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I'm assuming that you weren't installing on a raid setup. KB Article that mentions the problem. The issue is fixed in SP1.

FWIW, once I got it installed with SP1 I have had zero problems with it.

Windows Logo certification involves running automated tests supplied by a self-test kit called the Windows Logo Kit. Each device requesting a logo and a WHQL signature for the driver must fit into one of several pre-determined device categories, for which Microsoft has written hundreds of tests that must pass.

The set of tests covered by the WLK is fairly extensive. In fact, depending on the category, the breadth of testing generally surpasses what most vendors can afford to develop in-house or are willing to test themselves. (Think fly-by-night manufacturer mass-producing a USB widget at the lowest possible cost.) However, obviously the public never sees what bugs are caught by these tests; the public only sees bugs which slip through the cracks...

Microsoft could do something about it. It would just take dumping an entire driver model and replacing it something better though.

This is exactly what Microsoft did with WDF, released in December 2005 and shipped with all of the Windows Driver Kits released since then (including all of the Vista Beta kits).

WDF has two components: KMDF (kernel-mode) and UMDF (user-mode). In a nutshell, they are well-documented object-oriented libraries which implement much of the complicated synchronization logic and rules imposed by WDM architecture, freeing the driver developer to focus only on aspects unique to their hardware. WDF drivers generally have fewer lines of code, because thousands of lines of bug-prone WDM code is already implemented by the framework.

The transition process from WDM to WDF will take time. There are countless old WDM drivers written for Windows for nearly every conceivable device you can use on a PC (in fact, some consider this Windows greatest strength). It would be stupid to ditch all of this code. But for NEW drivers, this is the way to go.

Developer education is one key aspect. Now there is a book on WDF for driver developers that requires no previous WDM experience.

Vista will not magically run kernel-mode USB device drivers in userspace.
There *is* support for user-mode USB drivers via UMDF (User-mode driver framework). But, the driver has to be implemented differently for that to work.
Apple USB driver (Usbaapl.sys) is a traditional kernel-mode driver.
Any unhandled exception (or, perhaps, kernel memory corruption) in the driver will cause a blue screen.

And there is, in fact, a redistributable version of UMDF for Windows XP (SP2 and later).

Or possibly "disregard that, I suck cocks". This seems to be the article I remember: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc162494.aspx - and its talking about interrupts.

You'd probably go for IOCP on Windows.

But I vaguely remember reading something about some Windows mechanism that amounts to a 'light-weight thread'

Fibers. They kinda stretched the metaphor a little there...

you need to run a Crash Dump Analysis using MS's debugging tools.. I can almost bet it's a BHO or something like your AV software causing it to crash.. at least the analysis will pin-point what .sys or .dll is causing the bluescreen.. you can find the debugging tools here. I mention this because I haven't had Chrome crash on me once. but before blaming Chrome, I would look at what is really causing the problem. i truly believe it could be something entirely different.

It seems that they have a dedicated program, partnering with hardware vendors and support, aiming at "minimum 99.9 percent uptime guarantee".

Well, according to section 7.2 of the C# Language Specification, operands are evaluated from left to right, so the result is what I would have expected:

• first you evaluate the first i++, which yields 0 (and increments i to 1)
• then, you evaluate the second i++, which yields 1 (and increments i to 2)
• last, you calculate the sum (0+1 = 1) and assign it to i, overwriting the old value of 2.

This is..

I *think* the answer may be Process Explorer, because Securom really, really hates Process Explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

But I have not actually looked into this. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask:

How can a user set things up so that the user is notified when Securom attempts to install itself, and allow the user the choice of going forward with the install or not?

I ask this because Securom has a nasty way of installing itself when the user least expects it - for example, from the Bioshock demo and from the Spore Creature Editor demo.

A critical system should NEVER depend on an operating system that does not have a proper batch language. That should be a compact and powerful script language, using TEXT files for configuration that can be hand edited if needed, that can be stored and archived in a version control system, so that bugs can be tracked.

You realize you just described Windows Script Host, don't you? Included with every version of Windows since 2000...

Some banner ads are still available on Microsoft's web servers. Download 'em now before they're quietly deleted :-)

Yeah, something tells me the Highly Reliable Times won't be covering this follow-up story.

"In the past six years, there have been no production outages at the London Stock Exchange, and the new systems running on Microsoft technologies are critical to maintaining this 100 per cent reliability record."

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200042

Hands down the best voice commands I've ever used in a phone is Voice Commander for Windows Mobile 5. (I believe it's now included with WM6 as standard.) Not only does it do voice dialling of your contacts and numbers by simply saying "Dial 555 1234" but it also gives you control over the launching apps, mp3 playback, reading SMS messages, signal status and time and appointments.
For a full list take a look at the Microsoft website.
It also doesn't need any training or any setup you just press and speak and it works surprisingly well.

As for hardware that'll depend on your budget and availability but there are lots of options for Windows Mobile powered phones including candy bars and and flip phones.

Uh... Webkit doesn't have vulnerabiities it has bugs... the browser is what has vulnerabilities. Webkit has no network stack... it can't communicate. All it can do is accept input and render output.

Hahaha... your understanding of security is so 1995. I remember another great one, "you can't get malware via email unless you double-click an attachment." If WebKit has a single buffer overflow bug, then yes, it does have vulnerabilities.

Remember this gem from a couple years ago, "Vulnerability in Graphics Rendering Engine Could Allow Remote Code Execution (912919)"? But it's just a graphics rendering engine, how could it allow remote code execution?

Obviously the public is just too stupid to get the ad. That is why Microsoft had to explain it to everyone: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/windows/featureStories.aspx?story=660dee9e-9606-4e77-843e-ed81d83c0bfe

You can play files in the Matroska container on any platform that mplayer supports

Which of those platforms might be a set-top box or portable player sold in stores in North America?

As for AVI, how well does it support multiple video tracks? Multiple audio tracks?

AVI supports up to 256 audio streams and apparently even multiple video streams.

Soft subtitles?

A lone AVI file may not support subtitles, but the players do.

Chapters?

Pinocchio_01.avi, Pinocchio_02.avi, Pinocchio_03.avi... add all to playlist.

you can play Matroska files on the popular Popcorn Hour set-top box

Where can I buy one in North America?

and on the COWON A3

Where can I buy one with cash?

I use XP for doing graphic stuff, such as PhotoShop and Rhino3D, and for a few games, such as ThiefII, yet it seems that Windows NTFS is woefully inferior as far as data security and fragmentation issues. NTFS has no journaling.

That's not entirely true. NTFS doesn't use journaling for the contents of files, but it does use journaling for metadata. You can even access the log file to a limited degree -- enough to see what files have changed, and an enumeration of the type of change (e.g. data overwritten vs. creation of a new file). A backup program (for one example) can directly access the journal records to find what files need to be backed up without scanning through them all to find changes. If this is more than a generic attack on Microsoft, and you honestly care about NTFS journaling, you might want to read an MSDN article about some of the details.

Except that NTFS is a journalling file system. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134.aspx "NTFS Change Journal As files, folders, and other NTFS objects are added, deleted, and modified, NTFS enters change journal records in streams, one for each volume on the computer."

Would you please point me to a citation or reference to that ...

Because I understood that 32 bit windows would handle a maximum of 2GB, or 3GB if you do some registry / startup tweaking ?

The 2GB (3GB when starting up with /4GT in the kernel command line) limit a per-process limit, not a system wide limit. The same limit also applies to 32-bit processes running on 64-bit windows.

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx

Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.

Wouldnt it be better to make it look halfway decent from the start? Then users wouldnt need to waste their time hunting down themes.

3. Web Developer Bar (nothing like this on ANY other browser)
4. FireBug (nothing like this on ANY other browser, not even Safari's inbuilt "Develop" menu options comes close for debugging)

Every major browser has an equivalent, usually nearly identical.

IE Web Developer Toolbar
Opera Web Developer Toolbar (old version, not super great)
Opera Dragonfly (new developer tools)

Plus there's always FireBug Lite.

7. Tabmix Plus

This irritates me. The default tab behavior on FireFox is terrible. I dont think anyone I know actually uses it as is.

Heck, by default Firefox wont even remember your last session (ie, what tabs you had open, etc) if it crashes. How lame is that.

You shouldnt need TabMixPlus (mind you, thats what I use too on firefox, out of need) if the tabs behaved reasonably out of the box.

9. Foxmarks which makes sure all my bookmarks (and their keyboard shortcuts) are exactly the same in my office, on my three home machines (XP, Leopard, Ubuntu)

Does anyone actually use bookmarks anymore? I just dont close the tab, and leave it running there for months or years or whatever. Or just use the auto-complete history.

I'm half joking here ... half not. I havent used bookmarks since like the early Netscape days.

Dont get me wrong, extensions in Firefox are better than NOT having them. But why cant the Mozilla folks just make Firefox better out of the box. Every time I have to build a new machine for me, or move to another, I spend 5 times as much time remembering, downloading, and configuring extensions as I do just downloading and installing firefox itself. I'd rather the product was just better in the first place, and then it wouldnt need as many extensions (and wouldnt waste so much of my time).

But with Firefox, you need plugins/extensions to do ANYTHING. The product is just not that good out of the box. But you shouldnt have to spend so much time doing that, when they could just make the product more reasonable from the start.

Until recently, the reasons to use FireFox was web app development, because of FireBug, LiveHTTP Headers, and Web Developer Toolbar. Plus it had the most consistently reliable javascript performance for non-IE targeted web apps.

But nowadays all the browsers have Firebug, webdev, and livehttp headers equivalents. And it looks like Chrome will be the new standard for testing javascript heavy web apps. And of course you use IE for the apps that need IE (Exchange OWA, tons of corporate intranet apps, sharepoint, etc).

And I use opera for my non-dev browsing (ie, slashdot, digg, theregister, serverside .com/.net, newspapers, blogs, naked ladies, etc). It doesnt crash as often, it doesnt suck memory so badly, page zooming actually works and has for years (firefox just barely got reasonable page zoome with 3), it works reasonably without a million plugins, etc.

I dont mean this to sound as anti-firefox ranty as it probably does. Firefox has its place, and I'm glad its there. But its just not a very good tool, outside of being a very extensible general tool. And its a shame, because you have something like Opera that 'just works' and is nearly flawless, not to mention lean, fast, and beautiful.

So for 'personal browsing' type of use, Opera is better, at least IMO. And for app-dev/app-use, what FireFox used to be the king of, Chrom

As I understand it, windows tends to use threads in lieu of forked processes. You can use multiple processes with any kind of IPC you want, but windows won't have anything to do with them sharing memory.

To share memory between the processes on Windows, you just use memory-mapped IO.

Yes, the Devil Mountain "research staff" appear to be very naive when it comes to measuring memory usage for processes. As a result they are counting all of the shared code pages, open data files, and other shared memory pages for each process. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684891(VS.85).aspx

I found your post informative, and it seems that a lot of what I took for granted who knows how long ago is inaccurate. However, there's a bit more that I found.

User mode applications may only get 2 GB of physical memory by default, but driver resources are mapped from the upper 2 GB (or 1 GB) of kernel space. This is evidently why shrinking that space with the /3GB switch can cause problems if you have a 512MB video card.

Then again, if you have integrated graphics or other devices that leech off of mainboard memory, I don't think they would be stealing the same memory mappings as physical memory would. But then again, it doesn't matter - integrated chips are stealing the memory itself in that case.

The other thing I noticed is that the BIOS mapping memory is somewhat independent of addressable space - all the HP desktops at my college report 8 MB of RAM "missing" - 760MB instead of 768MB - because of how the motherboard wants to work.

Thanks for the corrections

I call shenanigans on the parent posting. This is FUD, and mis-informed FUD at that. There's no evidence that Chrome sends anything but the *hash* of the site you type in the address bar, and does not send your browsing history anywhere at all - whether in incognito mode or not.

See Lauren Weinstein's Privacy Forum posting here and here. Quotes:

Yesterday I posted some thoughts on the privacy policy associated with Google's new "Chrome" Web browser, and gave the open-source product -- which has a great deal of potential -- an overall thumbs-up based on current information...

and

I'm afraid that I'm much more concerned about the privacy policy for Microsoft's new "Internet Explorer 8" browser (which of course is not open source). While overall functionality and touted privacy improvements appear to be similar in many ways to Chrome, some of the specific privacy-related decisions in IE8 are very different from Chrome -- and not necessarily in a good way. One in particular is significantly alarming...

This guy does privacy issues and privacy policy for a living. I've been reading his analysis for years, and I give his opinions great weight.

Watching something like Tcpview:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437.aspx

or Currports:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html

may work better for a lot of users (anybody who can manage to download and extract a zip file...). A rootkit could still be hiding the traffic, but the approach you outline is better than nothing.

Yes, yes, I know they have a script debugger today ... if you have some form of .NET studio installed.

There's a standalone version of the script debugger available for download. Download here (you'll need a machine that passes "genuine windows" validation to download it... I dunno whether wine can do that?).

The getElementById method is now case-sensitive, and it no longer incorrectly performs searches using the NAME attribute.

My god, you mean it's actually going to behave like--you know--the name implies?!

Sanitize HTML -- Easily remove event properties and script from HTML fragments with window.toStaticHTML.

I am intrigued by this and think that this is a great innovative idea from a developer's perspective.

CSS Compliance

I don't think I would be the first person to say compliance to standards are currently lacking in IE. I'm glad to see them acknowledging this area of improvement!

At least it's a step in the correction direction! And on top of that, they are slowly catching up with Firefox plugins like Firebug or a their profiling tools:

• CSS Tool -- Display various rules defined by style sheets loaded by your Web page.
• Script Debugging -- The built-in lightweight debugger enables you to set breakpoints and to step through client-side script without leaving Internet Explorer.
• Script Profiler -- Visually determine where your script is taking most of its time.
• Version Mode Switching -- Switch into different browser modes to test content for standards compliance.

I dream of a future where I have means other than javascript popups to check objects in javascript in IE. Yes, yes, I know they have a script debugger today ... if you have some form of .NET studio installed. Which is just peachy if you run Linux and IE4Linux.

I am both curious of the new AJAX functionality they promise and fearful that they are simply another venue for security risks (let's all hope their cross-domain & cross-document functionalities are sound).

I do not think all is lost on this browser, however ... even if it assumes RAM is cheap and your CPU has over 171 cores to spare.

By learning C#, you can do ASP.NET 3.0 (a world away from ASP), a huge market in need of coders, you can branch out into things like SharePoint, the current hottest product in the marketplace, and even do stuff like Silverlight, which proved effective during the Olympics (If you ran Windows or SOME Macs).

The languages are almost identical, but you will find tons more FREE resources for developers. Microsoft has a development center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx where you can download C# 2008 express for free, and there are lots of videos and tutorials there to get you started.

Again, nothing against Java, but why start like a guppy in a huge pond of Java sharks?

I think it has something to do with Network Location Awareness

But I don't know for sure.

That's funny, because I recall having to fix pages when IE 5 came out, again when IE 5.5 was released, and again for 6 and 7. Each version of IE came with its own set of quirks and changes that caused non-trivial CSS layouts to render oddly. Conditional comments greatly aided the transition, but it was a transition nonetheless, so why not make a transition that actually makes web development more uniform for a change?

As for still requiring Microsoft's Java (because of JDirect or the com.ms.win32 stuff, I assume?) and IE6, IE8 is a moot point. If you aren't changing your environment either way, what does it matter what the rest of the world does?

Then again, there's no reason why your shop couldn't use Firefox with IE Tab and set your intranet domain to automatically revert to the IE renderer. Best of both worlds: local compatibility with global compatibility.

Short answer: yes, transitional runs in standards mode as well.

Long answer: read the msdn page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250395.aspx#cssenhancements_topic2

Actually, you can browse and use Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) sites perfectly fine in Firefox - I do it every day without issue.

There are quite a few features in SharePoint that don't work in Firefox, even more than don't work in Safari, and Opera isn't even considered. Here is the official list of what is supported where.

In practice, when deploying WSS or MOSS to our customers, the ISV I work for always recommends (and only supports) IE7.

You are kidding, right ? Didn't some people had issues with the latest versions of MSWord not opening files from old versions ?

No. Maybe you had it backwards: Didn't some people had [sic] issues with the old versions of MSWord not opening files from latest versions ?

But then, it would be: still no.

Netflix

There is a known compatibility issue between Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Netflix. Users of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 cannot view On Demand movies by using Netflix. Microsoft and Netflix are working together to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. This release note will be updated as soon as this issue is resolved.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949787

Ah, now I get it (even though I still disagree). It would be really, really interesting to know what models they use. Like I said in the original post software is a really special business. I'd love to work in controlling for such a company for a couple of months.

Nevertheless I base my argument on observation. Whenever they make it harder to use a pirate copy they release a fix which makes it possible to keep the copy going. For example when they blocked the famous FCKGW key in SP1 it took a week till they put a knowledge base article online describing the steps to change the key. Since then they have played this game numerous times: First they release an update which doesn't work with compromised volume keys, then they wait for the public outcry and provide a fix which simply makes it a little bit more annoying to run a pirate copy. If they really wanted to completely stop piracy they would handle this differently (and I'm sure their market share would drop at least in developing countries).

I bought a Thinkpad T61 a year ago, to find out that it was chock full of crapware.

Fortunately the only crapware I got on my new Macbook Pro a year ago was Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive.

Falcon

He should have gotten the chair.

i know just the man

Yeah, I feel your pain.

I bought a Thinkpad T61 a year ago, to find out that it was chock full of crapware. Thankfully, I had a removal tool handy ...

In all seriousness, I didn't want it, but the manufacturer insisted on installing it, otherwise they wouldn't sell it to me.

Can you do the updates on XP without having WGA installed?

Yes

I so, how?

You can manually download each update directly from Microsoft's site. I do this for my parents machines. They're legitimate machines with licenses but being on dial-up, it would take a while for some of the patches so I d/l the patches from work. I do the same thing for my 2K system.

Any links on a guide?

Go to this link, scroll down a bit until you see the dropdown boxes and make your selections. Do the broadest search possible so you see all the updates. Once the list comes back, just download the updates and manually apply them.

It should be noted there are a few updates every so often which will require you to verify your copy but those are far and few.

Isn't 'browser privacy' basically just a way of hiding your pr0n-browsing history?

No, no, no! How could you even think such a dirty thing! It's so that you can shop for that special gift with confidence knowing your family won't accidentally find out or use a shared computer without leaving a trace.

Ooops. Sorry. My copypaste is broken. Here's the link.

Link to the actual fix, not just some clever bullshit:

Find a retailer

They should just download and make BlueScreen the default screen saver.

Bah. I didn't check the preview. Here's the link:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328874

And bribed the government. This is so incredibly wrong in, oh, let me count some of the ways...

You can always run your own WSUS server.

This lets you control exactly what does and does not get installed, and WGA isn't even available through WSUS (although Office Genuine Advantage is). If you have more than two computers running Windows 2000 or later, WSUS is a big help for saving bandwidth and assuring you get patched up-to-date quickly.

Unfortunately, it requires Windows 2003 Server to run, but it is completely free (as in beer).