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We highly recommend that you use Exchange Web Services for new application development and avoid ExoleDB, WebDAV and CDOEx for new development. Give us feedback on about what you like and dislike in the API and what features you would prioritize next. We realize that building the new API set is a work in progress and we are aware that we haven't yet implemented some of the features that you developers might need for your applications. Yet we are openly looking for your feedback knowing that that feedback will help us on prioritizing the new features we are adding. If there is some functionality you need that isn't yet in EWS, and neither will be there in the next release, then let us know through the Exchange Developer Blog or Exchange Developer Newsgroup, we are always reading those for the great feedback you customers can provide us.

And here is the link to the latest Exchange Web Services (I mistakenly referred to it as Outlook Anywhere) information from MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb204119(EXCHG.80).aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555851

If Office 2003 worked, then Evolution would work.

Nice KB Microsoft: "The eliminate of the creation of Public Folder store and the connection from this Public Folder store to the mailbox store."

Apparently working with Exchange 2007 also causes brain damage...

Until said clients implement (or maybe decipher, considering Microsoft documentation) the protocol that Outlook uses.

SCREEN SCRAPING?

Why not just implement the fucking native protocol?

Our email is being moved over to Exchange.. after being moved off Exchange, to something else.

Previously, the admins dared not place Exchange on the internet, lest it be hacked. So the only way to get your mail was via VPN. Since they configure the concentrator to only allow Windows clients with the firewalling on, you can't access anything on your local network, and yea verily, this did sucketh.

Presently, there is a public IMAP server (running some variety of not-Exhange). And it's nice to be able to get your email without crippling your network connection, and from the IMAP client of your choice (ie, Thunderbird), installed on the device of your choice.

Soon, they intend to move us back onto Exchange. Because they still dare not place Exchange onto the internet, it will be secured behind something called Intelligent Application Gateway, which appears to be some kind of SSL proxy server.

So our options are....

• Use an IAG client, an MS only payware product, to tunnel IMAP.
• Use Outlook 2007 which conveniently has the "Outlook Anywhere" feature, which seems to combine an IAG client and use XMLRPC calls, and i probably the same client implementation as....
• Outlook Web Access, which comes in "functional version for IE" and "crap version for dirty smelly hippyware browsers"

Given that the current solution works fine, I'm none too happy ; reading the announcement the first question that arose was "Are they idiots?", closely followed by "How fat was the wad of sweaty Billbucks they were given?"

Your options are ; give money to MS, or use a client that sucks (OWA lite). All the other clients suck LESS than OWA Lite, but to access any of them you must give some money to MS. Minimum spend being "a copy of a MS operating system", for IE, and maximum being Outlook. I'm not sure what the license cost of an IAG tunnel client is, but since you have to run it on Windows, it's a guaranteed winner for MS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555851

If Office 2003 worked, then Evolution would work.

The Exchange 2007 web services API should make this job easier.

Introduction to Exchange Web Services in Exchange 2007
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb408417.aspx

New Programmability Features in Exchange Server 2007
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332450.aspx

More discussions:
Exchange 2007
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3891474

http://psankar.blogspot.com/2007/10/write-evolution-plugins-using-mono-c.html
"Exchange Server 2007 has a Exchange Web-Services Interface. IIUC Working with web-services should be a lot easier and featureful when done via Mono than plain C. So implementing support for Exchange 2007 can be done via this Mono plugins (which I am planning to takeup as my ITO task)"

The Exchange 2007 web services API should make this job easier.

Introduction to Exchange Web Services in Exchange 2007
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb408417.aspx

New Programmability Features in Exchange Server 2007
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332450.aspx

More discussions:
Exchange 2007
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3891474

http://psankar.blogspot.com/2007/10/write-evolution-plugins-using-mono-c.html
"Exchange Server 2007 has a Exchange Web-Services Interface. IIUC Working with web-services should be a lot easier and featureful when done via Mono than plain C. So implementing support for Exchange 2007 can be done via this Mono plugins (which I am planning to takeup as my ITO task)"

I wouldn't run Exchange 2007, so I cannot speak from experience.

Blu-Ray really seems like a technology invented for profit rather than for utility.

I completely agree, but for different reasons. If look in the seamy underbelly of the internets you'll find plenty of HD rips. About 8GB worth of carefully compressed MPEG-4 HD content will make most movies look pretty darn good on my 42" 1080P display. Better than standard DVD's, and fairly indistinguishable from Blu-Rays.

So, if the goal was the utility of easily delivering better content, it seems like the process should have been using the DVD-DL format with decoding software and file formats that could supported Hi-Def resolutions.

Sure, it'll be great down the road to fit 30GB of content on a single disk. But I'd imagine that Joe Public would be more willing to embrace a standard DVD player that could support HD content. Microsoft was on the right track with their WMV HD Content initiative. But, as Microsoft is wont to do, they didn't get it quite right.

Just because Apple isn't as open as Red Hat, that doesn't mean they're less open than Microsoft.

Well, I can get all the source code to products from Microsoft provided I sign certain NDAs with certain assurances and give a reasonable explanation as to why.

With Apple... Well, beyond the stuff that was already GPL before they adopted it (thus, preventing them from close sourcing it - ie: webkit). I can get access to... The kernel and some old BSD utilities. Which, to be perfectly honest... Isn't useful, since the useful/interesting things aren't the kernel or the outdated BSD utilities that we can get from else where.

Sure, it's nice that they give out the sourcecode to XNU/darwin, but nobody has any practical use for it. It's not much different from Microsoft opensourcing some of their stuff (MechCommander 2 etc.)

One one hand, Apple is slightly more open in the way that they give the source code because they have to, or because the source code isn't really useful to begin with. On the other hand, I can get useful sourcecode from Microsoft via some restrictive terms. To be honest, I don't really see either company more open than the other.

They both seem pretty closed to me, the only advantage is that with Microsoft, there is a chance to get into everything.

I actively encourage my students to use PDF files if possible...

Turning in assignments as PDF's makes sense. Since you don't need to edit the file, just read it, that seems like a pretty good solution.

I also specifically PROHIBIT MS Office 2007/2008 .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .xlwx, etc. formats. I'm not paying for an "upgrade"

Ohh, I get it! You're a Linux/OSX fanboy and purposefully want to make everyone else's work harder because you're an ignorant professor on his high horse, and fail so hard that you can't even download a compatibility pack.

That's definitely not what he's after. He's trying to reuse operating system dynamic libraries between host and guest OS instances.

Correct. I think this is where the market strug between Citrix' XENapps (which I think they're positioning as a replacement for Metaframe?) and Microsoft's application center server is going to weigh in -- both of them are about sharing apps from a server by providing an abstracted presentation layer to a thin (or thinnish) client while optimising the network traffic between the intermediate presentation server and the client. This needs encapsulated, or better versioned DLL's. It has to do it that way to get the scalability, otherwise screen refreshes across the net would be oenerous.

It's hard to give up client-server totally (there's alot of COBOL that runs on it, for example -- see Fujitsu's PC dusty-deck emulators for a case in point) so an intermediate layer is essential. What he's suggesting could use the same binding process, just in the same box. I think you can see a bit of this in the stub-call part of the CORBA spec, too

Besides, there's got to be a certain amount of shared code between the host OS and the guest OS via the hypervisor, else they couldn't share devices, no?

Anyway, here's Microsoft's take on it from just a day ago -- buried somewhere in http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-07GetVirtualNowPR.mspx/ is the statement "Last week Microsoft released Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, which gives desktop users a boost in fully harnessing the power of Windows Vista by streaming resource-heavy applications to the desktop. This helps eliminate potential software conflicts driving desktop stability and performance, while simultaneously enabling IT managers to centrally control key applications and their use. Application Virtualization 4.5 will be included as part of Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2008 R2, which is due for general availability in the coming weeks."

Looks like they're targeting Citrix, doesn't it? If I remember one of the Technet streams I think this relates directly to the serialisation of that DLL traffic across the virtual server-guest border. Or I could be full of compost, that's possible too.

Have Active Directory? OpenOffice.org stores its settings in the user profile (Application Data, IIRC), and it's possible to set up a default user profile that is pulled from a network server.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168475

Probably. These dongles pretty much all pretend to be serial modems and you just need to do some mucking around with AT commands and run pppd.

Some of them need some hackery (eg. the one I have needs a kick to switch from storage mode to serial mode) but you won't be the first to try it so there will be a HOWTO somewhere.

Not necessarily. I've worked on one of these dongles and on Windows it's mostly used as an NDIS device. Now the one I worked on uses the USB CDC Ethernet class and USB CDC Serial Ports - either it could act like a modem using the serial port or it could connect as an Ethernet device. The ethernet mode is preferred because you don't have the overhead of PPP headers, but it would still work as a dialup device using just the serial port. Now on Linux it will work by default in dialup mode, and with a bit of fiddling around with AT commands it will work in ethernet mode too - there's an AT command that makes the Ethernet device connect and support for the CDC Ethernet class is built into modern kernels.

However that means it needs quite complex Windows drivers, since Windows does not ship with drivers for CDC Ethernet. If I were making a Windows native device I'd uses make it an RNDIS device. That way you could skip the Windows driver, which is something that most companies screw up. But that means that it won't work with Linux. That said, there's a RNDIS driver for Linux now too

http://www.jooz.net/rndis/

If your company chooses to make a business decision (for whatever reason) to disable IMAP, thats their prerogative. That has nothing to do with Exchange.

What is a common "whatever reason" to disable IMAP in favor of a protocol for which Microsoft charges prohibitive royalties?

I did a quick test with this product a few weeks ago, and it sync'd well with my phone. My only concern was that Microsoft appears to assert patent claims relating to ActiveSync. Anyone have thoughts or experiences on using this product in the US market?

This is simply stating we have a large market share, which everyone already knows, or doesn't care

The Microsoft ad is saying that they have a diverse market share. Again, attempting to counter Apple's elitist spin. (Yeah, a large market share, too; that's an appeal to belonging. That is very powerful in herd animals like Consumers.)

I would also note that there's also a "we're cool too!" part of that message. I'm not sure if it'll catch on or not... but it's there.

Microsoft is battling a negative perception. It becomes really apparent when you look over their latest marketing web site:

This epic struggle explains why we make what we make and do what we do. The thing that gets us out of bed every day is the prospect of creating pathways above, below, around and through walls. To start a dialogue between hundreds of devices, billions of people and a world of ideas. To lift up the smallest of us. And catapult the most audacious of us. But, most importantly, to connect all of us to the four corners of our own digital lives and to each other. To go on doing the little stuff, the big stuff, the crazy stuff and that ridiculously necessary stuff. On our own or together. This is more than software we're talking about. It's an approach to life. An approach dedicated to engineering the absence of anything that might stand in the way...of life. Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows®. Which is just another way of saying we have each other.

-- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vs-walls.aspx

That this message is chock full of irony is another subject.

Actually, they have 18 MS distributors.

The more you know.

People will get more intelligent just by using functional languages. Even .Net has it now, it's called F# FSharp

Yes, "a total rewrite", or more accurately a 32-bit replacement that was meant to retain some compatibility with 16-bit OS/2 APIs. It also included compatibility for POSIX APIs, so why don't we call it POSIX XP?

Somewhere buried away I have a Byte magazine with a little news release from Microsoft saying they finally got OS/2 v3 NT booted up to cmd.exe on some risc processor which I can't remember the name of. So it was MS who at one time called it OS/2 v3 NT. (or perhaps it was OS/2 NT ver 3)
Note also that in the divorce MS got the rights to OS/2 ver 3 and IBM to ver 2. Warp v3 was actually 2.3, Warp v4 was 2.4 and with fixpack #13 became 2.45. eg
[E:\]uname -a
OS/2 amad.localdomain 2 2.45 i386

16-bit Presentation Manager might have run on NT, but I seriously doubt anyone ever tried to port 32-bit PM to NT. 32-bit PM was solely written by IBM, and neither IBM or Microsoft had a reason to port it. Microsoft wanted the Win 3.x user interface to be the look and feel of Windows, and IBM wanted OS/2 to become the market leader. (well... some of IBM did.)

Here is a link to MS technet describing 16 bit OS/2 support under NT, including the info that you can order the Presentation Manager kit from MS. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/cc767964.aspx
For 32 bit PM, once again all I have is another Byte news article consisting of an announcement from MS that they had got the 32 PM running under NT. This was at a time when it still was not sure which would come out ahead, Windows or OS/2 so MS were just playing safe.
MS got the rights to the 32 bit PM in the divorce, at that they actually had a beta of MS OS/2 v2 at one point. Just like IBM had the rights to Windows source up to v4 (Win95 was ver4.095 IIRC)
Funny enough the Win 3.x user interface was actually the interface that MS developed for OS/2 v1.1.

The APIs had common ground, because they were originally developed jointly. They quickly diverged, especially as Microsoft wanted to break OS/2's Win 3.x compatibility subsystem.

The Design of OS/2 by Dietel and Kogan
provides history of the split and is also good reading on OS design.

Yes that is a book I would like to read having heard many good things about it.

"Redmond has yet to produce a server-grade OS, let alone server-ready software." - by mmell (832646) on Wednesday September 17, @10:02AM (#25038287) Homepage

BullSHIT!

Man - You had best check with NASDAQ (for only 1 fine example), & see that Windows Server 2003 & SQLServer 2005 have been running with GREAT UPTIME & stability as well there for them, 24x7, for YEARS of stable uptime no less... by acting as the official disseminator of the official record of any & ALL trade activity occuring...

For YEARS now in fact!

Microsoft has an entire portion of their website dedicated to examples of this type of setup & activity in fact, look up "Microsoft" and "bigdata" online & see what I mean... for example:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/bigdata/default.mspx

APK

P.S.=> You "Pro *NIX" people here... you're amazing @ times: Amazingly DUMB - think, before you speak (OR, conversely, do a little research before you shoot your mouths off & look stupid doing so). People are getting wise to the crap that goes on @ this website, in the way of "antimicrosoft/antiwindows f.u.d." that goes on @ this website & more + more thread replies indicate it in the past 2-5 yrs. now than ever - quit while you're behind already, Pro-*NIX flock of lemmings around here @ /. (your day came & went, in the 1970's-1980's already, face it, & is and was being displaced by a more ubiquitous, flexible, & fairly cheap (opposed to commericial UNIX OS' + apps' costs) Operating System, Wares, & a great useable API toolset + dev. front-end IDE's like Visual Studio (*NIX stuff is, imo @ least, CRUDE by way of comparison))... apk

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library

For .Net stuff (similar to php.net)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/w0x726c2.aspx
Check the class library (or search)

Particularly the .Net Framework Library

The other option is to install the Visual Studio library press F1 on an intelisense item ie
System.Web.UI.TextBox and the object pops up in a help window (like back in the good old days of Borland C/Pascal).

ASP Specific (AJAX etc) check the "How do I"
www.asp.net (the learn tab has vids)

Silverlight
www.silverlight.net (vids under learn)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/bb404700(VS.95).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library

For .Net stuff (similar to php.net)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/w0x726c2.aspx
Check the class library (or search)

Particularly the .Net Framework Library

The other option is to install the Visual Studio library press F1 on an intelisense item ie
System.Web.UI.TextBox and the object pops up in a help window (like back in the good old days of Borland C/Pascal).

ASP Specific (AJAX etc) check the "How do I"
www.asp.net (the learn tab has vids)

Silverlight
www.silverlight.net (vids under learn)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/bb404700(VS.95).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library

For .Net stuff (similar to php.net)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/w0x726c2.aspx
Check the class library (or search)

Particularly the .Net Framework Library

The other option is to install the Visual Studio library press F1 on an intelisense item ie
System.Web.UI.TextBox and the object pops up in a help window (like back in the good old days of Borland C/Pascal).

ASP Specific (AJAX etc) check the "How do I"
www.asp.net (the learn tab has vids)

Silverlight
www.silverlight.net (vids under learn)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/bb404700(VS.95).aspx

For VBScript I tend to use google to find specific things. I haven't found one site that really covers enough in one place. Most people will write off VBScript being that it is Microsoft and Windows is evil and all that.

Seeing as I use VBScript mainly for natively being able to pull information from LDAP directories from a Windows XP machine I must at least defend it.

MS Scripting Guy, DevGuru, 4GuysFromRolla, and last but not least ActiveXperts.

It depends if I want info on WMI, LDAP, or general WSH Objects.

For VB or MSVC++ its MSDN.

The main source of information just is.

*Ducks*

For VBScript I tend to use google to find specific things. I haven't found one site that really covers enough in one place. Most people will write off VBScript being that it is Microsoft and Windows is evil and all that.

Seeing as I use VBScript mainly for natively being able to pull information from LDAP directories from a Windows XP machine I must at least defend it.

MS Scripting Guy, DevGuru, 4GuysFromRolla, and last but not least ActiveXperts.

It depends if I want info on WMI, LDAP, or general WSH Objects.

For VB or MSVC++ its MSDN.

The main source of information just is.

*Ducks*

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/default.mspx Let the flaming commence.

C#/.NET - http://msdn.microsoft.com/
Haskell - http://haskell.org/
Nemerle - http://nemerle.org/
OCaml - http://caml.inria.fr/
PHP - http://php.net/
Python - http://python.org/
Ruby - http://ruby-doc.org/ (API docs), http://ruby-lang.org/ (for more links and info)
SML - http://smlnj.org/ (the most popular implementation), http://standardml.org/Basis/ (standard library)

(X)HTML/CSS/DOM/XSL/etc. - http://w3.org/

Hm. Now that I've written it down, I see most of these are obvious, but then it makes sense, that the "official" sites tend to be the best reference.

For T-SQL, ASPX, Visual Basic, Visual C++, there's only one place to start... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx

I may not like everything that Microsoft has done in the past, but its C and C++ references are top notch: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dtefa218.aspx

Aside from the obvious, there are some interesting papers, essential reading, a mailing list, a tutorial, and even a (reasonably complete) wikibook.

Aside from the obvious, there are some interesting papers, essential reading, a mailing list, a tutorial, and even a (reasonably complete) wikibook.

I think the city's still thinks it's the early 90's:

WebFacing requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater. You can down-load the latest version from http://www.microsoft.com/ie.

XP is still being shipped on netbooks and they will provide fixes for it until 2014. That means that XP will have been supported for 13 years, since it was released in 2001.

Good luck on getting fixes for a 13 year old Linux distribution.

they'd make haste, as it'd be very awkward if the trial went passed Windows XP's life cycle.

Otherwise they might have to do another trial on Vista; and by the time the trial ends, Vista's life cycle...

They are not splicing DNA on MS platforms

You sure about that? There's no bioinformatics tools that run on Microsoft Windows? It's absolutely inconceivable that some of them may require significant (cluster/HPC) horsepower for processing terabytes of data for analysis and data mining?

Not a fan boy either, but OS elitism won't win you any points for accuracy either - just because YOU wouldn't choose to use Windows as your research institute's computing platform doesn't mean that it's not in use & perfectly viable as such.

At the moment,
Windows Datacenter supports 32 cores on X86, and 64 cores on x64 and Itanium.

The implication of "SKU" is that this limitation is trivial, and is imposed purely by marketing considerations.

On the low end products, yes. On Datacenter it's imposed by the bit width of the CPU.

Windows assumes the CPU bitmask field assumes will fit in a single register. Obviously this can be fixed but it doesn't work just yet.

SKU? Do you work in retail?

At the moment,
Windows Datacenter supports 32 cores on X86, and 64 cores on x64 and Itanium.

The implication of "SKU" is that this limitation is trivial, and is imposed purely by marketing considerations.

http://www.microsoft.com/vista/salesfigures/ontheup.html

Lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies lies

How many MILLION MSCEs do we have in the world now?

According to Microsoft Learning the answer is less than 1 million. And that includes NT4, Windows 2000, and Windows 2003 MCSEs.

Oh, and you misspelled MCSE.

Probably not much use to you in Australia, although this promotion was run in Australia at least once before. Not sure whether it is running now over there tho0ugh, I looked but couldn't find it.

If you know a student of have one in the house, you could always have a look at The Ultimate Steal (US Version) or the same thing in the UK.

Wouldn't normally recommend MS software for any reason, however I will probably be taking advantage of this one for my stepson, who is just starting to go through the interesting stage at high school, where he discovers what homework is and starts to realise the value of study. Fortunately, I'm also studying almost full time at the Open University, so shouldn't have too much trouble getting a copy. Since Cisco brought out a linux version of Packet Tracer, I don't need no stinkin' Microsoft on any of my computers.:=)

Of course, you could also tell her to just install the windows version of OOo 2.4 on her computer.

Probably not much use to you in Australia, although this promotion was run in Australia at least once before. Not sure whether it is running now over there tho0ugh, I looked but couldn't find it.

If you know a student of have one in the house, you could always have a look at The Ultimate Steal (US Version) or the same thing in the UK.

Wouldn't normally recommend MS software for any reason, however I will probably be taking advantage of this one for my stepson, who is just starting to go through the interesting stage at high school, where he discovers what homework is and starts to realise the value of study. Fortunately, I'm also studying almost full time at the Open University, so shouldn't have too much trouble getting a copy. Since Cisco brought out a linux version of Packet Tracer, I don't need no stinkin' Microsoft on any of my computers.:=)

Of course, you could also tell her to just install the windows version of OOo 2.4 on her computer.

His point is that you have to connect to Microsoft and send them your licensing information in order to download a patch which THEN makes your connection secure.

And that makes more sense? Without WGA, you'd still have to connect to download the update. Or here's an idea: you could connect using an Ethernet cable, or enable a white list on your wireless router, if you deem it such a security concern!

And anyway, that's not his point, is it?

Apple may not publicly acknowledge bugs, but at least they're not forcing you ensure you've got a Genuine iPod before being allowed to get to a patch that adds functionality that was left out entirely to begin with.

His "point" is about license validation, not security, and is pretty absurd when you consider that he'd rather have his OS creator not acknowledge bugs than require clients to provide license authentication before they receive updates (which, by the way, are included in the licence price). As for his dig at MS not including functionality for WPA2, this really is wrong: for a start, and as I have said before, when you buy a licence for Windows, this includes these updates. WPA2 functionality has been available since 2005. The reason he is complaining is presumably because he has a pirated copy of Windows. Well cry me a fucking river. You don't like MS/Windows/proprietary software, fine, but by stealing it you're just as bad as those who steal code from OSS projects in my book. And you especially don't have the right to complain because your free use of a commercial product doesn't enable you to get further support from its developers.

People can discuss whatever they want here.

Then why would you presume to tell me what I can and can't say ("ease up on the anti-fanboy hipster angle")?

they have been discussing Windows security holes for a long, long, LONG time.

Neither you nor the GP has discussed a Windows security hole.

It's really sad to see people so beguiled by a company that they'll do anything, including reasoning like idiots, to defend it. Apple releases a product with a security problem, so the response is that Microsoft validates client licenses before allowing updates to be downloaded.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Judging by this thread (which I've contributed to), maybe they could use Linux to get their higher end 64-bit systems to actually run for more than a week without horrific slowdowns.

I would consider that a great innovation (though not necessarily a breakthrough).

I hate Microsoft, love Linux:

They did it right. Direct download link:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/windows/default.aspx

It does like to a site that links to a high quality version available at Microsoft

Why does this story not link to the original video at Microsoft's website? http://www.microsoft.com/windows/

And the reason for the pile of money is that he mooches off of everyone from suburban families to pizza delivery boys molded in his own image.

And to give you an idea we go through ~20-30 Vista PCs a day at my shop, both repairs and software installs/bloatware cleanups on new units.

And I'll bet none are installed on a RAID array. I was trying to speed up Vista by running it on a RAID 0+1. This article has the details, and it apparently affects 32-bit installs as well. Right on the KB it says:

Workaround: Remove 2 GB of RAM, and then restart the installation process. After Windows Vista is installed, reinstall the RAM.

and then

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. This problem was first corrected in Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

I actually installed SP1 before reinstalling the RAM.

FWIW, once I got it installed, I've had zero issues with it. I was rather puzzled at first, I've never had any install CD BSOD/panic (be it windows/linux/etc.)