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Microsoft is going to be infected with the GPL virus!

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.mspx

I am sure that the community will write all the drivers once we have full source to the OS to know the right way to do so....

Or you know, you could just read the documentation:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/Devtools/wdk/default.mspx

Complete with tutorials and samples.

I'm not saying it would be 'easy', but its not that hard, and just like in Linux, once you've got a working sound card driver, supporting other similiar sound cards is pretty simple.

For the longest time, XP didn't come with AES/WPA support. You'd have to add this patch: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=662BB74D-E7C1-48D6-95EE-1459234F4483&displaylang=en

I'm not sure if this was rolled into a newer SP. Many people couldn't access a WPA2 AP so manufacturers chose to just enable WPA as there was less chance of incompatibility.

In my apartment complex, I'm one of two people who have WPA2 enabled. I'm the only one who has only WPA2 enabled.

Heh, the captcha word is "paranoia".

• MN-720 802.11G PCCard: No Vista(or even XP SP3) compatiblity... WHY?
• Microsoft Intellimouse optical: The driver in the link doesn't recognize this mouse... What's really funny is MS's Mac Intellimouse driver works perfectly. This is a rather old mouse, it was one of the very first optical mice available($70 back in the day).

I may just have bad luck... but Microsoft's driver compatibility is frighteningly bad.

• MN-720 802.11G PCCard: No Vista(or even XP SP3) compatiblity... WHY?
• Microsoft Intellimouse optical: The driver in the link doesn't recognize this mouse... What's really funny is MS's Mac Intellimouse driver works perfectly. This is a rather old mouse, it was one of the very first optical mice available($70 back in the day).

I may just have bad luck... but Microsoft's driver compatibility is frighteningly bad.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa383015.aspx

Not false just a little off, I was incorrect in implying that no graphical data was transmitted. My excuse is I was pulling from memory.

Yes. Microsoft is working on that one: http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/licenses.mspx

President B. Obama asks Ballmer to release Windows 3.1 sources while Ballmer rebrands Microsoft as communism and promotes "local software".

Consider this from Microsoft regarding end-of-life of its "desktop products":

Lifecycle and Licensing FAQ
1. Does the Windows Desktop Product Lifecycle Policy affect how long I can legally use a Microsoft operating system after I've licensed it?
No, this policy only affects the ability to obtain new licenses through certain channels, the time period and the way that Microsoft will provide product support for each operating system. The ability to use a Windows desktop operating system after it has been legally licensed is unaffected...

I am more of a UNIX admin so I don't claim to be an expert on remote Windows management, but I believe the tool you're looking for is Microsoft PowerShell which allows remote WMI scripting. I've seen some pretty impressive demos of infrastructure automation using WMI and PowerShell.

For power cycling and the like, I'd go with the hardware remote management tools (iLo, DRAC, and the like).

A quick Google turned up a few Microsoft articles on PowerShell and WMI. (Article 1, Article 2)

I am more of a UNIX admin so I don't claim to be an expert on remote Windows management, but I believe the tool you're looking for is Microsoft PowerShell which allows remote WMI scripting. I've seen some pretty impressive demos of infrastructure automation using WMI and PowerShell.

For power cycling and the like, I'd go with the hardware remote management tools (iLo, DRAC, and the like).

A quick Google turned up a few Microsoft articles on PowerShell and WMI. (Article 1, Article 2)

PSEXEC, a free app from sysinternals, is a neat way to run things remotely. Just heard of it last week but started getting al ot of use out of it. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx

GORILLAS.BAS: Microsoft's only open source game.

Lest we forget Allegiance...

Isn't MS Server 2008 heavily scripted? My understanding is that you now have almost as much control in a 2008 environment with no GUI (CLI only) installed as you do with a GUI.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/powershell-faq.aspx

This may be the way to go.

One more thing I forgot to mention. You said you were using Windows servers at the site. Install OpenSSH for Windows and on every box. That will give you a great command-line ability to list/kill processes, start/stop services, and generally do much of the Windows admin work in a script-friendly environment. The last thing you want to do is deal with a super-slow VNC or RDP session when you're just trying to restart a service.

It's kind of unclear whether you want to actually access these machines or run tasks on them (or both). However, Windows supports remote scripting and you can install an SSH server for interactive terminal access (or perhaps tunnel the script execution over the SSH connection if you're ultra paranoid).

What are you looking for in terms of API or codec info?

Silverlight will be adopting H.264 in its next major version: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/H264-and-AAC-support-coming-in-Silverlight/

The VC-1 codec is already a SMPTE spec: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1

The Silverlight Xaml vocabulary spec for Silverlight 2 was published in September: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/A/6/0A6F7755-9AF5-448B-907D-13985ACCF53E/%5BMS-SLXV%5D.pdf

You can't change how things work. These are the same type of guys who didn't bother with multiplatform server/client structure which would allow them to stream even to iPhone today.

Stuff like these: http://www.realnetworks.com/products/media_delivery.html

Some kind of "money under table" going on as usual. Do you think the old Windows Media only streamers/embedders used it because it was the best option available? Now Flash took over and Silverlight tries the same trick to gain ground. It has nothing to do with the technology, it has something to do with integrity of people choosing these technologies.

The issue with Silverlight is, it is not a true multiplatform thing, being x86 Mac only gives a very good clue about what it is.It comes from the very same company who doesn't say "NOT FOR INTEL MACS or ANYTHING HIGHER THAN 2003 OS X" in their "Windows Media Player for OS X" page resulting in huge amount of stability/performance loss. They still keep that damn thing available so unsuspecting Windows Switchers will download and rape their browsing and OS stability. If you have a buggy/outdated/not compiled for your CPU plugin on OS X, God help you since every single browser (even including Webkit framework using ordinary apps) will load it.

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_WMP&fid=1E974157-5031-4AC6-840A-6E07547B6AEB#viewer

Do you see anything about being PPC only, not updated there? If I told you it sometimes makes to top 10 of Apple Downloads (since they submitted!), you can imagine the degree of situation.

I am running PowerPC and Silverlight 2 is not available to my CPU. If it was, I would seriously think twice about using/installing it.

For real "laptops" the Grid Compass(but not battery powered) and the DG One (which is recognizably modern looking). Great shaving mirror. The 80x25 LCD display was made up of four panels because they couldn't make a single panel large enough...

I had the pleasure of playing with both of these and many other weird pre-pc clone boxs back in the early 80's (porting UCSD p-system).

Andy Andy

Sounds like what you're saying is that Linq is just the language that goes along with an ORM mapper. Something like what HQL is capable of doing.

No, no, no!

LINQ is not an "ORM language" Is map an element of an "ORM language"? Is fold? Of course not!

LINQ can be used to build an ORM. It can also be used for many other things entirely unrelated to ORM or databases (in contrast, HQL is very specifically an ORM query language, not immediately usable outside that domain).

Even if we were...you've essentially *possibly* invalidated point #5. What about the other 4? Those don't actually have anything to do with ORM, but actually deal with using Linq as a language (vs using HQL as a language).

No, your points don't deal with "LINQ as a language" at all, because "LINQ as a language" is absolutely orthogonal to databases in general, kinds of relations (belongs-to / has-a) in particular, caching, and so on. What you were describing is LINQ to SQL - which, I agree, is rather crappy, especially when compared to proper ORM such as Hibernate (this is what your #1, #2, #3 and #5 are about). Entity Framework is supposed to alleviate that, though I still do not consider it as mature as Hibernate. Even so, it has its nice sides (I believe that they're right on track with the idea that plain objects with decorators/attributes are not the best way to initially model entities - you really need a dedicated ERD modelling language for that, the one where relations are also first-class, named, and explicit).

Some functions that work in BOTH the database and the VM don't work with Linq, or don't work reliably (examples I've found: shift operator, bitwise and when used with ulong).

This is not true. In plain LINQ to Objects, every single operator is supported, and any function call works. Without any limitations whatsoever. Because it actually, you know, just calls those functions?

Once again, what you describe here is a LINQ to SQL limitation, not applicable to LINQ in general.

If you actually have to make a new language variant for every single database

You don't make a "new language variant". You have to make a "provider", which is entirely the same as NHibernate driver or (on a lower level) ADO.NET/JDBC driver. Microsoft has made a provider for their own database, now other vendors are delivering providers for their databases. Entity Framework infrastructure is designed to be extensible, so there's no difference between MSSQL provider supplied out-of-the-box, and third-party providers. LINQ-the-language is exactly the same in all those cases (just as it is exactly the same between LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL, and EF). C# compiler does not know nor care, and it's the one that defines LINQ syntax.

You can do almost everything you need to using standard, compatible-with-every-server SQL most of the time

Yeah? Try calling a stored procedure in a server-agnostic way. Or work with dates. Or concatenate two strings. Or get a substring of a string. Or limit the output of a query to the first N rows. Or create an autoincrementing field.

If you think you know the answers for all of the above, then have a look at this comparison of different SQL implementations, and check yourself.

And that's without even mentioning the subtle behavioral differences between locking (DB2, MSSQL) and MVCC (Oracle, Postgres, Interbase) database engin

Sometimes it pays to look beyond the hype and see what a new technology really does (or does not) bring to the table and if LINQ is just another way to write SQL to you then perhaps you should take another look, because LINQ has much more to offer than just LINQ to SQL.

Indeed. And to anyone who truly wants to understand what LINQ actually is, and what are its long-term goals, should really read Eric Meijer's excellent essay "Confessions Of A Used Programming Language Salesman: Getting The Masses Hooked On Haskell".

Linq TO SQL is dead. Not Linq.
Now people will be using Linq to Entities instead of Linq to SQL.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx

The ability to use Linq on other random collections will not be affected.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I can point to anyone ever getting those services even during the "Mainstream Support" phase, and at least you can say that it's had a LONG test phase.

Does anyone know if MS will continue to update products like IE and WMP for XP once it goes into Extended Support? That must be a conflict for them, knowing how they want to push people to the newer OSes, but realizing how much uproar there would be if a new version of WMP came out that wouldn't work on a brand new computer. And, considering how much they claimed IE was an integral part of the OS, any new IE updates might constitute "design changes and feature requests" for the OS.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I can point to anyone ever getting those services even during the "Mainstream Support" phase, and at least you can say that it's had a LONG test phase.

Does anyone know if MS will continue to update products like IE and WMP for XP once it goes into Extended Support? That must be a conflict for them, knowing how they want to push people to the newer OSes, but realizing how much uproar there would be if a new version of WMP came out that wouldn't work on a brand new computer. And, considering how much they claimed IE was an integral part of the OS, any new IE updates might constitute "design changes and feature requests" for the OS.

it suggests Install Silverlight !

then when coming to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?mode=sysreq&reason=unsupportedplatform [microsoft.com]

So those claiming that Silverlight were only needing JavaScript (Ajax) on the client-side were lying!

Yeah, see how easy that was to find the truth? Good job. So next time you find someone BSing you, do yourself a favor and verify. Never trust anyone except yourself, not that yourself is necessarily any better than anyone else, but at least with yourself, if you are wrong, you can do something about it. With the other guy, you can't do much.

What kind of shit-site is linked to?

"Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer's hardware or operating system. "

When going to that site http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/

it suggests Install Silverlight !

then when coming to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?mode=sysreq&reason=unsupportedplatform

So those claiming that Silverlight were only needing JavaScript (Ajax) on the client-side were lying!

Kepp your shitty site!

A customer makes a connection to the bank via SSL. How does the customer know whether or not this encryption succeeds or fails? He has no idea and he has no way of finding out.

The 1% error rate of paper ballots can be read here and many other places. Google "paper ballot error rate".

Also, I have my doubts about the methods from the paper, though I haven't read it. For example, how resistant is the technique with respect to attacks on votes that have been cast by people who, for some reason (such as low technical skills), cannot check the correctness of the result? If someone else is going to do that for them, won't this compromise anonymity of their vote?

There are many techniques out there. Some allow for a voter to verify that his own vote has been counted correctly. Universally verifiable systems allow for a voter to verify that everyone's vote has been counted correctly. No, this does not in general compromise the anonymity of the vote.

Also, don't you feel a bit silly arguing against hypothetical weaknesses of cryptosystems when you haven't even bothered to read the basics? Here's another good paper by Microsoft. Here's another good one from Carnegie Mellon.

Please read these papers. You will see they have carefully thought through the issues you are raising.

Most of these systems operate on a server/client basis. The client can use whichever implementation he desires as long as it implements the algorithm. He can use Microsoft Voter or GNU Vote or whatever he wants. You're not forced to sit down at a voting booth with software you don't trust.

More importantly MS is not selling a product called "Azure", they have given a product they are developing the code name "Azure". When they actually release the product if they call it Azure, then it might be time to discuss this.

While the pedant in me may have wished to agree with you in an earlier era, the pragmatist can't. "Code name" or not, they're deliberately and obviously underway with a marketing campaign which promotes "Azure" as their new product. The "code name" hand-waving is about as meaningful as Google's "beta" moniker.

-b

Apple determines what software is allowable on the iPhone, and most of the apps on it are for entertainment purposes or is garbage.

So what are the statistics for other platforms? My-Symbian.com's list of Series 60 apps has the most apps in the, err, umm, "Games and Entertainment" category, followed by "Miscellaneous Utilties", followed by "Graphics & Multimedia".

Browsing Microsoft's Windows Mobile Catalog shows, by far, the most apps in, well, "Games and Entertainment", followed by "Business and Office Productivity".

The main use for the thing, as admitted by Apple, is to basically have an iPod phone that delivers your need for both a cell phone and a music/video device.

Citation for that admission, please?

When you shopped for the computer did you take as a parameter the fact that the manufactured was openenough to provide details on how to do suspend to ram to anyone apart from MS?

It turns out that there is an industry standard for power managment on a PC originally developed by Intel known as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI). The vast majority of hardware vendors comply with the specification these days because they must do so to get a Windows logo. Partially as a result of Microsoft's enforcement of system power management testing to get a Windows logo, bugs in system ACPI tables are fairly rare anymore.

It also turns out that perhaps the most complicated part of entering system power states is coordinating the action amongst all the devices on the system. This requires power management handling implemented by all device drivers. It is no coincidence that "power management" is the biggest area of complaints surfaced by new Windows driver developers: correct handling of power management states is difficult to synchronize correctly and typically consumes a large portion of tricky code.

Microsoft has devoted a huge amount of time and money towards improving driver power management handling across the board. The Windows Driver Kit includes much improved documentation assisting driver developers in handling power IRPs correctly, and also includes a wide assortment of test tools designed to highlight power management bugs in real drivers and devices. Recently Microsoft acknowledged the difficulty of writing a power-aware WDM driver correctly and released a new driver framework which largely supercedes WDM to make power management easier for developers to get right. Finally, a significant portion of the Windows Logo testing kit validates that devices and drivers support power states properly. All of this work has paid off, as the OP indicated. Vista is one of the most power-aware operating systems in history, although much of the power savings are offset by extra resources consumed by other Vista features such as the Search Indexer. In any case, getting the PC industry to support device power management properly took lots of time and persistence Microsoft's part to achieve.

Frankly, the OSS community just hasn't put the same amount of work into handling power management, and the results speak for themselves. Linux is behind in power management because there aren't enough kernel-level developers knowledgeable about the subject and willing ot tackle the widespread problems in various drivers. Resuming from ACPI states S3 and S4 are very complicated operations to get right depending on what may have happened while the PC was asleep. Handling all of these edge cases in the driver code is tough, and unfortunately only an elite few know how to do it properly. Not to mention advanced bus support like USB's "selective suspend" whereby individual devices are suspended (e.g., state D2) to save power when not in use.

Advanced device support is still a major area where commercial software can still beat OSS today.

When you shopped for the computer did you take as a parameter the fact that the manufactured was openenough to provide details on how to do suspend to ram to anyone apart from MS?

It turns out that there is an industry standard for power managment on a PC originally developed by Intel known as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI). The vast majority of hardware vendors comply with the specification these days because they must do so to get a Windows logo. Partially as a result of Microsoft's enforcement of system power management testing to get a Windows logo, bugs in system ACPI tables are fairly rare anymore.

It also turns out that perhaps the most complicated part of entering system power states is coordinating the action amongst all the devices on the system. This requires power management handling implemented by all device drivers. It is no coincidence that "power management" is the biggest area of complaints surfaced by new Windows driver developers: correct handling of power management states is difficult to synchronize correctly and typically consumes a large portion of tricky code.

Microsoft has devoted a huge amount of time and money towards improving driver power management handling across the board. The Windows Driver Kit includes much improved documentation assisting driver developers in handling power IRPs correctly, and also includes a wide assortment of test tools designed to highlight power management bugs in real drivers and devices. Recently Microsoft acknowledged the difficulty of writing a power-aware WDM driver correctly and released a new driver framework which largely supercedes WDM to make power management easier for developers to get right. Finally, a significant portion of the Windows Logo testing kit validates that devices and drivers support power states properly. All of this work has paid off, as the OP indicated. Vista is one of the most power-aware operating systems in history, although much of the power savings are offset by extra resources consumed by other Vista features such as the Search Indexer. In any case, getting the PC industry to support device power management properly took lots of time and persistence Microsoft's part to achieve.

Frankly, the OSS community just hasn't put the same amount of work into handling power management, and the results speak for themselves. Linux is behind in power management because there aren't enough kernel-level developers knowledgeable about the subject and willing ot tackle the widespread problems in various drivers. Resuming from ACPI states S3 and S4 are very complicated operations to get right depending on what may have happened while the PC was asleep. Handling all of these edge cases in the driver code is tough, and unfortunately only an elite few know how to do it properly. Not to mention advanced bus support like USB's "selective suspend" whereby individual devices are suspended (e.g., state D2) to save power when not in use.

Advanced device support is still a major area where commercial software can still beat OSS today.

Judging from this FAQ, "versions newer than Vista" includes Vista. In fact, even that is not a strict bound, as all versions of Server 2003 SP1 also support GPT.

(At least that's my reading. I had no idea what GPT was before this, so I could be wrong.)

... your rant, your posting history, accusing me of bias and assuming I'm an MS employee ...

I don't care about you, your posting history, or your sense of humor. Way up on this thread somebody said "I'd trust Microsoft for security if my IQ was 50 and I didn't care that much" -- which is plain stupid, and I was replying to that.

You say I'm an MS employee. Not true, and how does it matter anyway -- that would only provide motive -- not negate my argument.

You say I have a pro-MS bias. I say you have an anti-MS bias. See how that works? You're so biased you can't even imagine how a non-MS employee could be defending MS!

You ask about astroturf ribbons -- and then you link to an old thread about DRM in Vista. I'll just remind you that it takes two people to have a conversation. So we're both astroturfing.

And finally -- you've posted some links of questionable value to prop up your argument. You can't make the same claim about me (in this thread, or any other). Why not just use facts and logic instead of this silly rant??

Or maybe you're not "with us"?

It's true -- I am not. Slashdot's hostility to MS has reached ridiculous levels -- to a point that I (who was once an MS hater) have become sick of the lack of objectivity and jump in to defend MS when I can. In that sense, I am not "with you". In that same sense, I accused you of groupthink earlier, and this precise line of yours seems to incriminate you worse than anything I can say.

Maybe, if Vista ever gets 20% real share there will be enough exploits to waste a few on some bots that find Microsoft's honey pots.

In that line, replace Vista with OS-X, Linux, or any other OS.

Further, I believe that as each vulnerability becomes common, is revealed, patched and repatched, others like yourself will continue appear to say "That was before! There are no more!"

And here you finally expose yourself as somebody who doesn't know much about security. Read any comment in my entire history on slashdot - I will never say anything as stupid as "there are no more security issues" (in MS software or otherwise). The best anyone (MS or anyone else) can do is keep improving their secure coding practices (like so), and keep grinding away at it, never letting your guard down, so that the cost of finding exploits in your sw is higher than the returns you get from the exploit. New and ingenious types of exploits are created all the time -- it's the stupidest thing in the world to claim that you have no security issues in xyz piece of software.

It is my firm belief that there exists within a default install of Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Server 2008 a vulnerability which allows an anonymous attacker to achieve total control of such a system without user interaction.

Try not to hurt yourself celebrating if that happens.

I offer no evidence and I have none. I do not assert that these things are true - I only state that I believe them. I really do believe this and there's nothing you could say or do to dissuade me from these beliefs.

I already knew I cannot change your 'beliefs'. But it irks me no end that you yourself admit that you have no evidence to back them up, but you'll keep posting one anti-MS diatribe after the other based on 'belief'. This is precisely where my groupthink accusation came from. This is precisely why the anti-MS stance on /. has reached a level of religious fervor / dogma.

Just go away before I have to get all twitter on you.

And finally, we have your motive as well. You simply don't like the fact that I'm defending MS, so you want to shut me up.

http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/video/SecondLight.wmv

I'll get modded into oblivion. It is taboo to speak imaginatively and positively about a Microsoft product on Slashdot.

You can find it in TFA, but if you're like I usually am and don't read it... there is a video, just to let those interested know...

http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/video/SecondLight.wmv

If you're still using XP in 2014 when they stop issuing security patches, then the problem may be on your end.

You don't have to join the OpenID foundation to become an OpenID provider. Funnily enough Microsoft did join; but in Feburary.

But as I ranted on my blog, becoming a provider is useless these days; allowing authentication using OpenID would be far more impressive.

Microsoft seems to think that Professional Write will at least export plain text (they even think it will export to early versions of Word):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156517

Combine that with a questionably licensed (read that as not licensed at all), questionably safe executable downloaded from some random location on the internet and it seems like you could do a little better than using strings (of course, those questions may pose more difficulty for some than they do for others).

The 'magic' Google phrase appears to be "Professional Write download".

Ok - I admit I got the timeline wrong - but I still see nothing but responsible behavior from MS in dealing with this flaw.

Every time this happens we get some idiot on here blathering about how things are better now.

Easy there dude.. however strongly you feel about it, the links you used were extremely disingenuous. I'll explain why:

Well that wasn't true before, was it?

Read your own link. It's got quotes from Brian Valentine (not a security expert) at the RSA 2000 conference talking about how MS put a naked Win2k machine on the 'net for 2 weeks, and only 4 denial of service bugs were found and no breaches were made. Also from your link: "Microsoft has made a comprehensive effort to build Windows 2000 with security in mind, including having a staff of 15 people study the code for breaches, denials of service, and bugs." -- in other words, that was a different world back then, and MS had a lot to learn about what kind of effort was required to secure windows. The effort mentioned in that article is laughable, with the benefit of hindsight. And as I said, the claim of MS not having secure development practices prior to ~2004 is true!

It wasn't true last time, was it? Note the 10 XP vulnerability blurb footing the story.

Again, read the damn link - not just the headline!
The article you linked does not refer to security in the sense of viruses/vulnerabilities/pwnage. It refers to security in the sense of data security using encryption and key management, authentication mechanisms (x509 certificate auth using smartcards). So you see, the headlines appear pretty damning, but the articles themselves again merely prove my point. Prior to 2004, MS really hadn't grasped the magnitude of the effort that would be required, and post 2004 (maybe earlier - right around the release of XP SP2) they really got their shit together.

What convincing evidence do you offer that this time they really, really mean it?

1. Industry plaudits: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10042248-83.html
2. Details of the process: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/ms995349.aspx
(note, the second link is a white paper by Michael Howard - a hacker/security expert himself - not a PHB unlike the dude quoted in your first link.) It's also detailed and insightful -- I suggest you read this link, even if you forgo reading your own.

DreamSpark and MSDNAA are not quite the same thing. DreamSpark is a web based service which allows qualifying college students to download full copies of VS2005, VS2008, SqlServer 2005, Windows Server 2003 and the full suite of their "Interwebz 4 dummiez" (AKA Expression Studio, etc).

MSDNAA is something that colleges sign up for. They pay for site licenses and qualifying students (at my university, only CS majors) can get copies of a huge range of Microsoft software, depending on what the college paid for.

On many systems the updates http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940510 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931573 can cause a lot of problems.

On many systems the updates http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940510 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931573 can cause a lot of problems.

Amazing as it sounds, I still have very VERY old data that goes as far back as 7th grade when I started using computers. I know of no converter for Professional Write that will convert Professional Write documents into ODF, or even MS Word 97/2000/2003. The only hope I have is that I can use strings to extract the text elements of the data.

Jeez! You that know when people say "Google is your friend" they're not just trying to be funny, right? Try these guys -- it's not free, but it claims to do the job. If you have a lot of data, they sell a product that will let you do the conversion yourself. How much are those old files really worth to you? Or, Microsoft has some suggestions.

South Africa's technology agency signed a three-year licensing agreement costing $800 per computer, says Daniel J. Mashao, the agency's chief technology officer. Namibia's government signed a three-year agreement for about $667 per computer, according to Gordon Elliott, head of administration for the Namibian prime minister's office. Those prices appear to be close to what Microsoft charges U.S. businesses.

Huh? $800 per seat? 800 what, USD? If those are client machines then that's insane. Even for Microsoft. I mean, the in-store windows pro for ~$200US gives you five licenses right? So I'd think, starting from $40US/license, then with an educational discount, then with a it's-frickin-Africa-and-we-have-to-pretend-to-have-a-heart-discount, it should be $10-20US max.

$800 license for Windows and Office? Are these server licenses maybe? Or is it a misprint and that's the price of an entire machine? I tried looking on Microsoft's licensing page, but their prices are obfuscated behind a 10-foot thick wall of PHB-speak. Ok, google produced this excel file that puts what is (I think) win pro at $311/4= $77.75US per seat. Can someone anointed with the licensing voodoo enlighten me please?

OT: the excel file linked from microsofts site is named: Copy%20of%20Price_List_Report.xls LOL

I haven't used this yet myself, but all of their (SysInternals - not MS) other stuff is great:

Desktops 1.0

If you watched the keynote demo, they were showing two users collaborating. One was using the normal desktop version of Word. The other was using the web version of Word. So the web versions are meant for situations where you don't have Office installed (just like OWA gives you access to your Exchange account when you don't have Outlook). This also means that two users using the desktop version of Word will be able to collaborate in real-time.

According to the press release, there will be an ad-funded version for consumers, so you don't need to buy Office to get access to these: "We will deliver Office Web applications to consumers through Office Live, which is a consumer service with both ad-funded and subscription offerings."

I also like the theory of the registry. All configuration held in a single, easy to access place with a consistent interface.

Unfortunately, in practice, it's a mess. Though, I really don't think the fault is entirely MS's. As you stated, too many developers simply dumped stuff in HKLM. The problem is, there is nothing in the design of the registry to stop that and it even encourages it. There is really no easy way to have a configuration in HKCU for one user replicate across all users for a system (the default user is only replicated when a new profile is created). On the other hand, HKLM is the same for all users.

This is actually one of the places where I really thought a Vista feature was great: Registry Virtualization. Virtualize out writes to system locations in the registry on a per-user basis. Unfortunately, it's not as comprehensive as that, and MS plans to deprecate it in the future.

You can always try installing http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspx (look for Alt-Tab Replacement).
It gives you a preview before switching. Works pretty well. Cheers.

Try uninstalling the KB952287 update. For whatever reason, that seems to have eliminated all of my ATI driver problems on Vista. The chances of actually needing that update installed are next to zero.

XP Home only supports one processor (or core), while XP Pro only supports two.

processor != core. From http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx:

Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor. Microsoft Windows XP Home supports one processor.