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Visual Studio Guy is the Green Lantern, MSDN Webcast Guy is Superman, Virtual Labs Guy is The Flash. I don't see credit on there anywhere, and this is definitely a marketing thing (not a parody).

I think MSDN Webcast Guy's tagline says it best, "His parents weren't very creative."

Visual Studio Guy is the Green Lantern, MSDN Webcast Guy is Superman, Virtual Labs Guy is The Flash. I don't see credit on there anywhere, and this is definitely a marketing thing (not a parody).

I think MSDN Webcast Guy's tagline says it best, "His parents weren't very creative."

Visual Studio Guy is the Green Lantern, MSDN Webcast Guy is Superman, Virtual Labs Guy is The Flash. I don't see credit on there anywhere, and this is definitely a marketing thing (not a parody).

I think MSDN Webcast Guy's tagline says it best, "His parents weren't very creative."

The best part is when you click "Watch Them in Action!" and it takes you to a page.

Now, a lot of sites have this crazy idea of embedded video that streams from a site or source that's dedicated to streaming video. You know like YouTube, Blip.tv or any of the .tv sites really. Does Microsoft utilize any of those freely available options? Oh no, of course not! YouTube is Google! Even if we don't have a competing solution we must not use theirs!

So what happens when you click "view"? Well, it creates a popup window that opens up Windows Media Player! Good luck viewing a .asx file all you non-Windows users.

The least Microsoft could do is create their own streaming video server but, alas, we must revert to our archaic mentality, reject all that is sensible and invade my privacy and comfort zone by automatically opening a program that is tied to the kernel (and at least historically had admin rights when I didn't) sitting in kernel land on my computer.

Assistant: Mr. Ballmer! Research indicates that Richard Stallman is 50% more cuddly than you!
Ballmer: Damnit ... must be his hair. Well, we'll see about that! Put the action figures I've hand crafted here immediately into production! Release plush dolls of clippy! Find me puppies to carry around with me at press conferences and when their cute factor falls below 40%, have them killed and replaced!

The PC is the mainframe... The people worrying about MS Exchange are like mainframe developers predicting or worrying about some obscure business application. It's irrelevant. You're 3, 5 years behind the times already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(mobile_phone_platform)
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8591201260.html
http://www.symbian.com/phones/index.html

This is the now, not the future, Microsoft have already lost, and they have admitted it. All their Windows mobile devices?

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/pocketpc/default.mspx?curPg=All

Almost all, industrial applications.

All you need to know about Free/Open Source Software is that its intended to destroy America. Please, only support pro-America companies like Microsoft.

Just read the great Vista EULA and compare to that anti-American GNU license.

E-meter for sale - cheap! Only $2.95! Just call +46 8 752 56 00 or

You're tricking people into calling Microsoft Sweden & asking for E-meters?

How's that going to teach the scientologists a lesson?

Somebody in there is having a good try.

He is highly thought of as one of the most powerful warriors alive. Although he is still young, Windows Vista Sensei is said to possess different strengths and confidence not known to anyone.

So when we point out the inadequacies of current email clients, our criticisms of Outlook Express should be updated to criticisms of Windows Live Mail.

Hmm, need to have registered an email address with Microsoft LiveID. Nah, just make me a new one. More spam fodder.

Verify my school against the list here. No go, just the big universities listed. Oh, but there's another way!

So, purchase a free item from JourneyEd, and we'll get an email with authorization to download. Sure, click-click.

Oh, look. "VeriClick - The easiest way to provide proof of your academic status." For the low price of $2.95, we'll look into our master database of registered students from 1,500 colleges and see if you're in there. Or I can email or fax proof for free. I'm sure the verification process will take at least a week or so.

New account with JourneyEd, usual account information. Skipped the payment step, that's good.

Apparently, nobody told JourneyEd about this, their webserver is full of molasses. I can't go any farther right now.

Well, there's always the MSDNAA (It looks like a troll), where for the low fee of $799 we'll send you discs for the campus (or $499 for download only). Still have to get keys from MSDN web server.

This is not looking free in time or money.

Visual Studio is built that way too, you could build a drawing program on top of Visual Studio Shell.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vsx2008/products/bb933751.aspx

They do give away the code to the Windows kernel:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/researchkernel.mspx

Actually, they do for academic research purposes.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/WindowsAcademic.mspx, namely the kernel.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/researchkernel.mspx

Actually, they do for academic research purposes.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/WindowsAcademic.mspx, namely the kernel.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/researchkernel.mspx

From the horse's mouth, actually : http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/security/news/efs.mspx?mfr=true

It's a very spinny article, of course.

The algorithms uses are, by and large, peer-reviewed ones believed to be implemented securely (i.e. 3DES, AES, etc), so thsoe people you know would probably be right on that front (though I obviously can't check the source code myself; this is not an empty "open source is better than X" proclamation, but rather a cold, hard fact in cryptology : if the source is not there to be examined, you can't be sure that there aren't implementation weaknesses that could be exploited. In this field, this is major; for instance, if by some unthought-of chain of events the cleartext encryption key ever gets swapped to disk, the game is over, no need to break the strong crypto itself ...)

By default, EFS stores a copy of the encryption key for the administrator of the machine (or domain administrator if in a domain). In the latter case the recovery key does not reside on the local machine, in the former case it does. This is default behavior. While it's documented, it really should not be DEFAULT behavior. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223316&sd=tech lists some best practices you should follow for EFS. The first best practice starts with the words "Teach users to". This is a bad idea, no matter what follows.

As I noted, it's /possible/ to make EFS reasonably secure.

From the horse's mouth, actually : http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/security/news/efs.mspx?mfr=true

It's a very spinny article, of course.

The algorithms uses are, by and large, peer-reviewed ones believed to be implemented securely (i.e. 3DES, AES, etc), so thsoe people you know would probably be right on that front (though I obviously can't check the source code myself; this is not an empty "open source is better than X" proclamation, but rather a cold, hard fact in cryptology : if the source is not there to be examined, you can't be sure that there aren't implementation weaknesses that could be exploited. In this field, this is major; for instance, if by some unthought-of chain of events the cleartext encryption key ever gets swapped to disk, the game is over, no need to break the strong crypto itself ...)

By default, EFS stores a copy of the encryption key for the administrator of the machine (or domain administrator if in a domain). In the latter case the recovery key does not reside on the local machine, in the former case it does. This is default behavior. While it's documented, it really should not be DEFAULT behavior. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223316&sd=tech lists some best practices you should follow for EFS. The first best practice starts with the words "Teach users to". This is a bad idea, no matter what follows.

As I noted, it's /possible/ to make EFS reasonably secure.

The triplets were born at a university hospital, therefore the Campus and School Agreement clearly applies.

Photoshop is just shorthand for "every mature application that hasn't been ported to Linux." The graphics pro, the small businessman, the home user, each has his own list of essentials.

Try searching Linspire's CNR library for a Print Shop clone.

2/ No GAMES
Companies don't want people to play games.

But you'll find games in schools and in the home and in the military. America's Army is used as a recruiting tool. SimCity was an early port to OLPC.

3/ No MS Office
So you simply use OpenOffice

Or not. Microsoft used a jigsaw puzzle as a logo for its Office system - and there are a lot of pieces in that box that the Geek forgets to mention when he talks about OpenOffice.org. Office Accounting Exoress

No shit, Sherlock!!

READ THIS CAREFULLY. THE PROBLEM ISN'T WITH SP1. THE PROBLEM IS WITH A BUNCH OF UPDATES RELEASED BY MICROSOFT IN ADVANCE OF THE RELEASE OF SP1. ONE OF THESE UPDATES TOTALLY F**KS YOUR COMPUTER.

Now, more calmly. The updates downloaded and installed onto my puter on Saturday via Windows auto updates. They need a reboot to configure and install, so you don't see the effects until your next restart. Sunday morning and I had a computer that was completely stuck in a loop for 5 hours before I finally pulled the plug.

Microsopt have now acknowledged that one of these updates is the problem. You are left with a system which is as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

Solution
1. Boot into safe mode if you can (I could).

2. Find a system restore point - I had to roll back to 6th Feb

3. SWITCH OF AUTO UPDATES OR YOU'LL BE BACK WHERE YOU STARTED

4. Residual effect is that keyboard driver irretrievably trashed, have no spacebar, return or backspace, so using another keyboard with a different driver.

5. Check out

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2748299&SiteID=17

This will tell you all you need to know.

Suffice to say that the site has had 28,000 hits so far.

Microsoft have issued a single statement confirming the problem and that are investigation.

JUST TO REPEAT FOR THE HARD OF THINKING, THIS IS NOT SP1, THIS WAS UDATES REQUIRED IF YOU ARE GOING TO INSTALL SP1 WHEN IT IS FINALLY RELEASED. THESE UPDATES WERE RELEASED BY MICROSOFT AND AUTOMATICALLY INSTALLED ON YOUR PUTER IF YOU HAD AUTO UPDATES ENABLED. THERE IS NO PIRATING INVOLVED. THERE ARE NO DODGY SITES INVOLVED. MICROSOFT HAVE RELEASED A CRITICAL UPDATE WHICH TRASHES YOUR PUTER.

Now I can only assume that there have been very few posts since Friday because all of you lot who stated that problems were due to people trying to pirate SP1 are now unable to get your puters to boot, let alone get on-line because tyou pooh-poohed the whole thing. OK, the title of thhe article is misleading, but if you'd bothered to read any of the posts from affected users, you would have seen that this was a huge problem and bog all do do with pirating.

To rub salt into the wound, this problem was discovered when SP1 RC was released to beta testers. The testers had to install the 6 prerequisite updates before they could install SP1. They hit the same wall. Yet Microsoft have done nothing about this problem and have released it as an automatic update. You really couldn't make this up.

I'm now faced with a 150Gb backup and a clean re-install of Vista, except that the microsoft update has trashed so much of my system that I can't boot from the recovery partition or even the recovery DVD.

2 hrs on the phone to Dell and another 2 to Microsoft. Nether can sort it and Microsoft admit it is their problem!!!!! I certainly wasn't the first caller today and I don't think I was the last.

I'm sorry if I've come over a bit sharp, but I've just spent 36 hours dealing with a problem that some of you say doesn't exist. Thanks for the help, folks, I'll be going to a site which has people who know what they're talking about, rather than coming here to be told it's my own fault because I did something that I didn't even do in the first place. Grow up!!

Yay! Nothing like the combination of XML and Java to bring out the haters. Incompetent use of a language/API doesn't equate to a bad language/API. I can show you plenty of crappy C/C++ code freely browsable in some open source libraries. Does that mean C++ sucks? Hell no.

My experience with Java+XML you ask? OFX servers for financial institutions. Without name dropping, check out the list of banks, brokerages, tax services, and credit card providers (Quicken) out there successfully serving up client data. I guess we're all circle jerking while you're downloading your account information into Quicken or Money.

Some good uses for XML:

• Ephemeral representations of atomic, structured data; usually for transport.
• Config files. More verbose and the syntax is far better at keeping you from fat fingering a setting and blowing up your app. If you can't clearly read XML, you need glasses.

Some bad uses for XML:

• High volume, rapid response data streams; like say an on-line multiplayer game (though I've never benchmarked this)
• Unbounded data streams; e.g. streaming media
• Databases

I have to admit, I'm clueless about your Java dependency issues. The only way I can see that ever happening is if you're dumping all of your classes into the default top-level package; and that's major user error if you are.

Yay! Nothing like the combination of XML and Java to bring out the haters. Incompetent use of a language/API doesn't equate to a bad language/API. I can show you plenty of crappy C/C++ code freely browsable in some open source libraries. Does that mean C++ sucks? Hell no.

My experience with Java+XML you ask? OFX servers for financial institutions. Without name dropping, check out the list of banks, brokerages, tax services, and credit card providers (Quicken) out there successfully serving up client data. I guess we're all circle jerking while you're downloading your account information into Quicken or Money.

Some good uses for XML:

• Ephemeral representations of atomic, structured data; usually for transport.
• Config files. More verbose and the syntax is far better at keeping you from fat fingering a setting and blowing up your app. If you can't clearly read XML, you need glasses.

Some bad uses for XML:

• High volume, rapid response data streams; like say an on-line multiplayer game (though I've never benchmarked this)
• Unbounded data streams; e.g. streaming media
• Databases

I have to admit, I'm clueless about your Java dependency issues. The only way I can see that ever happening is if you're dumping all of your classes into the default top-level package; and that's major user error if you are.

This article makes a similar point. I kept looking around for it, but I never thought I'd find it on Microsoft's own site :-)

No folks, Ballmer is Google Obsessed. Making money and core business no longer seem to matter for him. Attacking Google (profitably or not) is all he cared about. He'll spend 40-odd bn for Yahoo, but put 5bn into developing Vista (core business). He's just bought Danger (a deliberate attempt at Google Android).

The dumb thing though is that Yahoo is a sinking ship and buying them would only give a small cosmetic market share.

Well, the names have changed for one thing. There is Web (for R1 only), Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions. From the horse's mouth:

R2 Standard Edition supports up to 4 processors

R2 Enterprise Edition supports up to 8 processors

R2 Datacenter Edition supports up to 32/64 processors depending whether the CPUs are 32-bit or 64-bit.

MS used to require Data Center to not even install on anything that had less than 16 CPUs if I remember correctly but based on the above it seems that they allow it but you would be wasting your money by doing anything less than 32 CPUs with it.

Ha ha, funny, but why would it matter? This is a single socket we're talking about, so unless Microsoft has changed their licensing to per-core as opposed to per-socket (and AFAIK, they haven't), this is a non-issue.

This will probably not be read but:

"For the last 10 years Microsoft has also made available freeware viewer programs, but only for Windows, that can read Word documents without a full version of the MS Word software.[8] Microsoft has also provided converters that enable different versions of Word to import and export to older Word versions and other formats and converters for older Word versions to read documents created in newer Word formats.[9] The whole Office product range is covered by the Office Converter Pack for Office 97-2003 and Office Compatibility Pack for Office 2000-2007 since the release of Office 2007.[10]"

An excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word
Which is what my original link points to. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en
A free viewer provided by microsoft

No one I know, nor me, use openDNS, right now, BUT, I am looking into pointing to it for my systems, and my clients. It looks VERY interesting.

Ahhahah! How up to date are openDNS machines? I would guess sate of the art, but let me poke around their DNS server...Well, the pokeing indicates that security is at the higest levels, ( of course ), and I have opened a discussion with them regarding their maintenence.

BIND is currently at 9.4.2, and 8.2.x was the one vunerable, and IIs

Hehe! Look at this:

http://vdb.dragonsoft.com/detail.php?id=3028

"ISC BIND 9 - 9.5.0a are exist remote cache poisoning vulnerability, caused by the DNS query ID generation code."

This site:

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/927905

Lists Microsoft Windows as 'Not Vunerable"

"Thank you for the heads up. While we do use the BIND protocol, we have our own implementation so these implementation-specific vulnerabilities should not affect us."

But of course, this proves that the above is a mistatement...

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-3898

"The DNS server in Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP4, and Server 2003 SP1 and SP2, uses predictable transaction IDs when querying other DNS servers, which allows remote attackers to spoof DNS replies, poison the DNS cache, and facilitate further attack vectors."

The Patch for servers is:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms07-062.mspx
( Nice of them to patch a vunerability that they claim they dont have! )

From http://www.microsoft.com/msft/financial/default.mspx

Income Statements 1985-2008

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/download/Income%20Statements.xls

You could argue they had issues from 2001-2005, but can you honestly say they haven't been on a roll lately?

From http://www.microsoft.com/msft/financial/default.mspx

Income Statements 1985-2008

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/download/Income%20Statements.xls

You could argue they had issues from 2001-2005, but can you honestly say they haven't been on a roll lately?

You'll want to set the NoDriveTypeAutorun registry value in HKLM to 0xFF. This will disable Autorun/Autoplay for all device types. What's interesting, though, is that according to that article, the default configuration for Windows is to disable Autorun for removable disks that aren't "CD" devices. What's not clear is whether this digital picture frame actually does automatically run, or whether it requires the user to double-click on the device icon in Windows explorer. (The latter of which will run software on the frame, regardless of AutoRun settings).

However, if your goal is to make a change that is malware-resistant, forget it! If you've already got malicious code on your system, it's game over. It can make any software changes that it likes.

Wrong. It's available to MSDN users http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb898842.aspx

They've actually fixed the two bugs I reported - domain prefixes not working properly and slow network transfer over gigabit ethernet.

Yes it is. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb898842.aspx

MSDN users is a heck of a lot of people.. basically means it's available to nearly everyone that works in IT.

It probably won't be on automatic updates for a few days so in that sense the story is wrong - but it's not unfeasable at all that he's installed RTM and had this issue.

It's been released for MSDN members already. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb898842.aspx

I find it difficult to believe that they'd wait until march for the public release.

The public SP1 is available but it's not in the normal place - in fact I have it on a vmware machine right now. They've fixed the bugs I reported... I'm currently looking for more :p

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb898842.aspx

http://slashdot.org/ This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Result: Failed validation, 7 Errors http://kernel.org/ This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Result: Failed validation, 6 Errors http://wikipedia.org/ This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Result: Failed validation, 15 Errors http://www.fsf.org/ This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Result: Failed validation, 27 Errors Lets not forget, though... http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Result: Failed validation, 29 Errors

There is a lot of BS in this forum. Let me say once and for all that SP1 is available NOW for MSDN and Technet subscribers.

There are three downloads, a DVD image, an x86 .exe and an x64 .exe.

Read here if you don't believe me:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb898842.aspx [microsoft.com]

In addition the "news" report about install issues was gleaned from a forum that was discussing the earlier RC build of SP1, this is NOT the final SP1 that is available now.

H

that's a different problem, and from most of the symptoms it sounds like bad memory (except the reboot in BIOS - that doesn't use system memory and suggests a BIOS defect or other problem such as overheating). My machine has the latest manufacturer BIOS and ran happily from DVD boot and most of the people reporting this problem have similar symptoms to mine.

This one is consistently the same thing
Post Beep
Load BIOS
watch Ethernet numbers appear as it connects
wait 3s
reboot
(repeat)

in your case you may want to download and burn MS memory diagnostic (or any other) and run it
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp
also try removing one

Of course There is no possible way that you may be able download a free document viewer that lets you read these types of files is there?
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en
That would be unheard of.

Not true. I downloaded SP1 yesterday, it is available NOW for MSDN and Technet subscribers.

There are three downloads, a DVD image, an x86 .exe and an x64 .exe.

Read here if you don't believe me:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb898842.aspx

H

And little problems like patches and updates that are incompatible with YOUR system. Frex, this Vista disaster: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/showpost.aspx?postid=2848906&siteid=17

You have to live in Australia to participate...doesn't living in Australia already come with enough benefits? And now, the chance to win a Vista T-shirt!?! I'm packing my bags.
http://www.microsoft.com/australia/vistafacts/terms.aspx

Do you have a reference for this? I did a quick Google for activex sandbox without much luck.

The top hit is this rather dated page which says:

That was written in 1997 and maybe (most likely) they've changed things since then, but it definitely wasn't written with a sandbox in mind. Actually, most or all of the links in that search date from the late nineties.

Changing the search to "activex security" and we get a nice page on MSDN that says:

No idea when that was written or if it still applies. So, do you have any references on this subject?

Time for some anecdotal "evidence". A week or so ago I was asked to upload a large (2+ gig) debug trace file to Microsoft's tech support site, and doing that made use of an ActiveX control (I tried using Firefox with the "simple upload" option but I just got a generic and uninformative server error). Given the way in which it sat there saying "Connecting..." 99% of the time with the occasional momentary change to say it was transferring data, I'm sure this wasn't using a plain HTTP POST file upload. Which means this control was able to read the zip file on my desktop and upload it to the site.

Even more disturbing was the effect it had on my RDP session. I used 7-Zip to zip it with maximum compression and since that was gonna take a while I went home, and connected to my desktop later that night to do the upload. Set it going and started doing some other stuff and noticed my keyboard was being weird: almost every keystroke was being duplicated. I've got a Microsoft wireless keyboard and sometimes it does odd things like repeat a keystroke a bunch of times, but this was just twice and for everything. So I closed the IE window and disconnected the RDP session and re-connected -- back to normal.

Started the upload up again and sure enough, same problem. Disconnected the RDP session thinking maybe it was just a bit confused by the crappy uploader ActiveX page and logging in again would reset it. Went to reconnect, and found the keystrokes were being duplicated even on the login dialog! At that point I gave up and just left it for the weekend.

If an ActiveX control can somehow screw up key processing for the RDP login dialog, then I have a tough time believing it's actually sandboxed in any meaningful way. If you have references to the contrary, I'd love to see them.

Are you referring to Linux or Vista? I'm confused...