them seriously and it's a shame cause I personally love most microsoft products but such practices makes me wanna make fun of them.

Like sendmail has never had critical vulnerabilities in its address parsing code?

The irony is that the error is in MS's proprietary TNEF format. This is a binary format so it should be easy to parse.

Offtopic, but why can't slashdot link to the meat rather than some ad-laden rehash?