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At the moment 100% of the editable documents I receive are in MS Office binary formats. Which are completely undocumented.

Bullshit.

There are two ways this can happen. One is that it stays totally undocumented and patent encumbered like the old Office binary format, which is still only fully supported by MS Office. The other is that they publish a standard and get the ISO stamp of approval. That means they publish a specification and allow other people to re implement it without fear of a lawsuit.

How would it not still be patent encumbered?

Well, except that it apparently isn't. The document you pointed to talks about Ecma standardization, not ISO standardization.

Also, I find it disgusting that you, like Microsoft, still seem to think that it's OK to just rubber-stamp something through as part of a means to an end.

The whole Government thing is bogus too. If they kept OOXML proprietary but convenient and provided inconvenient ODF support they can still end up with most people using OOXML.

Unless, y'know, they were required by law to use an open standard? Maybe an ISO standard? Maybe it would allow Ecma too, in which case, you've already got what you want.

Windows Storage Server 2003, Enterprise Edition has a 8 GB limit
Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Windows 64 GB
Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), Enterprise Edition 16 GB
Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition 128 GB and 16 GB
Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition 32 GB and 16 GB

So we agree that with PAE enabled it can be done, it just isn't done on 32 bit Vista.

and NT was already a good OS before that.

Not in the usability department, unless you were lucky with your hardware. NT was like your bad ex-girlfriend on meth when it came to getting devices to work. Installing a nic in my first ATX box was a ritual of installing the card, installing the divers, unplugging and reinstalling the card, and an agnostic prayer or two to any deity that might be listening. And that was a PCI ne2000 card, about the most generic chipset on the planet. Once you had everything installed and working, NT was a rock next to Win9x and Mac OS, but it was a chore to get it there.

2000 fixed all that, and imo is the best OS that Microsoft ever released. Their only real subsequent improvement they've made is instant user switching.

Also, before that, I would easily have argued that 95/98/ME was better than OS9

And I could just as easily argued that's not the case. 9x might have had memory segmentation, it still suffered from registry and dll hell, and crashed faster than Amy Whinehouse on a bender. Hell, even if you left a stock install alone after bootup, Windows would crash after 49.7 days.

But all quibbling aside, my basic point is that it's silly to rag on Apple for having not a usable, secure, stable OS when nobody else really had one either - NT was a pain, and good luck with Linux or BSD.

I remember one implementing RAM compression and a swapfile, so that you wouldn't get "out of memory" errors by running out of physical RAM. (The "compression" was the interesting part, to me.)

RamDoubler? I believe that was made by Connectix, which made also made Soundjam (which was bought by Apple and became iTunes) and VirtualPC, which was bought by Microsoft. But yeah, I don't think OS X had swap until OS 8.5 or 9.

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/open/opencharity.mspx

Oh, the irony! Or is it hypocrisy?

Visual C# Express, the XNA Game Studio Express tools and runtime environment for Windows are all FREE. To develop, debug and/or play games on the Xbox 360, however, you must have an XNA Creators Club subscription purchased directly from the Xbox Live Marketplace. Two subscription options are available: $99 per year or $49 per four months.

This was introduced in Vista in fact: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/wdf/umdf_intro.mspx

Of course not all drivers can be switched to this framework because the requirement to touch physical memory, register for ISRs, etc. But moving 3rd-party drivers to user-mode is definitely a good thing.

Are you stupid? You said there are VERSIONS that can only support databases of a certain size. There's ONE version that is limited to 4GB. The others have no such limit. And if you bothered to read even your link, you'd see that Developer is the Enterprise edition, except you can only use it for development reasons. Otherwise, its identitcal to Enterprise.

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/features/compare-features.mspx

And there's versions of MSSQL that only support databases of certain size.

There's ONE version, and it's free.

Sort of; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en

Abstract it. Write a version of the library that uses an semaphore to protect access to variables on most systems. On the ones you can test on use lock cmpxchg or the local equivalent instead. So the code will still be portable, just faster on the ones with the assembler. Hopefully you can test on x86 and x64 so your code will be fast on those. Other peoplem can contribute assembler on other architectures if they use them.

Actually some OSs do provide a portable version of lock cmpxchg

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683590(VS.85).aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc302329.aspx

The problem is it's not part of Posix.

Abstract it. Write a version of the library that uses an semaphore to protect access to variables on most systems. On the ones you can test on use lock cmpxchg or the local equivalent instead. So the code will still be portable, just faster on the ones with the assembler. Hopefully you can test on x86 and x64 so your code will be fast on those. Other peoplem can contribute assembler on other architectures if they use them.

Actually some OSs do provide a portable version of lock cmpxchg

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683590(VS.85).aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc302329.aspx

The problem is it's not part of Posix.

functional languages. It seems to me one of the most promising angles on this problem is the resurgence of functional languages such as haskell, list and f# and even the adoption of concepts from that world seen in languages such as python and so on. As for US and European interest, for example Microsoft Research have some excelent papers on possible solutions e.g. Software Transactional Memory http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/ STM for C# http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/6cfc842d-1c16-4739-afaf-edb35f544384/Details.aspx I personally suspect finely grained parallelism is unlikely for the forseeable future for reasons such as existing knowledge of employees and legacy code. But hybrid solutions such as shifting heavy computation to languages suited to easily writing concurrent code (e.g. F#) tying into imperative languages for the event driven side. E.g. C#. Who needs a massively parallel gui anyway? Very few applications right now.

functional languages. It seems to me one of the most promising angles on this problem is the resurgence of functional languages such as haskell, list and f# and even the adoption of concepts from that world seen in languages such as python and so on. As for US and European interest, for example Microsoft Research have some excelent papers on possible solutions e.g. Software Transactional Memory http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/ STM for C# http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/6cfc842d-1c16-4739-afaf-edb35f544384/Details.aspx I personally suspect finely grained parallelism is unlikely for the forseeable future for reasons such as existing knowledge of employees and legacy code. But hybrid solutions such as shifting heavy computation to languages suited to easily writing concurrent code (e.g. F#) tying into imperative languages for the event driven side. E.g. C#. Who needs a massively parallel gui anyway? Very few applications right now.

• Will Microsoft use activation to force me to upgrade? In other words, will Microsoft ever stop giving out activation codes for any of the products that require activation?

  No, Microsoft will not use activation as a tool to force people to upgrade. Activation is merely an anti-piracy tool, nothing else.

  Microsoft will also support the activation of Windows XP throughout its life and will likely provide an update that turns activation off at the end of the product's lifecycle so users would no longer be required to activate the product.

XP will live forever . It may not be supported with service packs, but you will still be able to use it, and purchase it.

http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx

XP licenses can be transferred indefinitely. You don't have to ever buy another XP license as long as you are getting rid of the older machine. As for drivers, there will be drivers for XP for at least another 10 years. I can still download Windows 2000 drivers; it's a safe bet there will be Windows XP drivers for quite a long time.

I also find it ironic that XP is about to be "dead" and certain manufacturers still don't have XP 64-bit driver support.

Activation has to be provided by Microsoft for as long as their are stickers out in the "wild". There are no contractual provisions for Microsoft to NOT provide activation. At some point, Microsoft may elect to just allow any request to be activated. Those service centers which run 24/7 giving out activation codes when too many activations have been performed on the license don't run cheap. There is no alternative however. To not provide activation denies a customer the ability to run the operating system that they paid for.

Unless I am really clueless, which is possible since I do have some pretty spectacular "DUH" moments, the EULA does not provide a time frame or conditions for them to discontinue activation.

It will be even worse in corporations, since there is a pretty good rebellion going against Vista right now in the workplaces. That is just what I can see, I am not trying to start a war here :)

My point though is that corporations are even more aware, and more sophisticated about licenses, COA's , CALS, TS CALS, etc. and are far more likely to transfer a XP license from an older machine to a newer machine rather then purchase a newer OS like Vista.

So no, XP is not going to die. Far from it. This is just another article stirring up blogs like rocks hitting a wasp's nest.

"disabling activation"

4. TRANSFER--Internal. You may move the Product to a different Workstation Computer. After the transfer, you must completely remove the Product from the former Workstation Computer.

I think you might be close, but consider this

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/java/faq.mspx

It may be legally problematic for MS to support BluRay on the 360 because doing so requires them to ship a java implementation.

What are they going to do, take a bunch of crap out?

It's funny you should mention that.

TCP/IP over firewire support? Gone.

APIs for useful Explorer customisation? Gone. (That extension, which I found infinitely useful, not only doesn't work but has no hope of ever working thanks to an API change).

I'm sure I would have found more stuff I liked that they took out, but at this point I formatted my laptop and installed XP SP2. I actually didn't mind the UAC and other stuff people complain about (and it all ran quite smoothly despite many people who would convince you otherwise - albeit this was on a pretty decked out laptop). Having said that, XP not only runs faster but actually has the features that I care about and which I've become quite accustomed to. What used to be "upgrade to the latest OS and take the bugs and performance hit to have the latest features" is now "downgrade to the previous OS which is more stable and performs better to keep the *cough* latest features (which are 3 years old)".

XP requirements: 300 MHz recommended, 233 required. 128MB recommended, 64MB required. 1.5 GB HD space.

Vista requirements:1 GHz recommended, 800MHz required. 1GB recommended, 512 required. 15GB HD space.

Now, let's forget for a moment that Vista doesn't actually work with the recommended specs. After all, XP was a dog at the recommended minimum. A real spec for Vista is apparently 2GHz, 2GB, 15 GB.

So for 10x the spec what do you get besides a fancy new desktop theme? Anything? Besides a horde of devices that don't work with the new os, I mean.

XP requirements: 300 MHz recommended, 233 required. 128MB recommended, 64MB required. 1.5 GB HD space.

Vista requirements:1 GHz recommended, 800MHz required. 1GB recommended, 512 required. 15GB HD space.

Now, let's forget for a moment that Vista doesn't actually work with the recommended specs. After all, XP was a dog at the recommended minimum. A real spec for Vista is apparently 2GHz, 2GB, 15 GB.

So for 10x the spec what do you get besides a fancy new desktop theme? Anything? Besides a horde of devices that don't work with the new os, I mean.

Error console seems to be something underutilized, my coworkers are always asking why their script is broke, I just pop the console open and the answer is shown in red letters.

Oh yeah, and I believe IE has something similar too, I have it on my machine at work, if an error pops up, the tool leads straight to the offending line. Maybe this is it? I can't remember - and I'm not going to fire up IE on my home machine to find out.

Ignore the previous sentence, looks like I found it:

Script debugging is turned off by default you can enable it by going to:
Tools->Internet Options...->Advanced->Disable Script Debugging
Prior to XPSP2 the above will turn script debugging on for all applications that host the WebBrowser control (Outlook for example).
On XPSP2 we've split the option into two:
Tools->Internet Options...->Advanced->Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)
Tools->Internet Options...->Advanced->Disable Script Debugging (Other)

As a side note, I don't recall a time when I've had script errors in IE that I didn't have in FF. Most of the time I'm dealing with the occasional strange CSS inheritance behavior that IE loves so much.

There are a few reasons for the impression that Windows seems to scatter data all over the place:

1) Sloppy programming by application developers - not all applications use "My Documents". Not directly Microsoft's fault, but here Linux profits from its origins as Unix-like system:
In the Unix world, it is taken for granted that the user may only write to /home/, and applications respect that. Windows still suffers a bit from its history as unsecured system, where everybody was administrator and could write all over the place. Some applications took advantage of that, and this behavior is not completely weeded out yet.

2) Data redirection:
A questionable methods on Microsoft's part to fix problems with 1) in Vista.
See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160980.aspx for an overview. In short, Vista will silently redirect attempts to write to "forbidden" places to a place in the user's profile. This prevents the application from corrupting the system, but has of course side effects. For instance, take a group of users who used the same application in older Windows versions and were used to sharing data through a common directory (for instance a subdirectory of the installation directory). Now user A cannot see the data of user B anymore, and I doubt an average user will understand what has happened here ;-)

The article mentions only the latest OS that are supported.

If i look at the release notes, even fewer OS are supported:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3ED582F0-F844-40BA-B692-230845AF1149&displaylang=en

What you often see is that virtualisation is used to put old application that are only reliable on old but unsupported OS (like windows 2000 or NT 4.0) run on virtualized hardware.

So i bet they the list of operating OS will be longer. ( win98, NT4.0, windows 2000 server, old SP1 XP1 to mention a few)

If these are not SUPPORTED however then for big corporations will take a look at the competitors for a virtialisation server that supports old OS.

But why would a Microsoft only shop want/need virtualization ?

I imagine that a vast majority of hyper-v's customers will be those who want to run two OS-es on one system, and lets face it - the OS they're most likely to want to virtualize on a windows machine will be Linux.

I still don't understand what they mean by "supported" though. How can this *only* work for SuSe ?

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/virtualization-consolidation.aspx

"
Introducing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems--Windows, Linux, and others--in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.

Key Features of Hyper-V:

        * New and Improved Architecture. New 64-bit micro-kernelized hypervisor architecture enables Hyper-V to provide a broad array of device support methods and improved performance and security.
        * Broad OS Support. Broad support for simultaneously running different types of operating systems, including 32-bit and 64-bit systems across different server platforms, such as Windows, Linux, and others.
        * Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMP) Support. Ability to support up to four multiple processors in a virtual machine environment enables you to take full advantage of multi-threaded applications in a virtual machine.
        * Network Load Balancing. Hyper-V includes new virtual switch capabilities. This means virtual machines can be easily configured to run with Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) Service to balance load across virtual machines on different servers.
        * Hardware Sharing Architecture. With the new virtual service provider/virtual service client (VSP/VSC) architecture, Hyper-V provides improved access and utilization of core resources, such as disk, networking, and video.
        * Quick Migration. Hyper-V enables you to rapidly migrate a running virtual machine from one physical host system to another with minimal downtime, leveraging familiar high-availability capabilities of Windows Server and System Center management tools.
        * Virtual Machine Snapshot. Hyper-V provides the ability to take snapshots of a running virtual machine so you can easily revert to a previous state, and improve the overall backup and recoverability solution.
        * Scalability. With support for multiple processors and cores at the host level and improved memory access within virtual machines, you can now vertically scale your virtualization environment to support a large number of virtual machines within a given host and continue to leverage quick migration for scalability across multiple hosts.
        * Extensible. Standards-based Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interfaces and APIs in Hyper-V enable independent software vendors and developers to quickly build custom tools, utilities, and enhancements for the virtualization platform.
"

Could it be that only SUSE is 'officialy' supported and that other Operating Sytems will work anyway? It seems that the major requirement for Linux (including SUSE) is a 'Xen-Enabled' kernel.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-faq.aspx

4m37s vs. 14s could, potentially, be merely the difference between skillful and unskillful database administration.

It could be... but I admitted that was a possibility. :-)

All three solve the same problem (ie: the report in question) which MUST (by law) utilize the same data, calculate it the exact same way, come up with the exact same results... so no, there is no difference there. Some of each tables are not needed for the report - and arent called at all. The others (which are called) require the same exact data...

not like .NET plugs right into MySQL or Postgres.

Well, I understand what you are saying, but I also believe there is a real shortage of skilled workers in this country.

For example, Microsoft has 4643 open positions right now. Check for yourself here (might need to get a free Live/hotmail account): http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/default.aspx

As to the anti-OOXML side, I would recommend you look at: http://www.noooxml.org/ this site does an excellent job at detailing numerous flaws in the OOXML standard, and numerous irregularities in the ISO OOXML acceptance process.

But it is only fair to understand Microsoft's point of view as well: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/ChrisCapOpenLetter.mspx

I have considered both viewpoints. IMO: the OOXML standard is just another msft scam. Msft is continuing to abuse its monopoloy position, and aggressively fighting to maintain and extend its monolopy position.

But, that is just my opinion. Please consider both sides of the arguement, and come to your own conclusions.

I've had non-fatal driver crashes several dozen times, but only one hard crash requiring a forced reboot.

the video driver crashes were mostly caused by this:
KB940105

the hard crash I'm not sure about, but because I'm pretty sure the kernel was hosed (graphics went to garbage, sound in repeating loop, no way to change apps). I'm 99% sure it was video driver related in some way (I was watching full screen video at the time with several apps including VS2008 and Firefox running in the background). That is exactly 1 more hard crash than my oldest XP box has had in 5 years (which is to say I've never hard crashed that XP box, though my dual boot Linux/XP had a bunch of BSODs when a memory chip went bad). OTOH, my mom and dad can crash XP and Vista daily, and third party software has a lot to do with it. When you throttle your system with background crap like Weatherbug and 15 million similar apps you're bound to have some conflicts (they had over 100 items in their system tray when I cleaned it last - wtf?).

It doesnt.

Post as plain text, and it comes out fine (like this post).

You can even use simle HTML codes in plain old text posting, like Microsoft.

If I still worked at CompUSA (if there was even still one around), I'd be sure to let Microsoft who had a big part in writing it, know. Part of the software was Siebel's (ie: Siebel/MS joint project) and the other part was Microsoft's (ie: Microsoft's).

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/oct05/10-17SiebelAssemblyNETPR.mspx

Your experiences do not jive with numerous complaints about .Net/MsSQL's poor performance - nor with my experiences. But don't take that the wrong way - I am not saying your experiences are untrue. You probably have a setup that works under different load conditions... ours (CompUSA's) worked under conditions where 229 stores were connected to the database - a scenario where the MS products do not seem to scale up to very well (while oddly, Postgres, MySQL and DB/2 handle with ease).

Other situations I have compared with are custom EMS database engines... I have compared (using the exact same data) results on two different locally run with local data MSSQL setups with a MySQL setup through a network with an interpreted REXX engine generating the same reports).

MSSQL: 4min 37sec.

MySQL: 14 seconds (including network time and an 80,000 line HTML report being sent).

The report reads a LOT of data and generates MANY pages of output - hence the 80,000 lines of HTML.

The results were not even remotely close. Both MSSQL based software were written and compiled using MS's Tools, accessing local data via the local, compiled program... (while the REXX engine is just interpreted - through a web server no less - over a network from the client to the database and report engine). Now it is possible BOTH companies just did a very poor job in writing their software - while I did a better job (I wont claim to be great at db stuff, but I do like optimization planning when creating a table or search query). One of the competitor's software used a database structure very similar to ours (but who knows what weird stuff was being done in the query) - while the other one uses 126 tables for the same data (compared to mine and the other's 9 tables)... and all 3 (mine and theirs) required "sorting", loading, and calculating the reports from the entire data set (ie: it's not like they were grabbing too much data - they and I both have to grab all of the data to generate the report).

Your experiences apparently vary... but those are two of mine (one where there are a couple hundred users, the other with one user at a time, and an identical data set).

Maybe. But to my eyes this looks better: Office Online Home Page

MD5 or SHA1. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457006.aspx#EMAA for more details.

Try http://microsoft.com/

They have a lot of positive, and useful things to say about Microsoft products. In fact, they are so pro-Microsoft, you'd think they made Windows...

Microsoft even has a list of drivers that will cause the SP1 update to be unavailable for some users -- that was very handy for me in figuring out why SP1 wasn't showing up. Perusing the rest of that link shows some other reasons why users might not see the SP1 update as being available.

I had to go manually download and install two drivers. While it would have been nice for those to show up in Windows update as well it wasn't terribly painful. For anyone needing to update the Intel 965 drivers, I downloaded the ZIP file (the .EXE installer complained about the driver not being certified or some nonsense for my machine) and pointed the driver updater to the .INF file to get it installed. No issues so far...

Right here buddy: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B0C7136D-5EBB-413B-89C9-CB3D06D12674&displaylang=en

I don't at all have the idea that an SP is a roll-up, the GP did. I was disabusing him of that notion.

Seems pretty accurate to me, or at least likely to be. Look under Cause 5. It's a handful of drivers, it's not like Microsoft is taking some sort of shotgun approach here.

I'm sure they deem things incompatible by ouija board.

You can check the complete list of incompatible drivers here (under "Method for Cause 5"):

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=948343

This isn't a for-pay whitelist, they are blacklisting software that conflicts in some manner with SP1 causing system instability or more general malfunction. There's a word for that. Incompatible. This "pay us and we'll certify you" fantasy is a wild conspiracy theory.

You can download and install SP1 from microsoft.com yourself, along with installing said drivers, if you want to verify this.

There are 8 reasons SP1 may not appear if you check WU:
1. You are already running Windows Vista SP1.
2. Windows Vista SP1 has not been released for the language of the language pack that you have installed.
3. Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool is used to block the delivery of Windows Vista SP1 from Automatic Updates or from Windows Update.
4. You tried to install Windows Vista SP1, and the installation failed with a known inconsistency in the file or registry structure.
5. A hardware device driver or device software was problematic when you updated to Windows Vista SP1. The Windows Update service can detect the small set of device drivers and software that falls into this category. The Windows Update service will not offer Windows Vista SP1 until an update for the hardware device driver or the device software has been installed.
6. You have installed a prerelease version of Windows Vista SP1, and you must uninstall the prerelease version, or start with a new installation of Windows Vista.
7.You used the third-party program vLite to configure the system, and you may have removed required system components that have to be available for Windows Vista SP1 to be installed.
8. You see one or more updates for Windows Vista when you run Windows Update. However, you do not see Windows Vista SP1 listed.


At that website are further causes for those 8 reasons, but the specifically mentioned drivers that block SP1 are:

Audio drivers
Realtek AC'97
For x86-based computers: Alcxwdm.sys - version 6.0.1.6242 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Alcwdm64.sys - version 6.0.1.6242 or earlier

SigmaTel
For x86-based computers: Sthda.sys - version 5.10.5762.0 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Sthda64.sys - version 5.10.5762.0 or earlier

SigmaTel
For x86-based computers: Stwrt.sys - version 6.10.5511.0 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Stwrt64.sys - version 6.10.5511.0 or earlier

Creative Audigy
For x86-based and x64-based computers: Ctaud2k.sys - version 6.0.1.1242 or earlier
For x86-based computers: P17.sys all versions (This was originally a Windows XP-based driver.)

Conexant HD Audio
For x86-based computers: Chdart.sys - version 4.32.0.0 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Chdart64.sys - version 4.32.0.0 or earlier

Biometric (Fingerprint) Sensors
AuthenTec Fingerprint Sensor with the Atswpdrv.sys driver file version 7.7.1.7 or earlier
UPEK Fingerprint Sensor with the Tcusb.sys driver file version 1.9.2.99 or earlier

Display drivers
Intel Display
For x86-based computers: Igdkmd32.sys versions between and including driver 7.14.10.1322 and 7.14.10.1403
For x64-based computers: Igdkmd64.sys versions between and including driver 7.14.10.1322 and 7.14.10.1403

Other drivers
Texas Instruments Smart Card Controller with the GTIPCI21.sys driver file version 1.0.1.19 or earlier
Sierra Wireless AirCard 580 with the Watcher.exe application version 3.4.0.9 or earlier (This application is located in the AirCard 580 Program Files folder.) Symantec software driver for Symantec Endpoint Protection and for Symantec Network Access Control clients]
For x86-based computers: Wgx.sys versions 11.0.1000.1091 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Wgx64.sys versions 11.0.1000.1091 or earlier

As explained here, and detailed in this knowledge base, MS actually had a halfway decent reason behind it.

There are 8 reasons SP1 may not appear if you check WU: 1. You are already running Windows Vista SP1. 2. Windows Vista SP1 has not been released for the language of the language pack that you have installed. 3. Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool is used to block the delivery of Windows Vista SP1 from Automatic Updates or from Windows Update. 4. You tried to install Windows Vista SP1, and the installation failed with a known inconsistency in the file or registry structure. 5. A hardware device driver or device software was problematic when you updated to Windows Vista SP1. The Windows Update service can detect the small set of device drivers and software that falls into this category. The Windows Update service will not offer Windows Vista SP1 until an update for the hardware device driver or the device software has been installed. 6. You have installed a prerelease version of Windows Vista SP1, and you must uninstall the prerelease version, or start with a new installation of Windows Vista. 7.You used the third-party program vLite to configure the system, and you may have removed required system components that have to be available for Windows Vista SP1 to be installed. 8. You see one or more updates for Windows Vista when you run Windows Update. However, you do not see Windows Vista SP1 listed. At that website are further causes for those 8 reasons, but the specifically mentioned drivers that block SP1 are: Audio drivers Realtek AC'97 For x86-based computers: Alcxwdm.sys - version 6.0.1.6242 or earlier For x64-based computers: Alcwdm64.sys - version 6.0.1.6242 or earlier SigmaTel For x86-based computers: Sthda.sys - version 5.10.5762.0 or earlier For x64-based computers: Sthda64.sys - version 5.10.5762.0 or earlier SigmaTel For x86-based computers: Stwrt.sys - version 6.10.5511.0 or earlier For x64-based computers: Stwrt64.sys - version 6.10.5511.0 or earlier Creative Audigy For x86-based and x64-based computers: Ctaud2k.sys - version 6.0.1.1242 or earlier For x86-based computers: P17.sys all versions (This was originally a Windows XP-based driver.) Conexant HD Audio For x86-based computers: Chdart.sys - version 4.32.0.0 or earlier For x64-based computers: Chdart64.sys - version 4.32.0.0 or earlier Biometric (Fingerprint) Sensors AuthenTec Fingerprint Sensor with the Atswpdrv.sys driver file version 7.7.1.7 or earlier UPEK Fingerprint Sensor with the Tcusb.sys driver file version 1.9.2.99 or earlier Display drivers Intel Display For x86-based computers: Igdkmd32.sys versions between and including driver 7.14.10.1322 and 7.14.10.1403 For x64-based computers: Igdkmd64.sys versions between and including driver 7.14.10.1322 and 7.14.10.1403 Other drivers Texas Instruments Smart Card Controller with the GTIPCI21.sys driver file version 1.0.1.19 or earlier Sierra Wireless AirCard 580 with the Watcher.exe application version 3.4.0.9 or earlier (This application is located in the AirCard 580 Program Files folder.) Symantec software driver for Symantec Endpoint Protection and for Symantec Network Access Control clients] For x86-based computers: Wgx.sys versions 11.0.1000.1091 or earlier For x64-based computers: Wgx64.sys versions 11.0.1000.1091 or earlier

It seems like a great thing, but we don't know how they deem things incompatible. MS, in theory, has a big list of compatible hardware (which seems to be down atm, but providing an article with a link for completeness); however, for all we know it's one of those "Pay us and we'll 'certify' your software as Windows Compat, wink wink", just like the Nintendo Seal of Approval from all those years ago. Are these actually incompatible peripherals, or has the company making the hardware just not coughed up enough in fees to be deemed compatible?

C++.Net is though. What's your point?

I'm guessing you run the 32-bit version of Vista? SP1 includes this patch.

That's only a temporary solution however. Games like "The Witcher" run out of virtual address space on a patched 32-bit Vista, and the only permanent (at least for the foreseeable future) way to solve the problem is a 64-bit OS.

Umm; FileStream?

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filestream.aspx

It is just as easy (if not easier) as the f* methods of C.

I still prefer Perl though; I have yet to figure out how to open a pipe to stdin or stdout of some other app in another language.