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Microsoft essentially doesn't support their own OS if it's on a non-Microsoft virtual server:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=897615

This is an interesting point, and seems to indicate one of Microsoft's serious shortcomings.

Tons and tons of cool stuff has come out of Microsoft's research division, who seem to be given a blank check to research whatever they feel is the next path forward in computing.

Unfortunately, Microsoft lacks the direction or confidence to tie these things together into a cool package, and their OS doesn't encourage this sort of thing.

Apple, on the other hand, has had about a 75% track record for seamlessly integrating their new products and technologies into their customers daily lives. That's seriously impressive, and they've designed MacOS to be easily extensible, thanks to its UNIX underpinnings and fantastic set of core libraries.

As one example, Time Machine is a seriously cool technology that even novice users can easily connect with. It's useful, intuitive, and the mechanism by which it works on the backend is embarrassingly simple.

"...run it on a 2.4 GHz P4 with 256 MB RAM."

Now, that's completely unfair. The Vista recommendations clearly say 512MB of RAM for Home Basic and 1Gb for "ultimate". The minimum requirements are also set at 512MB of RAM. The 2.4GHz CPU is more than adequate (they recommend 1GHz), so double that memory and you should be all set!

[HAHAHAHA!]

I take your point, but these days you can get a 1GB DIMM for £15... (also, just to be pedantic, the the system requirements do call for a minimum of 512MB).

The quality of MS business model is even grater than you describe. Microsoft practically decriminalized pirating of Windows (and many other products) for personal and educational use. Some of these products are even available for free download. Full-fledged windows 2008 server works for 240 days normally, with simple trick you can use it indefinitely. This combined with the fact that windows are compatible with wide range of hardware and availability of software ensures that home users use windows.
And what johnny learns at home, wants to use at work. Companies are cashing out a lot of money to MS to provide familiar working environment to their employees.

Microsoft gives all kinds of stuff away (examples include this and this).

WTF? Why is GP being modded interesting?

Summary: GP is objectively wrong. Look it up if you must.

Here's a link to the white paper from DCP (owners of HDCP) (pdf).

I suppose Microsoft could agree to require it on DRMed media [...]

One the fancy new "features" of Vista is "Output Content Protection", which makes your pc compatible with HDCP-enabled sinks (and now with hdmi, any 1080p device). Here's the docs (from 3 years ago): http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/media/output_protect.mspx.

@Ahnteis: Nothing personal.

What scenario would Grandma Maybel need to even know about the registry?

Maybe Maybel wants to connect a video camera to the computer to email a video. Seems like a pretty "ordinary" task, but with XP SP2 many users were required to do some pretty nontrivial registry hacking

The link points here.

I've never know invalid HTML to crash IE. I don't think I've ever know IE to take any notice of the code at all. From what I've seen, it downloads the page, strips the code, and then throws whatever is left at the screen...

It has been known to happen! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885932 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811751 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913788 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909363

I've never know invalid HTML to crash IE. I don't think I've ever know IE to take any notice of the code at all. From what I've seen, it downloads the page, strips the code, and then throws whatever is left at the screen...

It has been known to happen! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885932 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811751 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913788 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909363

I've never know invalid HTML to crash IE. I don't think I've ever know IE to take any notice of the code at all. From what I've seen, it downloads the page, strips the code, and then throws whatever is left at the screen...

It has been known to happen! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885932 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811751 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913788 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909363

I've never know invalid HTML to crash IE. I don't think I've ever know IE to take any notice of the code at all. From what I've seen, it downloads the page, strips the code, and then throws whatever is left at the screen...

It has been known to happen! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885932 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811751 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913788 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909363

The other 98% comes from here

That's an interesting question. How much of the world's malware is hosted on (and by hosted i mean stored in, not just linked from) end-user Windows PC's, how much of it on Windows servers, and how much on Linux computers? Is there any statistics about that?

The other 98% comes from here

Sorry to burst anyone's bubble here, however, the hardware listed more than meets the Vista minimum requirements...

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windowsvista/getready/systemrequirements.mspx

Minimum reqs.
800Mhz 32bit or 64bit processor
512MB RAM
SVGA (800x600)
20GB Hard drive with 15GB free
CDROM Drive

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx
Recommended reqs..
1ghz 32 or 64 bit processor
512MB to 1024MB ram
15GB available space
20 to 40gb total hard drive
dvd-rom drive
support for directx 9.

so again, for certain versions, met and exceed requirements - ram being the only shortcoming for the 2nd level of the os.

I believe the poster's hardware well exceeded this list.

Sorry to burst anyone's bubble here, however, the hardware listed more than meets the Vista minimum requirements...

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windowsvista/getready/systemrequirements.mspx

Minimum reqs.
800Mhz 32bit or 64bit processor
512MB RAM
SVGA (800x600)
20GB Hard drive with 15GB free
CDROM Drive

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx
Recommended reqs..
1ghz 32 or 64 bit processor
512MB to 1024MB ram
15GB available space
20 to 40gb total hard drive
dvd-rom drive
support for directx 9.

so again, for certain versions, met and exceed requirements - ram being the only shortcoming for the 2nd level of the os.

I believe the poster's hardware well exceeded this list.

Are you not running XP - its tiny on XP.

Vista.. well, read about it on Google:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1173190&SiteID=17
http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/microsoft-public-windows-vista-general/30395-what-winsxs-folder.html
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=590216&view=getnewpost
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/53906-what-winsxs-folder.html

Also note that Microsoft provided a special tool (VSP1CLN.exe) to remove the files replaced by SP1, its part of your SP1 install and will clean up about 2 Gb. (yep, 2GB). There are plenty of instructions on its use on the web

Yes, but it depends on the settings for ownership chaining, and the ownership of the tables and stored procs. See here

Get TweakUI and enable X-Mouse. Set delay to 0 ms and window focus will follow the mouse cursor.

I remember the backlash when XP became mainstream and MSFT was everyone's favorite whipping boy because "Windows 98SE had better performance" and "Windows 2000 doesn't have a playskool theme." Now everyone swears by XP.

Go play with XP before service pack 1, before service pack 2. You'll end up swearing and cussing at it a lot I bet. People love XP now because they are used to it, it now considered to be rather stable, and the performance of computers has outpaced the OS by so much that the OS is neither seen as a hog on HD or processor capabilities.

The reason why I hate vista and the people I know that hate it hate it... because it takes up more resources without giving my any significant bonuses back. I mean look at the comparisons between Vista and XP. Most of it is marketing bull by saying that you can do this in Vista and you can't in XP. The bottom line is that Vista comes with things I don't want or don't need, but am basically forced to use because you can't turn it off.

"no apparent reason"? Firstly, Vista does not trash the hard disk at random times. A majority of the time, if no other program is requesting access, the drive stays idle. When it does do something, it's building the search index, building a restore point, ect.

You can either use the Performance Monitor included with Vista, or download one of Mark Russinovich's wonderful tools to determine exactly what the disk activity is, if you think it's a problem.

I'd bet hand over fist, 9 out of 10 trolls bitching about disk usage actually have a 3rd party program doing the thrashing, but again, for the lazy mind it's just best to bash Microsoft.

The desktop base for Windows is approaching 70% for XP and 20% for Vista.
OSX 8% 2% for W2K.

Top Operating System Share Trend

You can muck about with these trend lines , but mostly what happens is that OSX grows a little bit faster and Vista a little bit slower.

Install Silverlight

Compatible Operating Systems and Browsers

Windows Vista
IE7, Firefox 1.5+
Windows XP SP2
IE7, IE6, Firefox 1.5+
OSX 10,4.8
Firefox 1.5+, Safari

Minimum Hardware Requirements

Windows
X86 or X64 500 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM
PowerPC
Mac G4 800 MHz, 128MB RAM
MacIntel
Core Duo 1.83 GHz, 128 MB RAM

Ok, time to throw some karma on the fire. Silverlight supports vector graphics. If you ask for the spec on the Silverlight vector graphics, MS will direct you to the XPS spec. In there you will find a very complete 2D graphic markup specification that will look a lot like SVG (in fact converting SVG to XPS is fairly trivial). This is a legitimate specification that is currently be made into an open standard (TC46). I know bashing Microsoft is a popular pastime on Slashdot (and most of the time they deserve it). But sometimes, MS does the right thing (e.g. DirectX and Silverlight) -- perhaps only be accident, but still.

I don't know about your son, but I for one was so excited about programming that I didn't need much of a teacher. If you find the right instrument to get him excited about programming, he'll come to you with questions or figure out how to answer his own questions and lead his own learning path. Of course I'm sure he would still appreciate some ideas and guidance from time to time. Personally, I enjoy game programming. There are free game programming environments on Microsoft's web site if you're not too heavily anti-MS. The modern environments are, I suspect, much more entertaining to use for a beginner than the environment you're used to using. To get started, head to their "explore by intrest" page.

Also, I am working on a more visual (less coding) game development environment (Scrolling Game Development Kit 2), and trying to make it a bit more portable (it might work in Linux someday since I am almost done converting it from DirectX to the OpenGL-based OpenTK library). I think game development is a very rewarding way to learn programming.

Rather than mod, I think I'd rather comment on this one... Webkit and Opera tied as the first browser engine to pass Acid3. More great news, Safari 3.1 is the first browser to parse all CSS3 selectors. Even though the story is definitely balls deep on FF's cock, there's no reason to be hatin' on FF. Competition is good, right? I think the important point to take away from this article is ...IE is falling way behind... So much so that users are abandoning it in droves. Look at all the holes in that chart. At the rate things are going, IE will no longer be the dominant browser by the end of the year.

Like I said, I think you are confusing the software assurance program with the open and site licensing programs. The software assurance used to be separate but now it comes with the site licenses and open licenses except they don't apply to some OEM software.. You can however, get the software assurance separately. Or at least you could in the past.

The software assurance is a program that does what you mention, it give an upgrade path to ensure that your software purchases aren't outdated during the useful life to you. A site and open licenses cover any use of specified products company wide (and beyond in some cases) They cover the OS, server products, CALs, office, and any other product specified in the agreements. You build a configuration and each product lists points and after certain levels, you get a certain discount for that software. But if you have a site license for 15 OSes and 15 office programs, it doesn't matter which computers they are on as long as the company owns or controls them.

I know what the various bits of licensing are; the PDF states that operating systems are available through the volume licensing schemes only as upgrades (in other words: it's equivalent to the "Windows XP Upgrade Edition" box you can get from a retail store which is cheaper than the "Full version" box but you're only allowed to use on a system which already has an older version of Windows on).

Software Assurance is just an add-on to the license scheme that allows you to upgrade from the version you originally licensed if/when a new version is released. Sucks to be you if they don't release an upgrade during the course of the license agreement.

This isn't just my understanding; I've confirmed it with account managers from a number of Microsoft resellers in the UK on a couple of occasions.

Like I said, I think you are confusing the software assurance program with the open and site licensing programs. The software assurance used to be separate but now it comes with the site licenses and open licenses except they don't apply to some OEM software.. You can however, get the software assurance separately. Or at least you could in the past.

The software assurance is a program that does what you mention, it give an upgrade path to ensure that your software purchases aren't outdated during the useful life to you. A site and open licenses cover any use of specified products company wide (and beyond in some cases) They cover the OS, server products, CALs, office, and any other product specified in the agreements. You build a configuration and each product lists points and after certain levels, you get a certain discount for that software. But if you have a site license for 15 OSes and 15 office programs, it doesn't matter which computers they are on as long as the company owns or controls them.

Then I can only assume you haven't looked at the terms of the licenses very closely.

The corporate Windows site licenses are "upgrade only" - you can't use them against PCs which don't ship with OEM Windows.

I think your confusing the licenses from the software assurance program with site licenses from open value and similar programs. In fact, the open value licenses give or come with a PUR agreement that allows the use of any of the covered products on any machine.

I had to check with a site I was dealing with today, their licensing is the way I described so I called our MS rep and he assured me that we had a site license that would include custom builds as long as we didn't go over out "limit".

I can only assume that we are in different regions and the license varies by region.

Page 54 on the Microsoft Volume Licensing Reference Guide:

    http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/7/0/a70853c1-a783-4d48-a7ad-f404abdb1e7d/Microsoft_Volume_Licensing_Reference_Guide.pdf

states:

"In Volume Licensing, the desktop PC operating system is an "upgrade license". You may only upgrade devices for which you have already licensed a "qualifying operating system". A list of "qualifying operating systems that qualify for an upgrade is contained in the Product List, which can be found at .... If you acquire software assurance, you have the right to use "Windows Vista Enterprise Edition" on the device instead of Windows Vista Business. This also permits you to run up to four additional copies or instances on the device".

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897445.aspx

Linus Torvald Linux Kernel coding style http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/CodingStyle

Bjarne Stroustrup C++ Style and Technique FAQ (Trivia and style section) http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html

The most of so called "Hungarian notations"(including the ones previously recommended by Microsoft) is the wrong interpretation of the original ones. No wonder that Torvald , Stroustrup, Sutter and Alexandrescu don't recommend them. However, the original notation are quit reasonable and can be found here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260976(VS.60).aspx

Finally, there is the good book C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices By Herb Sutter, Andrei Alexandrescu

The best advice from this book " Don't sweat the small stuff. (Or: Know what not to standardize.)". For example " Don't specify how much to indent, but do indent to show structure" etc.

If you are using your computer right, it does not only enable you to do things, it does the boring things for you, automatically.

Exactly. Use the tools.

In the .net world, check out
fxCop: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(vs.80).aspx
StyleCop: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis

These can both be used to prevent code building if it doesn't meet standards. Sadly, the first task for me is usually to turn on "warnings as errors" and get the code up to that minimal standard.

Also check out Resharper: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
for flagging some code problems.

The problem with code standards is that your best coders are probably using a standard already; and the while the worst can be dragged onto a standard, they will write bad code even with it.

If you are using your computer right, it does not only enable you to do things, it does the boring things for you, automatically.

Exactly. Use the tools.

In the .net world, check out
fxCop: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(vs.80).aspx
StyleCop: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis

These can both be used to prevent code building if it doesn't meet standards. Sadly, the first task for me is usually to turn on "warnings as errors" and get the code up to that minimal standard.

Also check out Resharper: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
for flagging some code problems.

The problem with code standards is that your best coders are probably using a standard already; and the while the worst can be dragged onto a standard, they will write bad code even with it.

um...there is a 64bit version of windows, XP64, which Microsoft developed specifically for AMD's 64bit processors since at that time Intel was still pushing Itanium. This was available for public consumption not too long after AMD's processors were released and at that time only ran on AMD processors since they were the only producer of 64bit x86 processors. There is also a 64bit version of Vista available which runs on both Intel and AMD CPUs.

I wonder just how much revenue Microsoft and or Mozilla get from the different CA root Authorities?

Not a lot, it would seem:

How much does the program cost?

Microsoft does not currently charge for the Root Certificate Program. However, there is a material cost to CAs payable to an assessor associated with meeting the annual audit requirements. The CA is solely responsible for, and shall bear all financial and other costs and obligations associated with, meeting the requirements of the Program.

From Microsoft Root Certificate Program.

Task manager... if you can kill the viral process... (maybe take a look at the sysinternals suite, particularly I'm thinking AutoRuns, ProcessExplorer and RootkitRevealer might be useful (haven't actually had to use them yet).

Also Regedit... you might be able to remove the viral startup entries... but after you've killed the process or it might just add itself back.

After you've killed the process and removed its startup entries, rebooting might get you a clean environment and you can hopefully delete the infected files. It worked for me when I got infected from a P2P virus (dumbassed thing to do, I know...)

Anyway, hope you don't have to format, that would suck. Maybe my tricks weren't already up your sleeve. If they help, great. If those fail, I'd probably have to fall back to something drastic like booting from a safe disk and running antivirus, or taking out the hard disk and virus scanning it... that's a hasssle, though, and I'd be worried about breaking the OS.

Leslie Lamport famously defined a distributed system as "one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable".

http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/distributed-system.txt

In this vein, I would define cloud computing as "a computing system in which the failure of a network you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable".

Will they still sell XP licenses through their WGA program??? This could be a great solution!

Yep: http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/downloads/nonGenuine.aspx?displaylang=en&cCode=USA&Error=8&submit=1

It's always nice to know those who DIDN'T break any laws have to pay full price for XP, while the law-breakers get to pay half price and be legal.

Which is fine, Vista isn't the unusable brain-dead pile of steaming poop some would have you beleve, and it has some benefits over XP. I think you've named them all except for 1 (when you try to delete a load of files, any that are locked will show a prompt with 'skip' option).

Vista however....

hogs memory - you've seen this already.
hogs disk space (check your WinSxS directory, it isn't small. this is more of a big deal in this age of VMs and smaller, power-efficient machines)

Explorer will occasionally start to delete everything when you delete a few files, I think its user error but its not obvious how I end up with Vista trying to delete the containing directory.
File delete still takes ages - Vista will happily wait to tell you how long it'll take to delete a file before actually deleting the f*cker.

Driver support can be ... limited, especially for older hardware and you're SOL if you don't want to buy a new device.

Explorer cannot keep the display configuration per folder that I set it - not if I edit a parent folder (with the 'inherit' checkbox cleared, obviously).

The indexer service never seems to stop, and if you do stop it, you'll find you don't get a complete start menu list after time.

Also, for some reason, when I close any app that has used a lot of RAM, Vista starts a mega disk thrashing session. This lasts for minutes, though the system is usable, I wouldn't like to be running my box on a SSD!

Oh, but the biggest issue is things that have just broken, but you don't realise until you come to use them. eg, I had a problem with the Task Scheduler - it couldn't create new tasks. I forget the exact problem (or the solution) but it was pretty wierd with a mis-install of some system component. Also, I had problems installing SQL Server - I got a 'failed to compile MOF files xyz'. Turns out, this is because the WMI is corrupted! I'd only just installed Vista and it was broken in subtle ways. I think its just too complex, and I reckon you will too once you really get going with it.

So, after using it for a while I think its ok, but if I had to buy a copy I just wouldn't bother. Incidentally, my work PC runs XP and will do so until I have to change.

" there has traditionally been an unwritten rule among security professionals that the discoverer of a security vulnerability has an obligation to give the vendor an opportunity to correct the vulnerability before publicly disclosing it."

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/Security/bulletin/policy.mspx

Disclaimer: by reading this you understand and agree that everything that is written in this article is for educational use only, and none of it should be used at any circumstances, and if you choose to use this information for any kind of action you take full responsibility for it and release Anonymous Coward of any responsibility. If you do not agree to whats written here, stop reading now!

First, look on the internet for an ISO with the SHA1 66ac289ae27724c5ae17139227cbe78c01eefe40. Google or any torrent portal should turn up enough seeds. Make sure you verify the downloaded ISO, which is the MSDN XP3 Volume License ISO, as can be checked here (look for Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 - VL (x86) - CD (English) and click on Show details).

The VL versions of XP do not require activation, but do require a valid VL key entered during installation (which are different from retail and OEM keys from the stickers on your desktop/laptop). There are keygens out there that generate them (beware of trojans though!), but most keys will fail WGA checks, as they were not issued by Microsoft. What you need is a VL key from a very large institution such as big universities or corporations (which have low risk of getting blacklisted by Microsoft). If you (or someone you know) can run programs on one of these corporate/institutional systems, you can use this keyfinder to retrieve the VL key. After installing the VL disk with such a key, you'll have no problems with any WGA checks until Microsoft decides to block that key.

for virtual desktops, check out MS Virtual Desktop Manager

Vista and XP support PAE, check here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366796(VS.85).aspx

It's less relevant on XP and Vista, because the phsyical RAM limit for 32-bit is set at 4 GB, but there can be some advantage to using PAE on XP or Vista to get access to 2-4GB in a single usermode process.

I wish I could find a more direct link but on the enclosed page if you select "MSDN Operating Systems" it will list everything you get for a subscription of $700. Every version of XP/MCE, every Vista, every server 2003 and 2008 and even betas of the next versions. No need to drop a "killabuck" on the server. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/aa718657.aspx Also, Comodo personal firewall works on server 2k3...

I mean really, why do they even bother? Shit, everyone knows that all you need to be successful is a good brand. If your product sucks donkey balls, you'll still be profitable, year after year. All you need is a good brand! Experience doesn't matter, quality doesn't matter. Just brand! 100% of Apple's success is due to their brand, not because they make good products. Obviously!

Ahem. may I draw your attention to... Microsoft or perhaps Nike?

Modern hardware except one particular Pentium M stepping (which was popular for a while) handles PAE. 64G RAM on 32-bit

But Windows does not.

(the reason Microsoft stopped naming their software after the year released)

An excellent point, sir.

(the reason Microsoft stopped naming their software after the year released)

An excellent point, sir.

(the reason Microsoft stopped naming their software after the year released)

An excellent point, sir.

(the reason Microsoft stopped naming their software after the year released)

An excellent point, sir.