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I think he is referring to the userspace/kernelspace split in Windows NT. On 32bit Windows XP, by default, the userspace (ring3) will have at most 2 GB of the physical RAM, and the kernel space would get the rest (some of it paged and some of it not). On systems with more than 3G of RAM (a lot by 2002 standards), it was kinda pointless to reserve that much for the kernel space, so they added a boot.ini flag that changed the split to _AT_MOST_ 3GBytes for the userspace and the rest for kernel space.
In Vista the split for 3G/1G of RAM is default. Actually on a system with 4G of RAM running in 32bit mode, you can't use all of them even if you try (in Windows XP), because right under the 4G limit you would have the PCI memory address mappings, that can be as large as 512M for a common video card with half a gig of RAM. Add to that the RAID controllers and the other hardware, and you have about 800megs of RAM unused because they can't be addressed, as their address-space is used by the installed devices.
I think that http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823440/ and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/171793/ should describe what I'm talking about pretty clearly.

system requirements check it out seems that premium business and ultimate both support 1gig and the other support 512 so wtf are you smoking? Of course I would recommend that you use more than that but it still will run which debunks the OP.

You can download a fix for it here.

Let's try and put 8X the recommended for home premium x86 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx 8GB for those that can't be bothered clicking, why on earth, with the nasty upgrade path anyway is there a 32bit version, you will be forever restricted with 32bit vista, 3.5GB Ram is the bare minimum, so much for an upgrade path. That is like XP only being able to support 512MB RAM, fine for 2002 I suppose...

I agree with a lot of what you said, but are you serious with point one and OS X?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

Please show me which service pack made that many changes.

Ok, let's be serious for a second, have you actually read the 300 features list?

In perspective, if MS detailed changes as 'tiny' as Apple does and try to tout them as features, the list for Vista alone would have been over '5000' new features. (We could argue that Apple is smarter about marketing, but they are also conning people by doing this as well.)

Here I will open the link and scroll randomly to the middle and pick some of the 'features' to list and talk about.

(Networking)
- New AirPort Menu
- Self-Tuning TCP

(Parental Controls)
- Simple Account Setup
- Time Limits and Bedtimes
- Activity Logging
- Remote Control & Monitoring
- Dynamic Web Filter
- Web Filter Overrides

Now look at these seriously... They are laughable.

A New AirPort menu is worthy of mentioning as a new feature?
Self tuning TCP is actually one of the few halfway reputable.

Parental Controls, uh? How can they even make this list being serious. These are not 'features' but new 'options' in a dialog box for the Parental Controls.

Now in contrast just to these items ONLY, MS released Vista with features list like this:
Improved Networking
Improved Parental Controls

See how this works? If you are a Fanboi or not paying attention it looks like: MS Vista two Features compared to OS X eight features. It is this level of awareness and poor journalism and poor MS marketing that leaves people thinking this.

For Vista, 'Improved Networking' there are over 200 'detailed' changes in the OS from the self-tuning to the network stack itself being new. 'Parental Controls', there are over 300 features that range from Game Rating restrictions to a new UI for parental controls as well as about 100 policies that can be used.

Ok, so you get an idea of this?

Now you were talking about Service Packs so lets take a look at a couple from the past years. And I will even let you use the 300 features as a goal for OS X here...

XP SP2 was the addition of recompiled and more managed code from the Windows 2003 project. This is why XP SP2 is faster than XP RTM or XP SP1. In this alone there are close to 100 items changes from the core changes applied in SP2.

If we were going to look at XP SP2 and list changes using the 'Apple Method' it would start to look like this really fast:

Networking
- New Taskbar WiFi Menu
- New WiFi Connection Manager
- New Integrated WiFi Authenication systems (WPAv2, etc)
- New WiFi network notification system
- New Firewall with inbound and outbound policies
- Updated TCP connection limitations to fight Spyware
- IPv6 support
- New VPN/IPSEC policies
- New Security Center

On and on and on, and these are just off the top of my head, if I pulled out the item by item changes provided to IT professionals, we could fill pages of 'features', and it would be far more than 300.

Now on to Vista SP1. The entire OS was replaced with the Windows 2008 server build of the binaries. That is a lot of changes, in fact a year's newer OS replaced at the core level.

Here is a link to the 'Overview' of changes, which is a 'light' list as MS 'defines' features/changes. On this page alone there are about 100.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749132.aspx

Now move on to a broader list for IT professions:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709618.aspx

You will find about another 300-400 features/changes, and this is more detailed to the level of the crap Apple would list, as they demonstrate from their famous '300 list' you referenced.

A

I agree with a lot of what you said, but are you serious with point one and OS X?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

Please show me which service pack made that many changes.

Ok, let's be serious for a second, have you actually read the 300 features list?

In perspective, if MS detailed changes as 'tiny' as Apple does and try to tout them as features, the list for Vista alone would have been over '5000' new features. (We could argue that Apple is smarter about marketing, but they are also conning people by doing this as well.)

Here I will open the link and scroll randomly to the middle and pick some of the 'features' to list and talk about.

(Networking)
- New AirPort Menu
- Self-Tuning TCP

(Parental Controls)
- Simple Account Setup
- Time Limits and Bedtimes
- Activity Logging
- Remote Control & Monitoring
- Dynamic Web Filter
- Web Filter Overrides

Now look at these seriously... They are laughable.

A New AirPort menu is worthy of mentioning as a new feature?
Self tuning TCP is actually one of the few halfway reputable.

Parental Controls, uh? How can they even make this list being serious. These are not 'features' but new 'options' in a dialog box for the Parental Controls.

Now in contrast just to these items ONLY, MS released Vista with features list like this:
Improved Networking
Improved Parental Controls

See how this works? If you are a Fanboi or not paying attention it looks like: MS Vista two Features compared to OS X eight features. It is this level of awareness and poor journalism and poor MS marketing that leaves people thinking this.

For Vista, 'Improved Networking' there are over 200 'detailed' changes in the OS from the self-tuning to the network stack itself being new. 'Parental Controls', there are over 300 features that range from Game Rating restrictions to a new UI for parental controls as well as about 100 policies that can be used.

Ok, so you get an idea of this?

Now you were talking about Service Packs so lets take a look at a couple from the past years. And I will even let you use the 300 features as a goal for OS X here...

XP SP2 was the addition of recompiled and more managed code from the Windows 2003 project. This is why XP SP2 is faster than XP RTM or XP SP1. In this alone there are close to 100 items changes from the core changes applied in SP2.

If we were going to look at XP SP2 and list changes using the 'Apple Method' it would start to look like this really fast:

Networking
- New Taskbar WiFi Menu
- New WiFi Connection Manager
- New Integrated WiFi Authenication systems (WPAv2, etc)
- New WiFi network notification system
- New Firewall with inbound and outbound policies
- Updated TCP connection limitations to fight Spyware
- IPv6 support
- New VPN/IPSEC policies
- New Security Center

On and on and on, and these are just off the top of my head, if I pulled out the item by item changes provided to IT professionals, we could fill pages of 'features', and it would be far more than 300.

Now on to Vista SP1. The entire OS was replaced with the Windows 2008 server build of the binaries. That is a lot of changes, in fact a year's newer OS replaced at the core level.

Here is a link to the 'Overview' of changes, which is a 'light' list as MS 'defines' features/changes. On this page alone there are about 100.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749132.aspx

Now move on to a broader list for IT professions:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709618.aspx

You will find about another 300-400 features/changes, and this is more detailed to the level of the crap Apple would list, as they demonstrate from their famous '300 list' you referenced.

A

It's not like the DoD and MS don't get along very well....

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1999/feb99/cohenpr.mspx

Any sane govt with unlimited resources will want to keep the OS at home.

Besides they might have developed some anxiety from past reports.

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/03/windows.nsa.02/

Funny how this thing just won't die.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/437967.stm

I'm guessing that Bill shot the goose that could have laid a billion golden eggs back in '99.

It just took a while to die.

So, how much MS stock do you have in your wallet???

Danger depends on your perspective.

It's not like the DoD and MS don't get along very well....

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1999/feb99/cohenpr.mspx

Any sane govt with unlimited resources will want to keep the OS at home.

Besides they might have developed some anxiety from past reports.

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/03/windows.nsa.02/

Funny how this thing just won't die.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/437967.stm

I'm guessing that Bill shot the goose that could have laid a billion golden eggs back in '99.

It just took a while to die.

So, how much MS stock do you have in your wallet???

Junction points have been around since at least Win2K, possibly NT4. I know I used them on 2K personally, can't speak to NT4 though. And Volume Shadow Copy requires application cooperation, so it's not really that much of an improvement over standard mirroring unless you use copy-on-write, which is still not filesystem level. You need to have the apps aware of it.

My guess is that you simply haven't been paying attention.

MS Research was started in 1991. Here is a timeline:

http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/pastpresentfuture/default.aspx

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Rusell and Norvig is more or less the standard AI textbook and the book I'd suggest to get an overview of AI and its different methodologies. Mind you, it's over 1000 pages, but a very interesting read.

I reject that. Russell and Norvig really turned me off to AI, because they mainly come from a perspective "good old-fashioned AI" (GOFAI). This mindset is more about discrete symbols and logics, and reject uncertainty, probability, and fuzziness.

I was turned off by the entire field until I began learning about statistical, empirical, and data-driven approaches.

I heartily endorse Bishop (2006). It's a much more modern treatment.

I dont get viruses because I'm not a wintard who opens any FREEREGISTRYSCANNER add they see. I've been running windows xp without firewalls/AV for like four years now. Every 6 months or so I scan for viruses, rootkits, trojans, and adware, and i've yet to come up with anything.

Pride goeth before a fall. I had the same attitude with my previous windows installation. I never click on stupid ads, don't dabble in warez or other suspect corners of the net. I used firefox for web browsing. I get all of my windows updates downloaded automatically. I should be safe, right? Nope. I still got infected with a virus so nasty that the only solution was a re-formatting.

My downfall was always running as administrator, and using FAT32 in Windows XP. Now I run Vista, NTFS, and never as administrator. The shame of it is, Vista is orders of magnitude more secure than windows XP, but after the disasterous launch, few are buying it. Take this vulnerability for example. The windows services vulnerability still exists, but isn't critical because the process requires authentication in Vista (i.e. log on name and password). In other words, saying Vista is vulnerable to this exploit is like saying sshd is a Linux security hole. It makes me wish Vista were more of a sales success.

Or try his newer book, "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning". ( http://research.microsoft.com/~cmbishop/PRML/index.htm ) If you have a background in physics, it's an excellent book. Or so they say, I find it too mathematical myself. But Russell and Norvig is also an excellent choice.

I did my PhD in neural networks, and have read (and written) widely on the topic. My First recommendation is Chris Bishop's book "Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition". It is somewhat out of date now, but it covers all the widely known methods. Simon Haykin's book, which others have recommended, is also good, but Bishop's is more concise, and better if you don't need to know every detail of every technique. It's also worth investigating the Generative Topographic Mapping, which is not covered by either book.
As a PhD student, you should approach the topic of neural networks with caution! Be prepared to spend a lot of time training networks, re-training, adjusting ad hoc parameters, re-training. Almost all of the time, a neural network can be replaced by a standard statistical method, which will perform better and have a lower computational cost.

Well of course if you have a rootkit, scanning for rootkits will show clean. Thats how they work.

A rootkit modifies the kernel so that it intercepts all API calls, including the read() functions your scanner is using, and the rootkit feeds back false info such as directory listings omitting the rootkits files, and if one tries to open one of its files by name, the open() call now controlled by the rootkit returns a no such file error.

Rootkits can be scanned for. See Rootkit Revealer. If you don't trust the kernel to accurately report the contents of the HD, just don't use it.

On top of this TCP hasn't seen a major update since the 80's.

Uhh, TCP Vegas, TCP New Reno, BIC and CUBIC? All of which have been implemented in the Linux kernel? TCP has only been standing still since the 80's if you're using an OS from the 80's... or a Microsoft OS.

Note that the only one of those which made it into an RFC is New Reno, aka RFC 2582, which has been implemented in the Windows TCP stack since Vista, along with a number of other recent RFCs.

The others are basically different suggestions for implementing TCP congestion control. Microsoft has its own variant of those (Compound TCP, which is quite similar to TCP Vegas and has also been ported to Linux).

Your 1980s comment is not quite up to date, of course. Microsoft has been sticking to their BSD-based implementation of the TCP stack for quite a long time (too long in fact), but with Vista it's been undergoing quite a bit of change. I know it's unpopular to say something in favour of MS and/or Vista here and I'm far from being a MS apologetic, but it's worth actually reading their Cable Guy columns every now and then to be up to date with regards to what the Windows network stack actually does and doesn't do - especially if you are a sysadmin or interested in developments in the TCP arena.

On top of this TCP hasn't seen a major update since the 80's.

Uhh, TCP Vegas, TCP New Reno, BIC and CUBIC? All of which have been implemented in the Linux kernel? TCP has only been standing still since the 80's if you're using an OS from the 80's... or a Microsoft OS.

Note that the only one of those which made it into an RFC is New Reno, aka RFC 2582, which has been implemented in the Windows TCP stack since Vista, along with a number of other recent RFCs.

The others are basically different suggestions for implementing TCP congestion control. Microsoft has its own variant of those (Compound TCP, which is quite similar to TCP Vegas and has also been ported to Linux).

Your 1980s comment is not quite up to date, of course. Microsoft has been sticking to their BSD-based implementation of the TCP stack for quite a long time (too long in fact), but with Vista it's been undergoing quite a bit of change. I know it's unpopular to say something in favour of MS and/or Vista here and I'm far from being a MS apologetic, but it's worth actually reading their Cable Guy columns every now and then to be up to date with regards to what the Windows network stack actually does and doesn't do - especially if you are a sysadmin or interested in developments in the TCP arena.

Auto-update works if you have a legitimate copy of Windows, and there are plenty of people using pirated copies of Windows which do not qualify for the "genuine advantage" required by Windows Update.

If someone is already using a pirated copy of Windows as their desktop OS, then they probably wouldn't have a problem running a pirated copy of Windows 2003, either.

In which case, they can then download Windows Server Update Services which doesn't require WGA to download. After installing WSUS on Win2K3, they can configure it to only download updates matching the pirated MS software they have, and then individually approve or reject updates. They would then configure all the systems to retrieve the approved updates from the WSUS server.

By doing this, every update is available, and WGA is never installed on any of the systems.

I have 2 Vista machines that suspend reliably, and at least one co-worker does too. Other than the BSOD screensaver I've never actually seen Vista have a blue screen though.

First, look at the MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx unless it's against your religion to do so. Microsoft is touting Warp as a software fallback where the PC hardware is not up to the job. Well done to the ~5 posters who have seen this, your score a +10 on the scale of comprehending the MSDN article. -10 to Linix/Mac fanboys for seeing the word Microsoft, frothing at the mouth. A software fallback makes perfect sense on several fronts: 1. Older software that uses GDI/GDI+ gets a performance increase on Windows 7. GDI/GDI+ performance got walloped with Vista. Try running some VBA in Excel that builds graphs for example. Stupid new diver model and crap implementation from device manufactures. 2. Direct 3D games. The article mentions device CAPS, that's capabilities if I recall. Game coders have to examine what the device (graphics card) is capable of doing before trying to do it. EG: If its ATI and it's model X do routine Y, otherwise do Z. The code should just run in software emulation. It will be easier for developers to at least run the code without it crashing and identify where the fallback to software is. They are then free to develop a better workaround without having crash dumps to understand. EG quicker game development. 3. And in my opinion, most important. The GUI, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was introduced with Vista and on XP. While I think it's next to impossible to truly describe the potential impact of this, I'll have a go. a. It's vector based. Resolution and device independent graphics for example. Coordinates are double precision, if someone makes a massive monitor or a monitor with 600 pixels per inch capability, WPF will still cope without the display looking crap. b. Floating point precision colour. Put this in perspective, most colour values are byte based. One byte for red, another for blue, another for green and one more for alpha or opacity (transparency). A byte = 256 values. Ignoring the alpha channel, that's 256x256x256 colours, or 16,777,216 colours. A single (32bit) can be positive or negative in value, so lets be conservative and only use positive values; that's 3.402823e38 or 340,282,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Now multiply that by 3 for red, green and blue and you get: 120,846,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That should be enough colours to be getting on with. I imagine that display technology will take a while to catch up with a figure like that. c. 3D. Developers can use 3D in their applications without an intimate knowledge of how the Direct 3D API works. d. Recently, .net 3.5 SP1 introduced the ability for programmers to use shaders as well. It's early days yet; so useful implementations are bit thin on the ground. But you can introduce motion blur when a user is scrolling through a list of photos for example. All of this stuff does not come cheep, so MS are offloading as much as they can onto the GPU. But if the GPU fails for some reason, they don't want GUI developers trying to understand why and code round the problem. Warp enables them to at least have the app run, regardless of hardware. They are then free to either fix the problem or up the hardware limits. This technology has bugger all to do with playing Crysis, it's used as an example for gods sake.

Sounds mysterious... ...my own XP PC, and the one I had at my last job did not show that problem. But it certainly sounds like you did your homework in checking for viruses. Maybe it is a "legitimate" application that steals the resources. So I'd try the following things:

1) Take an affected PC and clean out the various autostart mechanisms. Take notes and observe if killing a particular service/application fixes the problem. A nice tool to help you there is available from Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

2) If 1) fails, check if your Windows-only software runs on WINE (http://winehq.org/). If yes, Linux is an option again.

The direct link to their numbers is here, including number for quad and dual CPUs. And here is the inquirer's take on it, which I tend to agree. This is about making sure that Win7 is put on as many machines as possible and doesn't have a "Vista Capable" debacle out of the gate. With this tech as long as they don't fuck up the CPU specs like they did with Vista(A 1GHz with 512Mb of RAM for Basic and 1Gb for all the others? WTF?) they should be able to give the Aero "experience" no matter how shitty of an Intel integrated GPU comes with your laptop. Of course it'll run so damned slow that the desktop will be pretty much the only thing you CAN run, but there won't be any more lawsuits because the machines can't run features. Anyway that is what I'm betting is going on in the mind of MSFT.

Personally I'll just be happy if Win7 doesn't run like a damned slug. because I'm really getting tired of playing "find a working driver" for all those damned laptops that keep getting dumped on my desk to be "downgraded" from Vista. I shudder to think how all those Best Buy and Wal Mart sub $600 laptops would have run if Vista would have had this "feature" at launch. How about making a nice lean functional OS instead of trying to out pretty Apple MSFT? Because frankly when you try to do Apple pretty you just end up sucking the big wet titty. Just accept the fact that you suck at pretty and move on. Win2K and WinXP weren't pretty and look at how much cash you made. Those of us that work with Windows will take compatibility and speed over pretty any day of the week. Just beg Allchin to come back and make backwards compatibility job #1 again and you'll find your customers will be happy.

Also, larger game companies will be able to point out these differences to get bug fixes out of the graphics card companies. "Your graphics card renders this incorrectly with regards to the reference, fix it" is much more forceful than "your graphics card behaves differently than your competitor".

DirectX already contains a reference rasterizer, which is better suited for that. This thing seems instead to be meant for applications that doesn't necessarily need more than "interactive" frame rates, but do need to run on a broad class of machines. Or for easing development of applications which could benefit from hardware acceleration when available (image processing f.i.).

From the MSDN page on WARP:

We don't see WARP10 as a replacement for graphics hardware, particularly as reasonably performing low end Direct3D 10 discrete hardware is now available for under $25. The goal of WARP10 was to allow applications to target Direct3D 10 level hardware without having significantly different code paths or testing requirements when running on hardware or when running in software.

Developers need to take time to read the Windows Vista user experience guidelines, or the equivalent for their own platform (or just read the Windows ones, whichever platform you're on, they're pretty good: http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/1/9/e191fd8c-bce8-4dba-a9d5-2d4e3f3ec1d3/ux%20guide.pdf ). They're imposing documents (760 pages for the Microsoft one), but you really shouldn't be writing UIs without reading it.

I find it outrageous that still to this day we are trying to find new reasons for people to throw away their computers instead of actually encouraging them to KEEP THEM.

But what else could you possibly get from a system that judges a company solely on its sales? Our economic system provides strong incentives to build products that break in as short a time as possible, and can't be repaired, so you must buy a new one. Complain all you like (and we all do), but unless you're doing something to reward a company for durability, you're not solving the problem.

And yes you can always donate your computer to charity.

Doesn't this machine come with MS windows? We've already discussed the fact that, if you donate a Windows machine, the license for the software probably doesn't transfer along with it. Yes, I know the MS PR people claim that they have a way to transfer licenses. But I have a number of friends working for charitable organizations who will tell you about the grief and wasted time from trying to get permission to legally run the software. Mostly, they failed at this, and either paid the retail price for a license, or more often they just trashed the hardware. If you go to the web site for MS's Microsoft Open License for Charities, you'll see that they don't actually talk about transferring the original license. The site tells you how to purchase licenses at a special price.

So if you donate your computer to charity, you may be sticking that charity with the expense of a software license.

Can you really trust Verisign more than TURKTRUST?

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-017.mspx

Network Solutions is a Verisign owned company which does DNS stuff:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/01/08/1920215
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/26/235256&tid=123

DNSSEC happens to be DNS + cert stuff. Go figure.

There is been a bug in the Linux kernel that makes computers reboot every 47.9 days. This bug has been around for nearly 15 years!

I don't think that Linux can claim to be ready for the desktop (nor the server for that matter) until its development process is streamlined. As it is, the development priorities are set at the whims of one person.

I'm not sure if you're a troll, or just retarded... I think you're confusing this real bug with something that rattled loose in your thick skull...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641

And also because of firebug, I don't get that in ie... no, you did not say iedeveloper bar.

Yeah, IE has pretty weak debugging support. Thankfully MS is getting better about that, with things like this.

The developer tools in IE8 are also much better than other IE debug tools I've seen, so the future looks better for IE development.

So we have developer tools for Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari, all working within the browsers. I won't bother to put a lot of effort into supporting Chrome until Google releases a final version of it, and then I expect Chrome to include developer tools as well (if it doesn't already). A single browser with 3 engines and no developer tools is worthless to developers, and seems pointless for users.

hmm.... I remember a variant of http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/compare-editions/default.aspx being around long before before vista shipped. Microsoft made it very clear that vista home basic did not include Aero.

If i buy a video game and my computer just bearly meets the minimium system requirements I don't get to sue the company that made it when i can't run it with the highest graphics settings.

Hell the requirements they are listing for Vista now are pretty much a joke. A 1Ghz CPU with 512Mb of RAM for Basic? BWA HA HA HA! And the same CPU with a gig of RAM and a DX9 card for everything else? BWA HA HA HA HA HA! Come on! We all knew with Xp you'd have to double it, but with Vista you need more like a dual core and 2Gb unless you want to experience "The night of the living thrash" on your HDD.

We all know why they did this: It was because they knew Vista was a bloated hog and didn't want it to look bad next to XP. But instead they set the system requirements WAY too low and huge chunks of the public got burned. And then they add insult to injury by killing XP when there are still plenty of single core CPU machines being sold and let this case go instead of settling which allowed all those damning emails get out. They need to just accept the fact that as far as the public is concerned Vista=WinME II, thanks to their own stupidity, and pay up before any more really damning emails hit the net. If they want to salvage Vista they need to kill Basic, and give the OEMs XP to use on anything lower than a dual core with 2Gb of RAM. I just hope Win7 doesn't suck, otherwise I'm going to have to be dealing with XP "downgrades" for my customers for a LONG time.

Am I the only one that remembers the Plus! pack that you could by to "enhance" your Windows 95 and 98?

Yeah but Plus! 95 actually did add features like font smoothing and high color icons (later released as a free font smoothing patch), Pinball, LOGO.SYS boot screen, and of course themes. Since all of that was integrated into later Windows releases Plus!98 pretty much just installed themes and a new boot logo.

If people want to complain about different versions of Windows, 95 was even worse! There was "Windows 95", "Windows 95 With Plus!" (aka OSR2), "Windows 95 With USB Support" (OSR2.1) and "Windows 95 with Internet Explorer" (OSR2.5). Each release contained significant features and updates not available in the lower versions (like USB support for example). Even worse was the fact that you couldn't even buy the better featured releases!

Since Apple controls its product line, the responsible thing to do would be to make sure that all of their current products supported CoreImage-- essentially, floating point fragment shaders.

I'm not sure if Apple offers a machine that does not. It shouldn't.

The Vista ready program was designed to assure customers that they would be able to buy a computer that Vista would run well on. In the pre-Vista era, Aero was certainly hyped. It's not inconceivable that some poor hapless soles bought new computers in the expectation that they would be able to use Aero, when it came out and were sorely disappointed when they found out that they could not.

Now that Vista has been released, you can demo a prospective purchase in the store, find out that the interface is not as lickable as you were led to expect, and move on. Or you can read reviews, and note the line "Not powerful enough to run Vista". But prior to release, it was all about trust, fine print, and careful research.

.

Since services like S&P began to define it as an industrial.

The six AAA rated industrial companies are Automatic Data Processing, Exxon Mobil Corporation, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc and Microsoft. In the early 1980s, there were more than 30 industrial companies with 'AAA' ratings. Microsoft joins select industrial club with S&P's AAA rating

S&P defines and tracks the performance of dozens of sub-sectors in the economy: Standard & Poors (S&P) Sector Indexes

S&P doesn't care if Spacely Space Sprockets employs only one visible engineer or technician. It doesn't even care what a sprocket is - or does - beyond a general sense of how it is produced and distributed and the role it plays in the economy.

They employ more lawyers than programmers!

More on a janitorial as well. Big Whoop.

Microsoft employs 94,000 people. It owns or leases 677 sites world-wide, 29 million square feet of real estate. It has subsidiaries in every country from A to Z. The programmer is never going to dominate the headcount in an organization that operates on such a scale. Fast Facts About Microsoft

How much outsourced programming staff could they have when they employ legal to bully 3rd party hardware companies to develop drivers for their new OS's?

Dear lord, spare me this.

You do not have to bully anyone to produce drivers for the OS that has 90% of your potential market - and Apple has a lock on damn near 10% of what remains.

Well, so far from Google I get maps, email, groups and a kind-of crappy office suite that is only usable online plus photo management(Picasa). In order to use any of their services, I need some kind of software installed, which they don't provide, or sell. Or, I can go buy a smart phone and use some of their basic services.

If I check on Microsoft's area, they basically offer all of this (email, office suite, picture management, maps, myriad of dev tools) plus a ton of other products and services. Have you seen what they actually provide? The comparison between the two can only take place between about 5 products. After that, Microsoft seems to have much more in their arsenal.

http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx?pf=true&group=All+Products

http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/

"It is very common for 'users' of Windows not to set passwords, which just makes it even easier easier to penetrate the whole network."

Enough FUD. On XP+ this would make it HARDER to penetrate the network because usernames with blank passwords CANNOT log on remotely. http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/create.mspx

can they really be blamed for shoddy coding done by third parties?

Yes they can and here is why:

If a program is going to allow addons then the communications between the addons and the main application should be conducted entirely through interfaces in order to preserve abstraction and enforce Design by Contract principles. In this way addons are allowed to plug into the application at precise locations controlled by the main application and to interact with the main application abstractly and in precisely defined and limited ways. Some people might argue that this is too limiting, but it has been my experience in developing software in this style that well designed interface contracts can support a wealth of valuable features while maintaining plug-ability and abstraction throughout the software stack. So I don't buy "It's the addons fault" since the addons, ultimately, can only do things which the main application framework has allowed them to do whether intentionally, through good abstraction, or unintentionally from poor addon framework design.

My company had two early Compaq tablet PCs, a TC1000 with a 1 GHz Transmeta CPU and a (by that time HP) TC1100 with a 1 GHz PIII. The PIII ran circles around the Transmeta (like, when you were waiting for it to turn your spoken words into text, it was 1-2 seconds versus 3-5) but the Transmeta didn't get significantly better battery life--both were good for about 4 hours in typical usage (which, at a conference, means taking notes, surfing, and playing FreeCell and Dots.)

Part of the answer is the Native Image Generator (Ngen.exe). There is also a ".NET Runtime Optimization Service" which re-compiles assemblies after .NET is patched.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6t9t5wcf(VS.80).aspx

The Native Image Generator (Ngen.exe) is a tool that improves the performance of managed applications. Ngen.exe creates native images, which are files containing compiled processor-specific machine code, and installs them into the native image cache on the local computer. The runtime can use native images from the cache instead using the just-in-time (JIT) compiler to compile the original assembly.

Mono has something similar, but it looks like its not automatic:
http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Runtime#Ahead-of-time_compilation

I'm guessing he meant "officially blessed" (which would be correct), not "given permission". The Mono team did not need Microsoft's permission to implement Moonlight. No one needs permission to implement a re-implementation of Silverlight as far as I'm aware.

Moonlight is a clean re-implementation of Silverlight based on the docs at http://msdn.microsoft.com/ Microsoft's test suites (which they have provided to us) and writing our own test cases to figure out how Silverlight handles certain cases where the docs were unclear (which we have tried to document on our own wiki: http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightQuirks - we've also included all of our own test suites in the moonlight source repository).

So, you need a long beard to support python?

Here is the photo of Jim Hugunin, the IronPython guy.

So, apparently not. But Microsoft seems to be short on bearded language designers in general...

Moonlight is LGPL, MIT X11.

Linux users are also protected by this covenant specific to Moonlight.

I still have my doubts on whether that is enough, though. Any non-trivial project will infringe somebody's patents. Mono or not, that problem will remain as long as your patent office refuses to be sane about granting patents.

"(i think HPC is limited to 4)" Do you have a source for that? Why would HPC support less cores than a version like Datacenter, which supports 64? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx

since Windows Server 2008 can only use 8 processors (i think HPC is limited to 4)

Win2008 x64 can handle up to 64 processors (in Datacenter edition). No idea what the limit for HPC specifically is.

a parallel language has already been readied for a while. It's called F#. See http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx

Yes, actually. There are many concurrency projects for .NET. Take a look at declarative languages like F#, PLINQ (parallel LINQ), Parallel C#, Polyphonic C#

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

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

http://www.parallelcsharp.com/

http://research.microsoft.com/~nick/polyphony/

You wanted me to prove the existence of what would be undisclosed MS patents, I thought you liked throwing out impossible challenges. Besides, you're the one claiming there is NO problem, so maybe you should attempt to prove it.

Your the one making the assertions that they are there. You need to support your claim. If you can't support your claim, then we have to take Novell at their word in that they aren't there. Me proving the opposite of your claim is just ridiculous, that would be like me saying your a no good tax cheating child molesting, raping baster, oh and if you disagree, I won't offer evidence in support of my accusation, you just need to prove that your not.

At least in the case of Novell, there is a record of what they have added, the additions get vetted by many other people in the community as well as the project admins and if your scared that something might have slipped by them, you have the option of just no using the stuff Novell has contributed. In the case of the accusation against you, there is nothing of the sort and the likelihood of it not being true is even harder to catch then in the system surounding Novell's contributions.

The problem with Novell's deal is that they're setting themselves up to be the only legit distributor of Linux, once it becomes encumbered with MS patents. (By anyone - even if the patented code was reproduced by Linus himself.) If there are no patents life goes on as now - if there are, Novell wins big.

This statement is just false. Novell doesn't control Linux. If Linux become encumbered with patents of Microsoft somehow, it will be because of people other then Novell. If novell adds something to anything, it is reviewed. If that review turns up a patent, then other groups and projects simply don't use the patented materials. That means Novell will be the only authorized distributor of Novell's MS patent encumbered versions of Linux in which the GPL already makes statements about despite that the Patent Deal might not even cover them.

Now it appears that what your pissed about is that if there is ever found that patents do exist in linux, then Novell might not have to stop using it when other will. But if you read the deal or even the breakdown Grokelaw did, you will find that the patent deal with MS didn't cover anything that competes with MS products or that were primarily developed by a third parties (that rules out the kernel). There are three exclusions to the covered patents, they are Foundry Products, Clone Products and Other Excluded Products. That means that Postfix or Apache, wouldn't be covered by the patent deal if Novell injected some poisoned code in it. It means that open office or mozilla or Gnome or Mono or anything of the sort in which meets one of more of those definitions wouldn't be covered and Novell wouldn't be an authorized distributor of them if they ever become encumbered by anyone.

The information has been availible for years now. Most people have dropped the "Novell is teh evil" by now because of it. Everything was blown out of portion during the creation of the deal because the Church of Stallman wanted to push the GPLv3 through when very few people were supporting it and they purposely misrepresented the facts in order to do so. The worst part of this is that their manufactured outrage which you apparently are still effected by, came at a time when the disaster that is Windows Vista was first released and all the TCO studies MS did were invalidated because the entire benefit to MS, the retraining costs associated with linux, was being recreated in the switch to vista. For

You wanted me to prove the existence of what would be undisclosed MS patents, I thought you liked throwing out impossible challenges. Besides, you're the one claiming there is NO problem, so maybe you should attempt to prove it.

Your the one making the assertions that they are there. You need to support your claim. If you can't support your claim, then we have to take Novell at their word in that they aren't there. Me proving the opposite of your claim is just ridiculous, that would be like me saying your a no good tax cheating child molesting, raping baster, oh and if you disagree, I won't offer evidence in support of my accusation, you just need to prove that your not.

At least in the case of Novell, there is a record of what they have added, the additions get vetted by many other people in the community as well as the project admins and if your scared that something might have slipped by them, you have the option of just no using the stuff Novell has contributed. In the case of the accusation against you, there is nothing of the sort and the likelihood of it not being true is even harder to catch then in the system surounding Novell's contributions.

The problem with Novell's deal is that they're setting themselves up to be the only legit distributor of Linux, once it becomes encumbered with MS patents. (By anyone - even if the patented code was reproduced by Linus himself.) If there are no patents life goes on as now - if there are, Novell wins big.

This statement is just false. Novell doesn't control Linux. If Linux become encumbered with patents of Microsoft somehow, it will be because of people other then Novell. If novell adds something to anything, it is reviewed. If that review turns up a patent, then other groups and projects simply don't use the patented materials. That means Novell will be the only authorized distributor of Novell's MS patent encumbered versions of Linux in which the GPL already makes statements about despite that the Patent Deal might not even cover them.

Now it appears that what your pissed about is that if there is ever found that patents do exist in linux, then Novell might not have to stop using it when other will. But if you read the deal or even the breakdown Grokelaw did, you will find that the patent deal with MS didn't cover anything that competes with MS products or that were primarily developed by a third parties (that rules out the kernel). There are three exclusions to the covered patents, they are Foundry Products, Clone Products and Other Excluded Products. That means that Postfix or Apache, wouldn't be covered by the patent deal if Novell injected some poisoned code in it. It means that open office or mozilla or Gnome or Mono or anything of the sort in which meets one of more of those definitions wouldn't be covered and Novell wouldn't be an authorized distributor of them if they ever become encumbered by anyone.

The information has been availible for years now. Most people have dropped the "Novell is teh evil" by now because of it. Everything was blown out of portion during the creation of the deal because the Church of Stallman wanted to push the GPLv3 through when very few people were supporting it and they purposely misrepresented the facts in order to do so. The worst part of this is that their manufactured outrage which you apparently are still effected by, came at a time when the disaster that is Windows Vista was first released and all the TCO studies MS did were invalidated because the entire benefit to MS, the retraining costs associated with linux, was being recreated in the switch to vista. For

You wanted me to prove the existence of what would be undisclosed MS patents, I thought you liked throwing out impossible challenges. Besides, you're the one claiming there is NO problem, so maybe you should attempt to prove it.

Your the one making the assertions that they are there. You need to support your claim. If you can't support your claim, then we have to take Novell at their word in that they aren't there. Me proving the opposite of your claim is just ridiculous, that would be like me saying your a no good tax cheating child molesting, raping baster, oh and if you disagree, I won't offer evidence in support of my accusation, you just need to prove that your not.

At least in the case of Novell, there is a record of what they have added, the additions get vetted by many other people in the community as well as the project admins and if your scared that something might have slipped by them, you have the option of just no using the stuff Novell has contributed. In the case of the accusation against you, there is nothing of the sort and the likelihood of it not being true is even harder to catch then in the system surounding Novell's contributions.

The problem with Novell's deal is that they're setting themselves up to be the only legit distributor of Linux, once it becomes encumbered with MS patents. (By anyone - even if the patented code was reproduced by Linus himself.) If there are no patents life goes on as now - if there are, Novell wins big.

This statement is just false. Novell doesn't control Linux. If Linux become encumbered with patents of Microsoft somehow, it will be because of people other then Novell. If novell adds something to anything, it is reviewed. If that review turns up a patent, then other groups and projects simply don't use the patented materials. That means Novell will be the only authorized distributor of Novell's MS patent encumbered versions of Linux in which the GPL already makes statements about despite that the Patent Deal might not even cover them.

Now it appears that what your pissed about is that if there is ever found that patents do exist in linux, then Novell might not have to stop using it when other will. But if you read the deal or even the breakdown Grokelaw did, you will find that the patent deal with MS didn't cover anything that competes with MS products or that were primarily developed by a third parties (that rules out the kernel). There are three exclusions to the covered patents, they are Foundry Products, Clone Products and Other Excluded Products. That means that Postfix or Apache, wouldn't be covered by the patent deal if Novell injected some poisoned code in it. It means that open office or mozilla or Gnome or Mono or anything of the sort in which meets one of more of those definitions wouldn't be covered and Novell wouldn't be an authorized distributor of them if they ever become encumbered by anyone.

The information has been availible for years now. Most people have dropped the "Novell is teh evil" by now because of it. Everything was blown out of portion during the creation of the deal because the Church of Stallman wanted to push the GPLv3 through when very few people were supporting it and they purposely misrepresented the facts in order to do so. The worst part of this is that their manufactured outrage which you apparently are still effected by, came at a time when the disaster that is Windows Vista was first released and all the TCO studies MS did were invalidated because the entire benefit to MS, the retraining costs associated with linux, was being recreated in the switch to vista. For

You wanted me to prove the existence of what would be undisclosed MS patents, I thought you liked throwing out impossible challenges. Besides, you're the one claiming there is NO problem, so maybe you should attempt to prove it.

Your the one making the assertions that they are there. You need to support your claim. If you can't support your claim, then we have to take Novell at their word in that they aren't there. Me proving the opposite of your claim is just ridiculous, that would be like me saying your a no good tax cheating child molesting, raping baster, oh and if you disagree, I won't offer evidence in support of my accusation, you just need to prove that your not.

At least in the case of Novell, there is a record of what they have added, the additions get vetted by many other people in the community as well as the project admins and if your scared that something might have slipped by them, you have the option of just no using the stuff Novell has contributed. In the case of the accusation against you, there is nothing of the sort and the likelihood of it not being true is even harder to catch then in the system surounding Novell's contributions.

The problem with Novell's deal is that they're setting themselves up to be the only legit distributor of Linux, once it becomes encumbered with MS patents. (By anyone - even if the patented code was reproduced by Linus himself.) If there are no patents life goes on as now - if there are, Novell wins big.

This statement is just false. Novell doesn't control Linux. If Linux become encumbered with patents of Microsoft somehow, it will be because of people other then Novell. If novell adds something to anything, it is reviewed. If that review turns up a patent, then other groups and projects simply don't use the patented materials. That means Novell will be the only authorized distributor of Novell's MS patent encumbered versions of Linux in which the GPL already makes statements about despite that the Patent Deal might not even cover them.

Now it appears that what your pissed about is that if there is ever found that patents do exist in linux, then Novell might not have to stop using it when other will. But if you read the deal or even the breakdown Grokelaw did, you will find that the patent deal with MS didn't cover anything that competes with MS products or that were primarily developed by a third parties (that rules out the kernel). There are three exclusions to the covered patents, they are Foundry Products, Clone Products and Other Excluded Products. That means that Postfix or Apache, wouldn't be covered by the patent deal if Novell injected some poisoned code in it. It means that open office or mozilla or Gnome or Mono or anything of the sort in which meets one of more of those definitions wouldn't be covered and Novell wouldn't be an authorized distributor of them if they ever become encumbered by anyone.

The information has been availible for years now. Most people have dropped the "Novell is teh evil" by now because of it. Everything was blown out of portion during the creation of the deal because the Church of Stallman wanted to push the GPLv3 through when very few people were supporting it and they purposely misrepresented the facts in order to do so. The worst part of this is that their manufactured outrage which you apparently are still effected by, came at a time when the disaster that is Windows Vista was first released and all the TCO studies MS did were invalidated because the entire benefit to MS, the retraining costs associated with linux, was being recreated in the switch to vista. For