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This must have been an Anonymous Coward from Microsoft's Mojave Experiment team.

You are wrong, Vista sucks. Let's look at Microsoft's Vista Edition comparison chart shall we?

I can easily get a copy of XP Pro for about $150 online.

Another $50 and I can get the worst, most horrible version of Vista (Home Basic).

Slap on another $60 and Microsoft says I can have more fun.

$40 more and I'm back to having less fun. :(
Well, at least now I can get the Vista Business Downgrade to XP Pro!

And for just $20 more I can make my brand new computer run like it's shitting down it's own leg (while running).



But seriously, the thing I hate most about vista is the "easier networking connectivity" which is included in all four editions.

The whole networking deal in Vista sucks. I've never wanted to smash a brand new computer to pieces before.

For C# / .NET code, Windows Mobile is the answer. Developing for it from Visual Studio is really simple, almost like for desktop Windows Forms apps, it supports remote debugging via USB and it has a emulator with many device profiles (different display and keyboard configurations).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsmobile/default.aspx

As for WM phones, HTC or Asus (a bit cheaper, I have a P750) make solid ones.

Of those extensions, the only one I use is Web Developer; the rest don't provide significant benefits. And IE7 has virtually the same thing.

There are almost certainly third-party extensions to handle the rest of that functionality (though why you'd want to be using PHP is a valid question; even setting aside ASP.NET, which kicks all manner of ass, there are better open-source tools).

As for the whole trustworthiness angle, well, call it FUD if you want. It's easy enough to submit code for independent critical review. When organizations don't choose to do so, the uncertainty and doubt that remains is real and intentionally created. Personally, I don't use MS products any more for anything outside of testing my web apps in IE, and have no intention of ever doing so again. I do not choose to trust them.

Paranoia is unhealthy. Therapy will help.

Beta download site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx

I'm still not impressed. I don't care how many whizzy-gig features Microsoft adds to their browser. It is still useless to developers until Microsoft installs standards support. And by standards support, we don't just mean fixing the broken setAttribute method. How about supporting a fucking decade old standards?!? Nope, still no mention of it. In fact, the bug on the issue was "closed by design".

By design? By fucking design?!?! BULLSHIT. Microsoft does not want to be interoperable with other Web Browsers. Period. If Microsoft really wanted to turn around their image in the market, they can start with something as stupidly simple as supporting addEventListener, removeEventListener, and dispatchEvent. I don't even care if the code looks like this:

Element.prototype.addEventListener = function(name, callback, capture) { attachEvent("on"+name, callback); }

^That's fucking WRONG and it would STILL be an improvement!

Microsoft can take their God damn browser and shove it where the sun don't shine for all I care. They have shown such incredible disdain for their customers, that I have to wonder why their even trying to hide it from the market.

*DEEP BREATH*

Microsoft, you are transparent. Your juvenile attempts at lock-in are NOT working and will NOT work. All you're going to do is piss off the people recommending software to grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, sisters, cousins, next door neighbors, school teachers, bosses, subordinates, government agencies, etc. IE will continue to lose market share. It won't be much longer before the alternative browsers reach critical mass. Many websites already show Firefox maintaining parity or even surpassing Internet Explorer. If you actually want to WIN the market, try competing for a change!

Can I get an AMEN?

That sounds like what 2D codes do currently. Microsoft research has been working on high capacity color barcodes, which store about 2000 bytes per square inch. Alternatively, QR code and DataMatrix do the same thing.

I think that poster's comment is a little misleading. From the article and linked materials it would appear that only integrated SOAP web services are deprecated, and not native XML as the poster implies.

Details of deprecated features here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729.aspx

I don't see how Apple could ever be compelled to provide support on any hardware it doesn't deem acceptable.

The same way Microsoft handles equipment not on the Hardware Compatibility List:

They'll tell you to take it up with the equipment manufacturer.

>Which of these other OSes (WinMob, Symbian, and Palm) has a bluetooth API? None, I think.

Actually, they all do.

Windows Mobile Bluetooth API
Symbian Bluetooth API
Palm Bluetooth API

If it were the "most technologically-savvy event" wouldn't it at least make an effort to support ALL operating systems

It does support all operating systems that are capable of the technology. Can Linux do this: "owners of secure content may request that Microsoft revoke the right of Silverlight to copy, display, and/or play secure content."

The need for political parties to protect their content from hackers has been discussed on /. before and the Democrat and Republican national conventions have some similar, and some different, philosophies on handling information access and control.

"For virtual attendees, the Democrat convention site is providing a progressive web experience (high definition Silverlight video , Digital Rights Management), while the Republican convention site is providing a more conservative web experience of..." - excerpt from August 21st Journal

"For virtual attendees, the Democrat convention site is providing a progressive web experience (high definition Silverlight video , Digital Rights Management), while the Republican convention site is providing a more conservative web experience of..." - excerpt from August 21st Journal

I can find a lot of things that expose a documented and published interface, the internals of which I have no intention or interest in modifying.

However this technology stack seems to be unacceptable in some people's eyes.

Microcode in a CPU is exactly the same as a binary blob. It is a bunch of non-Free code, which exposes a standard interface which the kernel talks to. Suggesting a thin hardware layer makes things any different than a defined interface in software is ridiculous. You may be able to get an exacting spec for it. It may even be 100% accurate, without anything like the FDIV bug...

I'm interested to see your views on my phone, running Windows Mobile, and exposing one of these documented and published interfaces, would be an acceptable part of a Free software solution, and how this is ethically/morally/asshattedly any different from my CPU, graphics card, or even the IE COM component.

Part of the problem is that the Geek tends to scream out retail list for software that everyone knows is easily - and legitimately - available at very substantial discounts.

MS Office Ultimate 2007 will be available to any U.S. student with ID for $60 come September.

90% off retail list for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Outlook, Groove, OneNote, and InfoPath.

If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft, then MS Office for home use may only cost you the price of the media plus S&H. Home Use Program.

You should use Process Explorer and tell it to "replace task manager" under options. Process Explorer shows you exact CPU usage and will draw a graph of resource usage for any process.

On the off-topic note: Don't even bother thinking about the task manager, just download the Process Explorer and set it to replace the task manager. It's light weight and vastly superior to the task manager in every way. One of the utils I miss in Linux.

"OpenDNS has drawbacks too. They redirect Google.com and all non-existent domains to their own crappy search engine." - OpenDNS has drawbacks too. They redirect Google.com and all non-existent domains to their own crappy search engine.

Barring ANY other solutions that may present themselves via others' suggestions? You CAN "override" this, via using a custom HOSTS file (see %Windir%\system32\drivers\etc & in that subfolder/subdirectory, lies the HOSTS file & you can 'hardcode' a correct IP to URL equation there, which will/should override ANYTHING coming from ANY DNS server)

You also MAY have to use this registry hack (easily done), to set the order of preference as to which of the 3 (HOSTS file, Local DNS cache, & DNS server) the IP stack refers to, first, for said IP to URL equation satisfaction:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/139270/EN-US

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\ServiceProvider]
"LocalPriority"=dword:00000005
"HostsPriority"=dword:00000006
"DnsPriority"=dword:00000007
"NetbtPriority"=dword:00000008

(LOWER NUMBERS HERE = GREATER PRIORITY)

As you can see, I give my LOCAL DNS Cache the greatest priority (because it has my HOSTS file loaded into it @ system startup (IP stack startup, actually)), & THEN, my custom adbanner blocking/speedup fav sites (which this post is showing folks how to do, & yes, it works) is next, & then my ISP/BSP's DNS servers, & lastly NetBios/WINS stuff (which I just plain do NOT use, because I have no LanManager style network running here, ONLY Tcp/IP)

APK

P.S.=> The beauty of this is simple: It's NOT only "restricted to Windows" & in fact, began its 'life' in *NIX, so this type of arrangement/solution can work if you're a *NIX user too (barring the registry stuff up there, it's the same format for their HOSTS files as they are on Windows)... apk

on the other hand it will be up to device driver and operating system developers to figure out how to handle devices that offer an array of services, such as phones.

USB already has specs for how to handle a "composite device", which presents multiple interfaces to the system. Windows has handled composite devices properly at least since Windows XP Service Pack 2. See WHQL: USB FAQ - Intermediate. If nothing else, a phone could act like an Xbox controller, presenting itself to the host as a USB hub with each of the "array of services" on a separate port.

Some of you are saying that Firewire 800 it's fast enough.
Remember that for some marketing reason there is no IP over FireWire in Vista, so forget about sharing data using your trusty firewire cable with a Vista PC.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/IP_1394.mspx

It's that arrays are still not first class objects in the language.

Well, this is arguable. Arrays are essentially pointers in C++. Semantically you can define sized arrays at compile time, but a dynamically sized array (what you seem to be referring to) is just a pointer with a size counter. That sort of thing is NOT the sort of thing C++ fundamentally treats as deserving to be a "POD" type, and is perfectly find residing in the STL (std::vector). I, personally, see absolutely no problem with this.

I don't see any keywords for specifying the endianness of an integer - how useful would that be.. to be able to say "bigend int foo" or "littleend int foo".

Not very? I dunno, for cross-platform work maybe? I've honestly never had a particular urge to switch the endianness of an integer, or come across a situation where it would be terribly important. Do you have an example? I honestly can't think of much.

I'd like to be able to specify a structure or a class which could have a single value be composed of a few bits in utterly random places in it. In other words, you could say something like:

struct foo {
int a bits 1-2 this+1.2, bits 4-5 this+3.3
};

which you would read as int a bits 1-2 are at a byte and bit offset from the structure.

This looks like something you could accomplish with bit fields. But maybe I'm not reading your meaning correctly? Is there something here that couldn't be accomplished with a well laid out bit field?

And, while we were at it, how about packed pointers. AMD64 has 64 bit pointers and we can easily stuff some extra crap at the high end of them if the compiler knew to strip it out before we dereferenced them. You could implement that as a mov and an and.

This is really a feature I would classify as "arguably" useful. As in, maybe something that would come into play for embedded development, or driver development? Honestly, again, not something I've ever really wanted, but maybe you could provide another example why? Definitely not something I'd consider important for inclusion into the core language, that's for sure.

To me, a language like C or C++ is that you can evolve your own exact brick of memory and carve it up in some way... really, the idea of C is almost to be just to be a very fancy macro assembler and C++ was to throw a bit of object orientedness around it, if you want.

But, instead, we have iterators and containers and ever more powerful templates and, gross, garbage collection support...

C and C++ are for getting things done. Having a fancy, user-readable assembly language may be great for people who are doing embedded and driver development, but for the vast majority of us, we WANT high level features which make the language as expressive as possible. There's nothing stopping you from just confining yourself to the lowest level corners of the languages, popping inline assembly in where you want it, but that's not really the POINT of the language.

The great irony, of course, is that C++ templates and, wow, look at generics in C++0x, are so incredibly powerful that, what we have is a extremely high level language that still doesn't do comma delimited output of numbers.

What? Again, this doesn't make sense to me. I can name have a dozen methods of varying complexity to accomplish comma delimited output. This another one of those things that doesn't belong in the CORE language. This is something that SOME people need to do, and SOME don't, depending on the vagaries of their projects. As such, it absolutely belongs in an external library, and again not as a core language feature.

To be honest, what seems the most schizophrenic here is your claiming in one paragraph that you want C++ to be some sort of glorified assembly language, and then going on to complain that it doesn't do comma delimited output. I'm sorry, I just don't get it.

Microsoft cut those users off in 2006

Yep. Also the Microsoft reference on "JScript" is pretty good.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4yyeyb0a(VS.85).aspx

I expect that even C# has regexp libraries

System.Text.RegularExpressions

Firefox already has the superior webdeveloper add-ons. I'd like a firefox plugin that allows me to debug IE CSS with those FF add-ons.

It's no firebug, but Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is pretty useful for those "what the hell is it doing over there?" IE moments.

Office 2007 only runs on Vista!

really? MS says otherwise http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101668651033.aspx

Yeah, well I'm sure MS also says that you can delete unwanted email in MS Outlook versions older than 2007, but the fact that they say so hasn't helped us much.

I'm assuming Microsoft uses EWF for their free Windows Disk Protection software. It uses the disk rather than the memory for the cache, though. Which makes more sense IMO, as you're expecting to write to disk anyway and you have much more disk space than memory space available.
I'm assuming this still doesn't protect you if the malicious code gains administrative privileges though.

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx .NET is covered, so no, Microsoft has pledged publicly not to sue on those patents.

Office 2007 only runs on Vista!
really? MS says otherwise http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101668651033.aspx

Before Latitude ON, there was Dell MediaDirect, a Windows XP Embedded partition that booted in about 10 seconds.

The only user focused difference between the 2 that I see, is that MediaDirect is/was positioned as a way to access your files - and Latitude ON is positioned as a way to access the Internet.

Technically, the whole "embed an ARM PC into an x86 PC" may be a better idea than the convoluted MBR and partitioning schemes MediaDirect employed - but it's certainly more expensive as well.

Then, as mentioned, there's Windows Sideshow, which even Dell is prototyping. SideShow is more ambitious than Latitude ON, encompassing everything from sinlge line text displays to show system stats, to ARM based Windows Mobile devices to check email, play media files, etc. So far, it's failed to gain much traction in the marketplace - but, I think that it's still too early to call it dead.

If you take a look at some of the prototype developments in the SideShow remote computer spaces, I think you'll agree that all the functionality of Latitude ON is there - it's just a seperate device instead of being housed in the same case as a laptop.

So - it's not like Microsoft isn't aware or working on this market, Dell and Co. just decided to go their own way. Big deal - happens all the time. While MediaDirect used XP Embedded, other manafacturers were using Linux based OS's. Wake me up in 2 or 3+ years when the market has settled down, and we can declare a winner.

Before Latitude ON, there was Dell MediaDirect, a Windows XP Embedded partition that booted in about 10 seconds.

The only user focused difference between the 2 that I see, is that MediaDirect is/was positioned as a way to access your files - and Latitude ON is positioned as a way to access the Internet.

Technically, the whole "embed an ARM PC into an x86 PC" may be a better idea than the convoluted MBR and partitioning schemes MediaDirect employed - but it's certainly more expensive as well.

Then, as mentioned, there's Windows Sideshow, which even Dell is prototyping. SideShow is more ambitious than Latitude ON, encompassing everything from sinlge line text displays to show system stats, to ARM based Windows Mobile devices to check email, play media files, etc. So far, it's failed to gain much traction in the marketplace - but, I think that it's still too early to call it dead.

If you take a look at some of the prototype developments in the SideShow remote computer spaces, I think you'll agree that all the functionality of Latitude ON is there - it's just a seperate device instead of being housed in the same case as a laptop.

So - it's not like Microsoft isn't aware or working on this market, Dell and Co. just decided to go their own way. Big deal - happens all the time. While MediaDirect used XP Embedded, other manafacturers were using Linux based OS's. Wake me up in 2 or 3+ years when the market has settled down, and we can declare a winner.

IPv6 for Microsoft Windows: Frequently Asked Questions [Updated January 10, 2008]

What is new about IPv6 support in Vista and Windows Server 2008?

Installed and enabled by default
GUI based configuration
DHCPv6 support
Etc.

How can I tell if the ipV6 protocol is installed for Windows XP?

To determine whether IPv6 is installed, type ipv6 if at a command prompt. If IPv6 is installed, you will see a display of your IPv6 interfaces and their configuration. Otherwise, the Ipv6.exe tool will indicate that IPv6 is not installed.

How do I install ipv6 protocol for Windows XP? SP2 or later.

[Four methods step-by step]

{from the Network Connections dialog box}

6. In the Select Network Protocol dialog box, click Microsoft TCP/IP version 6, and then click OK.

from the Windows XP desktop, click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt. At the command prompt, type netsh interface ipv6 install.

People need to debug stuff and encrypting everything makes debugging, and therefore ANY DEVELOPMENT, virtually impossible.

Of course you can debug if you have a certificate signed by the platform publisher.

Microsoft found this out the hard way with signed driver requirements. They made signing a requirement and then immediately backed off because it made debugging drivers near-impossible.

It is already a requirement on Xbox and Xbox 360. Even on Windows Vista 64-bit, if you use a driver signed with a self-signed certificate, you get "Test Mode" in all four corners of the screen (.doc).

Actually, Net Applications shows PPC dropped below half of Mac users nearly a year ago. Some big consumer sites I've talked to recently say PPC is now around 25% of Macs hitting their servers, and dropping quickly.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/11/05/intel-macs-overtake-ppc-macs-in-october

Also, Silverlight 2 is supported on Windows 2000, it's the NBCOlympics.com web site that doesn't support it.

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=2.0#sysreq

Custom protocols and standards wreck the web, which originally got large in part because of its inherent interoperability.

It's why we bothered to put things in HTML in the first place, instead of linking Gopher trees to LaTex and .doc files.

I have never liked Flash for this reason. It's a hog on Opera, and unstable as well on Firefox. It encourages the worst kind of contentless web site creation. Finally, it's a giant sieve of security holes and vulnerabilities.

A couple of items of interest displayed at Siggraph this year as well which I think have potential.

Microsoft's come up with a way of painting objects onto an object extracted from a video, then reinserted to the video that remains accurate when the camera angle's changed. Their research paper's called Unwrap Mosaics, and you can see a video on Youtube here (higher quality video on the reseach page).

A company called Image Metrics have made a video with actress Emily O'Brien, using Light Stage technology from USC's Institute of Creative Technologies (an example of this is on a Google presentation called New Techniques for Rendering Human Performances) to create a realistic animated virtual face, that has convinced an editor on VFXWorld that they've passed the uncanny valley. Article is here.

I've been thinking that it was only a matter of time until editing video would become similar to editing photos, I just though it would take a lot more time, but everything is already here. They can even create realistic hair based on photos, just think what technology we'll have in the next decade, this could be in our homes by then.

use Event Tracing For Windows.

Microsoft spends billions of dollars researching things like that, but never brings any of them to market. Look at the "Image Deblurring with Blurred/Noisy Image Pairs" paper -- it's a marketable, easy to use technology that would be of huge benefit to typical consumers, yet chances are good it will never be commercialized. Contrary to popular opinion Microsoft does innovate, it's just that all the good stuff gets killed by some committee full of assistant senior project project team manager manager mangers.

Ah, good idea! Actually the MOSS wiki has this functionality; the "Workflow" feature allows you to do exactly that. I said the MOSS wiki is crippled (and I still stand by that), but that is one of the nice things about it. That would definitely open up the possibility of allowing all users to edit with an approval process in place.

It took me a minute to find (but I learned a lot about Moss, the plant, on various wikis), but I finally identified it as Sharepoint. Yeah, this is probably the way to go if (a) you're a business, (b) you've bought into the whole MS ecosystem, and (c) you want an otherwise crippled wiki that you can't improve.

I dug into Wikimedia's database schemas and it shouldn't be too hard to add an approval mechanism. I'd add just one table with pointers to a particular edit, the approving user, and the date approved; then you could treat it like any other piece of metadata. Beef up a few select statements and you're done. It looks like it could be a standard add-on.

Do you have a source for [Test Mode in Windows Vista 64-bit], or did I get lucky? I would love to get a screenshot of it and set it as my co-worker's wallpaper.

My source is Kernel-Mode Code Signing Walkthrough.

Oh, please. Name the industry that is so dominated by patents that newcomers can't enter it.

Patents aren't the only way big businesses control competition, licensing and other regulations are used as well. Try to start a lawn care business in some places. Growing up I used to cut some people's grass, but if I tried now I'd have to have a license in some cities and counties.

Sure, Microsoft can break their own products, but they can't break everyone else's products

Oh but Microsoft did break other people's programs, Vista will not run many programs that run quite well on XP. The same with Windows 2000, NT4, ME, '98, and '95. MS doesn't even release the APIs to Windows developers in tyme for them to release updated software. Even if they are a member of MSDN, which can cost at least $700. Even then there are several different licenses. Because MS delays releasing the APIs MS's own divisions can release a product before the competition does.

The first company that produces a *good* Windows clone will make billions. They'll instantly get 20-30% marketshare.

In theory perhaps but not in real life. You don't think MS won't slap a lawsuit on a competitor who tries to clone Windows? MS has a war chest for lawsuits of hundreds of millions of dollars, both to beat competitors over the head, and when they steal someone else's patent.

also notice that corporations are OWNED by "the people" -- which you also can own -- and that's a hell of a lot more direct power.

Corporations are owned by people, not "the people". Many people own no stocks in corporations. You even have less of a chance to influence corporations as a stockholder than you have influencing politicians as a voter. Unless you own a hugh chunk of stocks.

Falcon

Oh, please. Name the industry that is so dominated by patents that newcomers can't enter it.

Patents aren't the only way big businesses control competition, licensing and other regulations are used as well. Try to start a lawn care business in some places. Growing up I used to cut some people's grass, but if I tried now I'd have to have a license in some cities and counties.

Sure, Microsoft can break their own products, but they can't break everyone else's products

Oh but Microsoft did break other people's programs, Vista will not run many programs that run quite well on XP. The same with Windows 2000, NT4, ME, '98, and '95. MS doesn't even release the APIs to Windows developers in tyme for them to release updated software. Even if they are a member of MSDN, which can cost at least $700. Even then there are several different licenses. Because MS delays releasing the APIs MS's own divisions can release a product before the competition does.

The first company that produces a *good* Windows clone will make billions. They'll instantly get 20-30% marketshare.

In theory perhaps but not in real life. You don't think MS won't slap a lawsuit on a competitor who tries to clone Windows? MS has a war chest for lawsuits of hundreds of millions of dollars, both to beat competitors over the head, and when they steal someone else's patent.

also notice that corporations are OWNED by "the people" -- which you also can own -- and that's a hell of a lot more direct power.

Corporations are owned by people, not "the people". Many people own no stocks in corporations. You even have less of a chance to influence corporations as a stockholder than you have influencing politicians as a voter. Unless you own a hugh chunk of stocks.

Falcon

Probably the biggest joke yet. Well, in my experience:

http://support.microsoft.com/

This started in XP actually. The problem is that Microsoft sets the read-only attribute on the special folders that get custom views. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326549 for information about the root cause of the problem reported on this blog. Fixing it on the Windows side requires one to go all old-school and use attrib; cracked me up.

If you don't ever need to pay for technical support (and if you are not a business, where support of computers is an unavoidable cost), then YMMV, and again... nobody's forcing you to buy a Mac. The average (read: large majority) user will pay less to own a Mac than a PC.

And it is simply, well, uneducated of you to call Network World and Tom's Hardware Mac fanboy sites. They are very, very much the opposite. Most of the time, they don't even bother to recognize the existence of Macs. By your definition, I suppose this is a Mac fanboy site too, right?

Nobody ever said Macs don't ever break. They are generally well built, unlike some random whitebox which you are claiming will be cheaper, but Macs do fail too. That's why those studies looked at total cost of ownership for a large number of computers. On average, Macs cost a lot less to support.

I still am not seeing a single scrap of evidence from you to the contrary. And again, Network World is as mainstream, respectable, and non-Mac-fanboy as is humanly possible. Ditto for Tom's Hardware.

As for how much you KNOW computers (which I have to call into suspect if you aren't cognizant of major mainstream PC publications like the above), then you must know that Mac OS X Server is certified UNIX 03, unlike any linux or Windows computer in existence. The consumer version of OS X isn't quite UNIX certified, but contains most of the same technologies as the Server... you can spend all day in the CLI if that is your gold standard for good computing. Everything from grep to Oracle runs on OS X the same as on any other computer.

But saying a Mac is a piece of shit when you look at it just shows that you're looking through your counter-fanboy goggles. Why is it that Macs win practically every industrial design award? That doesn't mean they "look pretty." it means they are built better than any other computer. Now why don't you go ahead and call me a liar about that too... this time, try using this first, and try to show me some sort of proof.

The complaint applies to the version of Windows most people have.

A VERY nice feature of Free, Open Source Software is that there are no license hassles.

Another VERY nice feature is that the software is not designed in such a way as to trick the user into paying more. There are 7? versions of Vista: Vista Starter*, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, and Vista Enterprise. That's 6, but I think there is one more. And they are all not a new operating system, but just a new version of Windows XP.

And, even worse --> Windows XP was a huge, huge hassle for three years, until Service Pack 2 was released.

Uglier still --> --> Then, after only 3 relatively good years, Microsoft announced that it had declared the death of Windows XP!!!

More sheer ugliness: There are operating system files that the operating system won't copy, making backups a big hassle. There is the sloppiness which makes software be self-degrading and very vulnerable to attack, which helps the vendor sell more copies, because people throw away the corrupted computers and buy new ones, therefore paying for a new copy of the operating system. Another abuse: Microsoft drones attended OSCON, trying to infiltrate the Open Source Convention to sell things that require payment in more than money, in acceptance of abuse, also. There is making new versions that require far more powerful hardware, so that customers will require new computers, making it more profitable for hardware vendors, who then accept that they are being abused in other ways.

It's when you catalog ALL the abuses of commercial software vendors that it become obvious that it is good to avoid them if at all possible. Not all of Microsoft's abuses are cataloged here, of course.

(*Note from Microsoft: Windows Vista Starter is not currently scheduled to be available in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, or other high income markets as defined by the World Bank.)

I remember when Microsoft advertised no more UAEs [Unrecoverable Application Errors http://support.microsoft.com/kb/75490%5D. They accomplished this by renaming UAEs to GPFs, more commonly known as BSODs.

Maybe they should build their computers properly? That looks like a 0xF4. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330100

Anybody has an idea of what the real problem may be? It may be related to overloaded network or a faulty network card. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954311.

and now, with Vista, display drivers are back to being in user-mode:
At a technical level, WDDM display drivers have two components, a kernel mode driver (KMD) that is very streamlined, and a user-mode driver that does most of the intense computations. With this model, most of the code is moved out of kernel mode. That is, the kernel mode piece is now solely responsible for lower-level functionality and the user mode piece takes on heavier functionality such as facilitating the translation from higher-level API constructs to direct GPU commands while maintaining application compatibility. This greatly reduces the chance of a fatal blue screen and most graphics driver-related problems result in at worst one application being affected.

As an intern at Microsoft, you'll have real responsibility, real work, and real opportunities to jumpstart your career. (You'll get paid, too!)

http://www.microsoft.com/college/ip_overview.mspx

Meets your requirements and they take care of just about everything. I'm from Canada, so it might have been easier in my case, but at least give it a try if only for the on-site interview!

Back when Windows NT was being developed, I heard that device drivers had to communicate with hardware through the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and this made Windows NT very stable. Then I heard that they decided to allow hardware drivers to connect directly to hardware because sometimes going through HAL had a performance hit. I can't find much information on the history, but these lecture notes seem to confirm that drivers can now bypass HAL. Is this why bad drivers can still crash Windows?

Microsoft at least provides tools to verify that drivers work properly.