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I think it's because these machines have 512 MB of RAM, a 1.5GHz clock, and 10-20GB of high speed SSD storage. If you compare that with XP requirements you will see it is well over by 8 times every particular. XP doesn't run as well as Linux on these machines but they're much better than the best machine available when XP was released in 2001.

Vista, though? Not gonna happen.

If you must, they make a good thin client for Citrix though, and the internet-everywhere nature of the devices makes that a reliable answer if not an ideal one. I wonder if the cellular based wireless works on a plane. That would be cool.

10-20GB is more than enough for a fat Linux Distro with all the fancy effects that make it look better than Vista and OO.o, which opens most of the Office documents you'll ever need anyway. With documents on mini-SD or pendrive you're good to go no matter where you're going. So what you need Vista on these things for is beyond me.

Oh, and did I mention that they do HD video and run for six hours on one battery charge? What's that about?

Seriously, if a user needs more than this then he needs a server slice in the server room and he can still use one of these to remote into it.

For now it's up to the users to decide if and when XP "dies". There are two ways I can think of for Microsoft to kill XP: (1) They could develop and release a useable next-generation OS(which remains to be seen) or (2) Putting on the tinfoil hat, I guess Microsoft could "accidentally" leak hitherto-unknown XP vulnerabilities so that XP will be so exploitable and unpatchable that it will eventually be unuseable...but that scenario is unlikely given Microsoft's support lifecycle policy. I doubt that they could handle lack of innovation and 1 or 2 more crappy OS releases before *NIX and Apple eat MS' marketshare. Also, MS' foray into the services market may go bust and after that, supporting their legacy software may be one of the few things that will earn them money.

* In fact, virtualize the entire filesystem so a bad program can't screw up your install.

Partially implemented in Vista. Very nice to run legacy apps without admin privleges.

* Instead of babysitting the user with endless "Cancel Allow" dialogs, allow some programs (administrator-defined) to run as administrator (i.e. root) by adding a popup dialog to ask the password. Add the possibility of remembering the password FOR THIS SESSION ONLY.

Did you ever use Vista? I've been working on my Vista machine since this morning, and i didn't see a single UAC dialog. Things might be different if you're a developer, but in that case it might make sense to run your development apps under another user account.

Btw. UAC can be configured to prompt for user:password instead of Permit/Deny. That's what i did.

* Speaking of filesystems, add native compatibility for ext2,ext3,ext4 (is it out yet?), reiserfs, jfs, xfs, etc. We live in an open world. Add compatibility or die.

I don't see a reason for doing this. Cross file system support in the OSS world is pretty spotty too, and simply: there is no need for it. Dual boot is never done in the corporate world, no SOHO customer does it either, just a few enthusiasts.

* Make (or adopt) a decent partitioner that can resize partitions without requiring to buy third party products.

Implemented in Vista.

* Give up on the directx "intellectual property" stuff and release the code under a GPL-compatible license.

Where is the business reason for this?

* Modify the kernel so it can run in Xen without CPU-virtualization extensions.

Even Hyper-V and VS2005 need their extensions installed in order for virtualization to reach properly. Besides, Citrix and Microsoft have an agreement on virtualization support. Which will probably result in what you need.

* Release the specs for developers to be able to make and use their own window managers (i.e.KDE, GNOME, etc) work with Windows.

I think a lot of this stuff is hard-coded and not as flexible as X11. There are replacements shells available, but they're not exactly the same as a window manager:

http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/

* Get rid of all that Digital Rights Management crap and allow users to save videos and music in hi-res formats for backups. Windows media player shouldn't allow any copy-protection crap to execute and spy on them.

Quick question: If Microsoft removed all their DRM stuff from WMP now, how much more would they earn in 2008?

* Open-source network-based apps and provide official support a-la sourceforge for users to submit bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Microsoft offers official support for a fee, just like almost all linux distributors. Community support is available through http://forums.microsoft.com/ and a myriad of 3rd Party Websites.

* Don't sell 7 different versions of the OS. Make the management and administration parts available on the darn CD / DVD.

I'll agree on the 7 different version thing, but it doesn't really matter. As a business, you don't have much of a choice. It's either Business or Ultimate if you don't have volume licensing, or Enterprise if you do.

I don't understand what you mean with management and administration - it's all there on the CD, and the RSAT tools for Server 2003/2008 are available for download.

* Here's an idea: Make (or use) a "/home" partition so users can put their configuration and files in a directory of their own, so advanced users can either boot Windows or Linux and still have their important documents unmodified.

Yes, that's configurable. At least since Windows 2000.

* And please, for the love of everything good in the world, GET RID OF THAT ANTIPIRACY C

I'm not sure what you mean by XP Pro EOL this year in June. According to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223 extended support is to April 2014 and according to http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps XP Pro sp2 is supported until April 2010.

I'm not sure what you mean by XP Pro EOL this year in June. According to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223 extended support is to April 2014 and according to http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps XP Pro sp2 is supported until April 2010.

At a Children's science museum near where I live, there is a small pool that lets you "pick up" letters and symbols that seem to be floating in a pool of water. There is a projector overhead that projects the symbols onto the water. Some sensors tell the system where and what attitude the ladles, and if you dip the ladels into the water where a letter is projected, it starts to project into the ladle. This technology has already been done. As for movement and display of data, see Microsoft's table-top computer.

Windows Server 2008 offers a 60 day grace period, but you can rearm it three times:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948472

As a student, there are ways to obtain permanently activated copies for less than the $999 or so retail. Most universities have MSDNAA access where you can log on and download a CD key for free. If that doesn't work, there is a deal if you log onto your MSDNAA account to obtain a one year Technet subscription for $99. This is for evaluation only licenses, but removes any time limitation not just on Server 2008, but any commercial MS product. Of course, as a student, you can buy a fully licensed copy for $500 each, and some universities even offer fully licensed copies for $10 or so.

Its not possible - I don't think it is.

And you are quite incorect. Microsoft just released a security update for IE6 as late as feb 12 2008. If they would have abandoned IE6, this wouldn't have been possible.

Note the past tense I used; it was not reported speech, no need for tense shifting.
With IE team disbanded, I'd say it was abandonware.

It is true that MS isn't adding new features to IE6 but what has changed so dramatically with web pages, specifically, slashdot web pages in the last year or so that it can no longer work? Nothing has. Nothing at all.

So what are you bitching about then?

And whether it is a piece of shit or not isn't really your call to make universally. It has it's used just like any other program out there. And yes, it is up to date because they are still providing security fixes for it. So check up on what your claiming before making the claims.

Yay, security fixes. Since IE6 is integrated in Windows, plugging IE's holes is essential for Windows functioning.
That doesn't sound like active development or support to me. If IE were a standalone program, this kind of "support" would be only a step above total abandonment.

If IE6 were up to date, it would have decent standards compliance, for one thing.

Whether it is crap or not isn't pertinent to the situation.

Yes, it is. It's crap because it is not standards compliant. Among other things.
Since most pages nowadays are coded to standards (as much as possible, at least), this also means that it is not up to date.

What is pertinent is that for whatever reason people might want to use it. That isn't a crime, your attitude of forcing people to use different software because you don't like something should be.

I'm not holding a gun to anyone's head. (Though you're tempting me.)
I'm not installing different browsers on people's computers behind their backs. (Though in the case of IE6, it would not be such a terrible idea.)

Because you say something doesn't mean I was proved wrong. What a delusional ideal you have about your own self worth.

Your actions speak louder than my words: if I have not struck truth, why did you change your rhetoric?

MS has been actively supporting IE6 up to two months ago that I know of. It provided updates in Dec of 2007, October before that and pretty much every months in 2007. Like I said, it was the current up to date web MS browser for windows until IE7 came about.

Discounting the long-dead IE versions like IE5 and below, it was the only Microsoft's web browser, for Windows or otherwise.

See above about "active support".

And yes, I did limit it to MS browsers because we are talking about the most used browsers of the world, MS browsers.

You may have been talking about them. Or was that the royal 'we'?

Besides, it doesn't really matter as long as IE users are a minority on this site.

It still isn't more then IE's share.

What is this, a dick measuring contest?

So my statement stands true, "it is what was available to the majority of people. You are insane if you think the majority of people use fire fox or opera when IE6 was available".

It is what was preinstalled on the majority of desktop systems.

I never said the majority of people in the world used Firefox, Opera or whatever; however, I'd guess Slashdot readership is a bit differend demographic. And we were discussing Slashdot, weren't we?

Lol.. No it shows how retarded your position is.

Your strawman shows how retarded my position is... riiight.

Of course morons usually don't know when they are acting like morons so I won't hold it ag

Again, no.

If the team was dis-ban-ded and no up-dates were pro-vi-ded, then the brow-ser was not up to date. It was fucking a-ban-don-ware
Now, you have wisely chosen to drop the "up to date" phrase in this post, but you'd used it before. I'll grant you it was the most common Windows browser, but that doesn't make it any less of a piece of shit.

And you are quite incorect. Microsoft just released a security update for IE6 as late as feb 12 2008. If they would have abandoned IE6, this wouldn't have been possible.

It is true that MS isn't adding new features to IE6 but what has changed so dramatically with web pages, specifically, slashdot web pages in the last year or so that it can no longer work? Nothing has. Nothing at all. And whether it is a piece of shit or not isn't really your call to make universally. It has it's used just like any other program out there. And yes, it is up to date because they are still providing security fixes for it. So check up on what your claiming before making the claims.

Well, a good part of users had neither legitimate Windows installations nor the will to jump through hoops to make it work on non-legitimate installs.
The mere fact Microsoft forced the upgrade tells me that even they think IE6 is crap.

Whether it is crap or not isn't pertinent to the situation. What is pertinent is that for whatever reason people might want to use it. That isn't a crime, your attitude of forcing people to use different software because you don't like something should be.

Funnily, I'm prone to say that about you, and have even shown how you change your word choice when proven wrong.

Because you say something doesn't mean I was proved wrong. What a delusional ideal you have about your own self worth. MS has been actively supporting IE6 up to two months ago that I know of. It provided updates in Dec of 2007, October before that and pretty much every months in 2007. Like I said, it was the current up to date web MS browser for windows until IE7 came about. And yes, I did limit it to MS browsers because we are talking about the most used browsers of the world, MS browsers.

Neither is your company or your country.
In Europe, Firefox has a much greater market share.

It still isn't more then IE's share. So my statement stands true, "it is what was available to the majority of people. You are insane if you think the majority of people use fire fox or opera when IE6 was available".

It really only shows how fucking retarded you are.

Lol.. No it shows how retarded your position is. Of course morons usually don't know when they are acting like morons so I won't hold it against you.

Ah, and the browser is the integral part of the OS, or what?

Do you have to run IE6 or do you want to run IE6?

Actually, I run firefox and only open IE when something doesn't display correctly. I think I already told you that if you where paying attention to anything. And no, I haven't upgraded to IE6 yet and I don't plan to anytime soon. I'm against your insane idea of leaving IE6 in the dust to "force" people to upgrade to IE7 and an operating system that supports it because of your own dislike for IE6 and nothing more. It is not having the option to fall back to that it the problem. Not what I use or don't use.

Stop trolling. You are too rabid to be able to insult me anyway.

I simply asked a question, it wasn't trolling. If you don't want to answer it, fine. But don't pass your appearances off as my flaws.

If they do that by attacking things I never said, try to insult me in the process and generally act as flamebaiting trolls, then yes, they are.

Then why d

Mainstream support for XP is set to expire on April 14, 2009 according to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&x=16&y=12&C2=1173 Which is obviously before June 30, 2010. Does that mean they'll extend Mainstream support as well (I'd assume so). If so, it'd be the second time they've extended support (originally 5 years after release, or Dec 31, 2006).

"No strings"? Here are a couple of "strings":

If you file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against a Microsoft implementation of such Covered Specification, then this personal promise does not apply with respect to any Covered Implementation of the same Covered Specification made or used by you.

This promise is not an assurance [...] that a Covered Implementation would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party.

From http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx

Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated: http://research.microsoft.com/~chrisko/papers/ICWSM_paper.pdf, albeit totally orthogonal to what skewz.com does.

Are you guys using machine learning at all? If not, how do you protect yourselves against user bias (e.g. the situation where liberals like your site and conservatives don't, so you get mostly liberal stories). Personally, it seems to me that Skewz is just a glorified Digg with sliders.

I'd say you weren't insightful, but your link is even if it proves you wrong about it being a marketing brand name. It is the actual name of the product. That's not up for dispute whether you like MS or not.

Your very wiki link says the following:

The term 'SharePoint' is commonly used to refer to one of the following two products:

        * Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)
        * Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.mspx

SharePoint (Windows Sharepoint Services) is actually free...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D51730B5-48FC-4CA2-B454-8DC2CAF93951&displaylang=en

The fullblown version MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) is not...

If you're on Mac/Linux, start coding in Python (http://www.python.org/). It's a simple, powerful, and flexible language which you can do a lot with. Basic Python program:

print "Hello, World!"

Yeah, that was the whole thing.

If you're on Windows, get Python anyway, or get the .Net framework runtime. I'm guessing you already know that .Net is Microsoft's answer to Java, and they're aggressively pushing it out to their whole software developer ecosystem. In fact Vista comes installed with the latest version. If you're on XP or earlier, you might already have a slightly earlier version of .Net installed. If you have it, then there'll be a C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework folder in your computer.

If you don't, you can get the latest version from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=333325fd-ae52-4e35-b531-508d977d32a6&DisplayLang=en).

Once you have it, you can run all applications written in .Net, and you can write and run your own apps.

Here is where it gets interesting. To write programs for .Net, you can pick and choose from several languages. The framework itself comes with support for Visual Basic.NET, C#, JavaScript.NET, and C++. Since you mentioned coding cool stuff with Basic, let me mention that I used to write cool stuff (arguably :-) in QBasic as well back on Windows 98. But anyway, you can now write in Visual Basic, which has been upgraded to leverage all of .Net's power. Here's a basic (hah) graphical interface VB.NET program:

Imports System.Windows.Forms

Public Class Hello_World
    Public Shared Sub Main()
        MessageBox.Show("Hello, World!")
    End Sub
End Class

To compile and run, type:

E:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\vbc test.vb .\test.exe

at a command prompt, where `test.vb' is the file wherein you have saved the source code.

Now, Microsoft offers free versions of its flagship Visual Studio developer products which make it very, very easy for you to code, especially nice graphical interfaces. And you can find those by doing a search for `visual studio' in the Microsoft website. But I will argue against it until you're moderately comfortable with a language and have in fact compiled and run some graphical programs which you coded yourself from top to bottom. The reason is that Visual Studio and its ilk automate so much of what you would do that if you start there, at best you'll never even learn of all those aspects of programming, and at worst you'll be thoroughly confused by what it does. This is what happened to me, for example, when I tried to dabble with writing MFC (Microsoft's previous attempt at making graphical interfaces easy) applications in Visual Studio 6 way back when.

Having said that, I've heard some really nice things about Borland Delphi, which is a more powerful version of Pascal which is said to be really fast as well. And it's a full-fledged development environment like Visual Studio, with support for code completion and all that. But, it's only available for Windows AFAIK. You can get it (free) at http://www.turboexplorer.com/, and check out some really awesome Flash videos they have up on http://www.turboexplorer.com/delphi/videos, where they take you step by step from no knowledge of programming to creating full-blown graphical apps with Delphi.

From what I know, the above are basically ways of creating rich-client GUI programs. Of course, there's a lot more to programming. If you don't want to download anything, just get Firefox and start hacking away in JavaScript/CSS and create some cool Web 2.0 apps in a single HTML file.

No one, not even MS can implement it because they haven't published a version that makes the required changes

Which "they" to you mean here? ISO (and to a lesser extent, Ecma) would be the proper "they" in this case - not Microsoft - and you never meant to imply otherwise, I hope. Incorporating all of the BRM recommended changes into a usable standard is something that's being worked on right now, and will continue if DIS2900 has in fact passed this vote. It has already been agreed that the parts which reference Word97 (which were always clearly marked as deprecated and optional) will be moved to a new section - also clearly marked 'deprecated and optional'. And while MS may participate in writing those next versions, acceptance is already out of their hands.

Creating standards that for legal reasons are not implementable by such a huge portion of the market, undermines the standards process.

I guess you're going by the SFLC's recent remarks about the OSP here. Oddly they didn't feel the same way about remarkably similar covenants from IBM and Sun. There would seem to be some dissent within SFLC as well, given that Mark Webbink (of SFLC's board, and also speaking as general counsel for Red Hat) has said that he feels the OSP does indeed allow the flexibility to be implemented under F/OSS licenses.

I have. I've even been involved in writing some of them. I dare you to go look at ODF and then look at OOXML. The difference is night and day, even for a layperson.

If you've been involved with the writing of some ISO standards, and you're an advocate of free and open standards, surely it rankles you that many ISO standards aren't freely available, but instead must be purchased for hundreds of dollars ($350 or so for ISO/IEC 26300, a/k/a ODF)? But I digress (sorry) - I have personally looked at both ODF and OOXML. Haven't just taken the pundits opinions on faith - I went and looked. Both have large sections which require much re-reading if one wants to create a good implementation. And OOXML is bigger, but IMO bigger in a good way. It goes into great detail on many things where ODF simply stands mute. Still, this is only a matter of opinion - and we all have those. So yes, the difference is night and day - but we might have to agree to disagree on which is the night and which is the day.

Some committee rubber stamping something does not make it a standard.

And here is the nub of the matter. At the end of the day, all "standards", published by ISO, IEEE and similar orgs are completely optional. Any implementor can choose to implement them, or not. Any buyer can choose to require any amount of standards compliance before buying a product - or not. So, if DIS2900 is approved and published as ISO/IEC 2900, it will simply compete with ISO/IEC 26300 on its own merits. And if OOXML is indeed so bad, then clearly ODF will win, right?

Or will it come back to the quality of the products which implement either of these standards? Of course it will. Large orgs which care about international standards compliance will once again be basically faced with the choice between OO.org and the Office Suite. And the choice will become blindingly obvious, eh?

when the new Sound Blaster X-Fi 2 or Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 hit the shelves.

when the new Sound Blaster X-Fi 2 or Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 hit the shelves.

Do As Much Evil As Possible

Respectfully,
K. Trout

Everyone also knows that I'm the author of RoughlyDrafted,

Jeepers - are you? And you admit it? In public?

please let us know where the market for Mac viruses and exploits is,

Well, there's a Safari exploit being auctioned right now.

But really, the vast majority of exploits to hit OS X won't be OS X specific - but belong to other projects, like Apache, SSH, Samba, etc. This is because OS X sensibly uses open source to do all its heavy lifting security wise.

Also, please fill us in on what you think it means to be a zombie, because a zombie process has nothing to do with being part of a Windows botnet.

You're a dumbass.

Admittedly, (presumably) you're an OS X user, so you're less likely to have experience with zombies, but you'd think you'd at least do a simple google search before attempting to correct someone.

https://www.microsoft.com/Education/Freshstart/FSSplash.aspx

Take a look at the Fresh Start program for yourself. Surprisingly enough, nothing seems overtly evil. Weird.

I thought this was where Microsoft was heading with the Novell deal etc. By allowing Open Source to use their patents they infect it and find a new and possibly more secure way of getting money out of large companies. Remember Microsoft is promising not to sue independent open source developers (although people running their code are not so lucky.) http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx

I cannot condone this kind of "open source" as it involves patents which make me not free to write my own code. That is no kind of freedom at all. I hope the distributions shun this poison.

I've been a long time Creative user, and they've lost me with this one. I have used Soundblaster cards since the 8-bit Soundblaster Pro. Since then I've owned the Soundblaster 16, AWE 32, and a couple cards in the Audigy series. For over 15 years, I've used Creative's cards almost exclusively (aside from a brief stint with the Pro Audio Spectrum 16).

When Vista SP1 was released last week, I didn't see it in Windows Update because the latest driver available for my Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro was not compatible with the update (see this KB article). This driver hasn't been updated since March 2007, and didn't work all that well to boot. Analog 5.1 surround was sketchy, and the sub channel didn't even work.

Daniel_K came to the rescue in my situation. I needed to uninstall my drivers to upgrade to SP1, then install his driver package get my card working again. The installation went very smoothly, and my card is working better than it ever has on Vista. There are some quirks, but all surround channels are working as they should, and sound quality seems to be improved over the previous drivers (although this could easily be attributed to the placebo effect).

The last thing that Creative should be doing is going after Daniel_K. If anything, they should hire the guy to teach their driver team a thing or two.

Sadly, this is not likely a technical issue, but a marketing one. Creative seems to have made a deliberate decision to leave Audigy users in the cold in an effort to get them to upgrade to their new X-Fi series. Problem is, it doesn't seem to be working. Peruse Creative's support forums and you'll see post after post lamenting their substandard driver support with promises to avoid their cards in the future.

Creative's strategy may work with casual customers with a sub-$50 card, but not for others who have invested over $200 for a high-end Audigy card with a breakout box. Those people are still looking for return on their investment, and will be the first to walk away from Creative when they get snubbed.

Hopefully this is a misunderstanding, and Creative will work out a deal with Daniel_K. If this doesn't happen, they stand to lose some of their most loyal customers. Given their track record so far, the outlook doesn't look good.

they are very happy that people all over the world use (unlocked) iPhones, and Apple executives have probably spent a lot of time thinking about how they could have played the game differently with AT&T to still get the contract with them (which you'll remember took a major infrastructural investment on AT&T's part to bring the iPhone -- and only the iPhone -- visual voicemail)

I'm always impressed at how some people can apparently divine altruistic motives from Apple's management decisions. Every unlocked phone deprives Apple of a large chunk of potential revenue from the sale of its device in the form of monthly cash payments. Several reports last year estimated the cost to Apple of so many unlocked phones as ranging from $500m to well over $1 billion (the difference comes about depending on whether you account for the "missing" devices as languishing in the supply chain or reshipped to Asia).

But critically, apparently believing Apple's propaganda regarding the "difficulty" of implementing visual voicemail functionality leads me to lose trust in any of your assertions. Visual voicemail is not hard to do - it was around for several years before Apple's version, and if it's so difficult, how is it that companies like GrandCentral/Google can retrofit visual voicemail onto basically any phone with either a WAP browser or SMS facility? Add in a 3G+ network and a real web browser and it really shines. Given enough network neutral bandwidth, many things are possible. Microsoft can add Visual VOIP to phones with Portrait. Apple's continued invocation of the Herculean nature of its visual voicemail is a marketing smokescreen designed to convince its more fannish customers that bedding down with the telcos comes from necessity, not avarice.

Actually, IE on Vista runs with fewer permissions then a normal User account by default. It runs as a low-integrity process. This means that it loses access to most of the user's files (it has access to things like the temp directory for storing cookies, cache, etc.). See MSDN for details.

No kidding! Some others that aren't hard to find...

http://developer.motorola.com/
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/developers/
http://www.nokia.com/A4126236

Thank heaven that Apple paved the way, it's amazing these other companies in the mobile market were able to adapt so quickly...

(All links are for developers, I didn't check but I think all have SDKs available.)

Most of these driver incompatibilities were actually caused because microsoft changed the driver structure at the last minute which basically shot a lot of the manufacturers in the foot at the starting line.

Actually Microsoft had been talking to the graphics IHVs about the new Longhorn "Advanced Driver Model" as early as spring 2005. Both ATI and nVidia had representatives (i.e., developers) working closely with Redmond during that time. The Longhorn/Vista display model became known as "WDDM" and was more or less locked down, from what I understand, by late 2005. By the time of WinHEC 2006 (April), they were already talking about WDDM 2.0, as you can see from this presentation. If you take a look at the slide deck, ATI's Tim Kelley actually delivered part of the presentation on WDDM 2.0.

Frankly, I don't think nVidia invested enough energy in making high-quality Vista drivers in time for launch. They had approximately a full year of Betas, the same time that ATI and Intel had. The Vista Beta and RC programs had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, for which Microsoft collected crash dump data (which is the same type of data mentioned in this article, collected BEFORE launch). Yet even with this time, and the user crash dump reports, clearly by launch in January 2007 nVidia still wasn't ready with robust drivers.

The evidence here really does point at nVidia, no matter how much you want it to point at Microsoft.

If pudge was to work for Microsoft, he'd get free health care and see how the European model works!

http://members.microsoft.com/careers/mslife/benefits/plan.mspx#healthbenefits

Here is a link:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/eb1936c0-e19c-4a17-a1a8-39292e4929a41033.mspx?mfr=true

Depending on what version of "blame Microsoft" you are responding to the complaint may or may not be legitimate.

How is a link to Windows 2003 relevent to Vista, which has a different driver model?

According to the only link you provided, video drivers were moved into the kernel for performance reasons, not stability reasons. Also according to the link, they were able to address the previous performance issues (or faster hardware made the impact negligible, or both) and thus moved the drivers BACK into user land.

I don't think what they said was consistent, and given that there's more video hardware now than in the NT 3.51 days, I can understand why they started leaving it to the vendors to do the majority of testing of their own drivers.

As for the screw you attitude, i don't see why you attibute that to only MS; that seems to be the MO of pretty much any corporation (or government, for that matter) that gains a lot of power. It's not great, but it's expected because it does seem to be human nature.

"In Windows NT 4.0, drivers were moved into kernel mode to improve performance. However, when a kernel-mode driver fails, it can crash an entire system, whereas the failure of a user-mode driver causes only the current process to crash."

Rename: F2
Properties: Alt-Enter
There is almost always a keyboard shortcut in Windows.

WM6 official ROM. Push still requires a the client to maintain a connection, how often it needs to reconnect depends on the network, client and server:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/mobile/deploy/deployexchange2007/160e94df-acca-4ae7-b759-90838c83da2d.mspx?mfr=true

I work on hundreds of problematic servers in a month in a server support call center, and I've seen plenty of Microsoft updates mess with things. Take the Microsoft Scalable Networking Pack which is present in SP2. Its interaction with Broadcom Gigabit ethernet adapters can break things in very interesting ways. While I always recommend updating production servers during maintenance windows, it's best if you can get those updates in a testing environment first to see how they interact with everything.

You use the freely available Windows driver development kit (DDK) and/or Windows driver kit (WDK). http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/ddk/default.mspx/

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx

Windows XP has BATCH resizing capability as a download and you can crop in Paint.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe

You can crop and resize using MS HTML Help Image Editor. And your IT department probably won't complain about installing it for you. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms669985.aspx

• PowerPoint Viewer 2003 (1.9 MB) (for versions 97 thru 2003)
• PowerPoint Viewer 2007 (25.8 MB, requires 5 MB of hard disk space)

• PowerPoint Viewer 2003 (1.9 MB) (for versions 97 thru 2003)
• PowerPoint Viewer 2007 (25.8 MB, requires 5 MB of hard disk space)

My personal favorite is this simple buffer overflow that existed in the Windows help system for 7 years (all the way back to NT 4). By browsing to a web page the Windows Help system could be exploited to take control of a user's computer. It took them 5 months to release a patch.

Go ahead... say it:
Orange

Link

I've had to do this before. My friend successfully installed and activated XP, but over the years upgraded his computer piece by piece. Motherboard, CPU, video card, sound card, etc.

Microsoft notes your hardware when you activate. If it changes significantly, it thinks it's on a new computer. So, you call a human and ask politely. 9 times out of 10 (another friend works in a repair show downtown) they'll reactivate your XP, no questions asked. Friend got his XP working again.

But, your problem was you "thrashed the installation." So, I assume you formatted your drive, reinstalled XP, and it wouldn't activate?

If that's the case, try installing your drivers before activating. Without any drivers, Windows thinks you have different hardware than you do with drivers. Different computer = no activation.

I had the same problem. I upgraded the RAM. Then I upgraded the video card. Then I added a sound card. There's a fudge factor, but these three components was enough to make my XP machine do another activation check. I just had to say "Okie-dokie, reactivate" and it worked.

Try installing your drivers again and reactivating. Otherwise, there's a phone number, and a nice human operator will fix your install.