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AFAIK DSF will not suit this. But MS is active on advanced distributed file systems like Farsite http://research.microsoft.com/Farsite/faq.aspx Unfortunately is does not seem to be publicly available.

Running DFS (to serve files) on Windows XP clients? What are you smoking?

From Microsoft TechNet:

The servers that will participate in DFS Replication must run Windows Server 2003 R2.

It is possible to use DFS Namespaces when domain controllers and namespace servers run a mix of Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 without SP1, and Windows 2000 Server, but some functionality is disabled or available inconsistently, depending on the operating systems on the servers.

From: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/1aa249c0-40f3-4974-b67f-e650b602415e1033.mspx?mfr=true

Now, I could go and read through Microsoft's webpage about DFS, and speend a few minutes paraphrasing it into a post for your edification; or maybe you could, I don't know, go do it yourself...?

What're you're talking about is not a new concept, it just turns out to be really hard to build in a useful way. The most comprehensive discussion of the problems involved can be found at the Microsoft Research project Farsite.

The short version of the problem is that the level of service you can expect from each system is incredibly variable, so it's hard to offer a meaningful QoS for the system as a whole. It's not quite as bad as the distributed-hash-table problem (a.k.a. P2P file storage), but it's still bad. (Zooko once told me that MojoNation saw an average 50% turnover in nodes in a 24 hour period.) But it's also not as easy as having all your distributed nodes dedicated to just storage, and even that's a really hard problem to solve. (I should know; my company is one of the few vendors doing it.)

Someone else suggested OpenAFS. OpenAFS is fantastic, but not for unreliable server environments. I really don't think there's a complete solution out there, but not for lack of asking.

In IE7, right-click in the toolbar area and select "Classic Menu."

In Vista's Windows Explorer, click the "Organize" button, click the "Layout" check box, then click "Menu Bar." If you're in some random folder but want ALL folders to show the menu bar, check the box that enables this option in all folders.

In IE7, right-click in the toolbar area and select "Classic Menu."

In Vista's Windows Explorer, click the "Organize" button, click the "Layout" check box, then click "Menu Bar." If you're in some random folder but want ALL folders to show the menu bar, check the box that enables this option in all folders.

In IE7, right-click in the toolbar area and select "Classic Menu."

In Vista's Windows Explorer, click the "Organize" button, click the "Layout" check box, then click "Menu Bar." If you're in some random folder but want ALL folders to show the menu bar, check the box that enables this option in all folders.

Harder than XP? You must be kidding!

Things like HAL detection:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905119.aspx

An easier modifiable WIM image which is easier to insert drivers/patches into and a much higher baseline of drivers (just because it is newer) makes it much easier to deploy!

In what way did you find it harder?

"There are other ways to do this that don't require specific hardware. Google "Vista breadcrumbs". It takes 30 seconds to get used to it, but it's perfectly effective."

They aren't perfectly effective. I personally think most of this review is stupid, but the complaint that "With a directory that has a long name like that, the higher-level directories aren't visible in the address bar, so I had to locate it manually in the left-hand tree view panel" is something that I know he's not the only one to have experienced, because I have too. [That said, note to reviewer: see that triangle between the paths? Click it. It's still more annoying than just hitting 'up', but probably less than using the treeview.]

It also requires a little more locating. I know where 'up' is in XP relative to the Window, but in vista you have to read.

It seems to me the licensing prohibits you from including the OS when giving the PC away anyway

Huh? Where on earth did you get that idea? From the XP EULA:
"Transfer to Third Party. The initial user of the Software may make a one-time permanent transfer of this EULA and Software to another end user, provided the initial user retains no copies of the Software. This transfer must include all of the Software (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, this EULA, and, if applicable, the Certificate of Authenticity)."

But the microcode is produced and distributed seprately. There will be microcode data in the chip when it is shipped, but a BIOS or operating system can overwrite it on-the-fly with an updated version from upstream. Microsoft even releases microcode updates from chip makers on occasion, as do some Linux distros.

Intel never describes what they changed in their updates, and their microcode is encrypted with a key that is built into the chip (preventing it from being inspected). And we're talking about hundreds of kilobytes of code here (last update is 387072 bytes of code, much more than enough to do some serious espionage with). I don't know about the other makers.

Tell it to street-level drug pushers. They mastered lock-in decades ago. It's only recently that tech marketing has risen to the level of "The first taste is free, baby!"

what the hell do they do when they find a BIG problem like data corruption?

"The Windows Vista SP1 install process clears the user-specific data that is used by Windows to optimize performance, which may make the system feel less responsive immediately after install. As the customer uses their SP1 PC, the system will be retrained over the course of a few hours or days and will return to the previous level of responsiveness." source

Any performance tests that haven't taken that into account somehow can't be taken too seriously sadly, it's a difficult thing to deal with for review, much like a fresh Vista original release, though at least SP1 shouldn't blank out your index system's index, and cause that to re-catalog everything too, that really would cripple immediate post-install tests.

He said MSNDAA

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/bb676724.aspx

College pays $499 a year and downloads whatever operating systems and development tools they want and installs them on as many PCs as they want.

Except that the cheapest MSDN subscription (MSDN Operating Systems) is $699. The cost goes up rapidly from there. If you're not doing development or testing, it's cheaper to buy a cheap PC with Vista than a MSDN license.

You also needed new drivers for DX9, DX8, DX7 and so on.

Not quite the same ballpark. In terms of MS Office dx7-dx8-dx9 is Office 2000 to Office XP to Office 2003. DX10 is Office 2007 with docx and ribbons.

Oh, and using multiple D3D applications simultaneously was supported since DX2 (via DirectDraw Clipper object). Vista allows to make _composite_ applications, i.e. a D3D surface which is in turn mapped into another surface.

I'm sorry. I meant simultaneously hardware accelerated d3d. You know, so if one program has a spinning rendered textured and shaded cube at 120fps in one window, and you switch to another program in another overlapping window with its own rendered texture mapped shaded spinning regular polyhedron, the cube in the first one doesn't drop to a framerate you can count on your fingers... its 2008. They should both be able to spin at full speed. While a movie is playing in a 3rd window, on a desktop with 3d shadow effects if that's what the user wants.

These things don't even begin to get near where I'm talking about:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa919937.aspx

You don't need new driver architecture for DX10, it can work well enough with the old one. You just won't get hot-swap support and other goodies.

Only someone in marketing would suggest that. "Hey, lets take all the revolutionary big features out of DirectX10, backport it to windows 98; and claim we've got directX10 working on Windows 98" Because, hey, you could do that. You could even show some program that checks for directx10 and makes a couple directx10 api calls to prove your programming mojo.

But, sorry, that isn't directx10.

In fact, there are projects to make DX10 emulation using OpenGL features.

See above. That isn't dx10 emulation. That's adding support for some dx10 api's using dx9/ogl. That's great if you want to run Halo on XP or something, but try something actually impressive... get AeroGlass running on XP, while playing a DVD movie in one window and WoW in another. Then click the start menu without having the other two windows choke up.

You realize that was a special 3 year deal. Up until that point they paid zilch.. their flying stock was supposed to be "profit" enough for shareholders.

here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A232-2004Jul20.html

or look here: http://www.microsoft.com/msft/FAQ/dividend.mspx

to see that they haven't been doing it very long... under 50 cents per year on a $60 investment isn't very good. My electric company pays better and they're far smaller and the stock cheaper.

Considering Microsoft makes upwards of 80 cents on the dollar PROFIT for some products (tune of tens of billions profit a year), they should be paying the owners a lot better than they do. Actually, looking around no companies pay good dividends... who cares about the price, I want interest for my money.. if I had some...

Um, Microsoft has released a patch that allows Office 2000-2003 users to read .docx files: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en

I agree. Horrible article. I looked for new info about what the kernel upgrade had, but he didn't know...? WTF?

That Windows Vista SP1 would have a kernel upgrade has been known for almost since the start of SP1, easily for months at least.

Articles have even already been written about what the new kernel contains. Even by Microsoft, something this guy doesn't seem to even know!

Here's the deal, although in some sort of "prerelease" form:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/kernel-en.doc

And here's a pretty detailed "changelog", although it doesn't separate kernel changes from the rest:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071208/vista-sp1-changelog/

The bug concerning BSOD's with Vista x64 and systems with >3 gigs of ram has to do with nvidia chipsets. There is a hotfix which fixes the bug, but I too found it vary annoying having to remove half my ram to install Vista.

Vista facts for those, who don't have silverlight.

>> Ars Technica claims that file copies are now 50% faster in SP1.

Actually it is only 25% faster when copying local files:

"Improves performance over Windows Vista's current performance across the following scenarios:
- 25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine
- 45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system
- 50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1 system"

source

Actually the "network/audio QoS" bug you talk about is not fixed in SP1. More tech details:

As explained in your link to Ed Blott's blog, although SP1 fixes lots of things, it still doesn't fix the MMCSS-related network throughput drop that was highly publicized 6 months ago ("slow network transfers when running Media Player").

Mark Russinovich, the MS developer who gave a very detailled explanation of the bug in his blog, never published a follow up to this bug, as he said he would when it will be fixed. The unanswered comments in his blog also confirm the issue is unfixed in SP1 [1].

In fact, the list of notable changes in Vista SP1 [2] mentions that the only thing they did appears to be a hack to manually hardcode the throttling behavior:

""" In SP1, PC administrators are able to modify the network throttling index value for the MMCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduling Service), allowing them to determine the appropriate balance between network performance and audio/video playback quality. """

Since Russinovich said the underlying problem is a high CPU usage caused by the DPC calls made by the network driver to receive the network packets, my guess is that they have to work around all those crappy Windows network drivers that don't implement standard interrupt mitigation techniques (like NAPI under Linux).

Meh. Just one more example of why closed proprietary drivers suck :)

[1] http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx
[2] http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/005f921e-f706-401e-abb5-eec42ea0a03e1033.mspx?mfr=true

The author of the article, Michael Eisen, is chief legal officer of Microsoft Canada.

Anyone have bets as to how long before a significant program of widespread use is broken

Application compatibility, too, improves significantly with SP1. While this area includes consumer-oriented applications, incompatible enterprise applications were the big deployment blockers over the past year. In the past year, Microsoft and its partners have remediated over 150 enterprise application blockers: These are applications that previously prevented one or more corporations from upgrading to Vista.

Beyond that, has there been any actual basis showing that SP1 (of the testers) adds any form of significant performance enhancements?

The BSOD with more than 3GB RAM you are having is usually due to specific combinations of Chipset and SLI congifurations. I have seen it a few times on systems I have built up.

Check out:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777

Install the hotfix and give it a try.

Ok, so the DRM isn't as intrusive as Gutmann said, but it is still there, and intrudes when you play back "premium content", right? (Thanks for those informative links, I am not going to buy a Vista computer, so I haven't really been following that stuff)

And how do you know that the Reduced functionality mode is actually gone?

I don't have a single device that uses HDCP.
Not my Upconverting DVD player, my PS2, or any of my linux devices/computers.

Maybe I am pissed at the whole industry, then. I am not going to get a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player until Helios Labs makes one without the DRM.

Am I becoming excessively cynical for thinking that SP1 for Vista was rushed out the door for marketing reasons?

It's common for people to wait for the first service pack before moving to a new software platform (not just Microsoft's), and I've seen in their marketing they've been attempting to address the "myth" (http://www.microsoft.com/australia/vistafacts/fact.aspx) that Vista won't be ready until SP1.

I'm predicting that SP1 will just be a bunch of already released hotfixes bundled together and won't do much to cover up the stench of excrement the product exudes.



I'm sorry that this is slightly flamebait, but I don't like Microsoft's products that much and I'm still bitter that my employer forced me to install Vista on my work laptop.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=94bb6e34-d890-4932-81a5-5b50c657de08&displaylang=en

Come and get it!

Notable changes in SP1 Hot fixes and patches rolled up in SP1 Release Notes document
Unlike most of the chatter I've read on /. I've been mostly satisifed with my Vista install so far. The only real problems I've experienced is the repackaging of some of the SDK tools such as graphedit which used to be available as standalone, but the 64 bit vista specific version is only available as part of a multi-gig sdk download... Also some vendors have been slow to ship good drivers although I suspect that MS requiring a 64 bit for the "vista compatible" label and not requiring a 32 bit version will in time result in a better driver base.

Notable changes in SP1 Hot fixes and patches rolled up in SP1 Release Notes document
Unlike most of the chatter I've read on /. I've been mostly satisifed with my Vista install so far. The only real problems I've experienced is the repackaging of some of the SDK tools such as graphedit which used to be available as standalone, but the 64 bit vista specific version is only available as part of a multi-gig sdk download... Also some vendors have been slow to ship good drivers although I suspect that MS requiring a 64 bit for the "vista compatible" label and not requiring a 32 bit version will in time result in a better driver base.

Notable changes in SP1 Hot fixes and patches rolled up in SP1 Release Notes document
Unlike most of the chatter I've read on /. I've been mostly satisifed with my Vista install so far. The only real problems I've experienced is the repackaging of some of the SDK tools such as graphedit which used to be available as standalone, but the 64 bit vista specific version is only available as part of a multi-gig sdk download... Also some vendors have been slow to ship good drivers although I suspect that MS requiring a 64 bit for the "vista compatible" label and not requiring a 32 bit version will in time result in a better driver base.

Would Washington rather MS move their operations to Nevada and lose the tax base of all the employees?

Microsoft is a Washington corporation; it owes its existence to the State of Washington. I don't know what the corporation laws of Washington State are, but if they were sensible, Washington could simply dissolve Microsoft if they moved out of state.

This situation is actually a good argument for getting rid of corporate taxes.

Not at all. Corporate taxes reduce profits and redirect money away from "investors" - gamblers who expect to get paid without working. Payroll taxes reduce wages and redirect money away from people who actually work.

That corporations can game the system to avoid taxes is an argument for reforming regulation of these beasties, not for letting them off the hook on taxes.

There's no lock in other than coding a page in Silverlight. The downside being there's no current support for Opera or Safari.

"Moderation sucks and slashdot moderations suck harder. Read at -1, ignore the moderation and skim past the offensive posts."

I've always found it interesting that a site that goes on so much about "freedom" and "my rights" has no problem with a third-party dictating what they should see and what not.

Anyway moderation works. It's called filters and it works great on Usenet. Unfortunately it takes work.

"Any web site that keeps readers for over a decade is doing something right."

Any company that keeps it's customers must be doing something right.

Taxes. See this file:

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

(which shows a net income of ~$76 billion since 2000, after taxes and one $375 million accounting charge)

The reason people keep telling you you are wrong could well be that you are wrong...

Look here:

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY08/earn_rel_q2_08.mspx#cash

I read through those tips recently. They are generally good ways to improve security, but most are beyond the average user. Simply having people use non-admin accounts (with something like SudoWin for easy access to admin stuff) or even using DropMyRights on IE would probably be 90%+ as effective, and it should be a lot easier than going through all those pages of tips.

My biggest issue with those tips is that most things are way beyond the common user's understanding, and likely to cause issues. When someone does run into an issue, they don't have the first clue how to fix it. For example, AdBlock is a much better solution than a hosts file for general browsing. It's a lot easier to understand that */ads/* or *badstuff.com* is being blocked as opposed to figuring out why some random site is blocked due to getting an IP that's listed in some Windows LAN config file somewhere.

My parents and brothers are behind a NAT router using Firefox and Thunderbird with McAfee OAS and have no problems, despite running XP with admin accounts. My PC (also XP with admin account and Fx/Tb and McAfee) scored in the mid 50's on the CIS test linked from the tips, yet I've had no incidents (other than ones I manually triggered). Replacing a few obviously-busted programs with better alternatives and giving a little education will stop the vast majority of these problems.

"You can get Visual Studio Express for free and [the] professional version for something like $150."

Visual Studio 2008 Professional Retail-Box Win32 : $699.84. (They didn't want to be honest and say $700.)

That is a low-end version of Visual Studio 2008 Team Software Developers with MSDN Premium for "Only" $5096.99. Otherwise known as $5100.

Source: Microsoft's buy page.

Well no, it can't be sustained, but there isn't any intention to sustain it, it was a one time thing to move that money off of their balance sheet.

Anyway, here is a page listing all the dividends Microsoft has paid to shareholders:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=MSFT&a=02&b=13&c=1986&d=01&e=3&f=2008&g=v

There are about 9 billion shares outstanding, and there has been the entire time they have been paying dividends, so we can calculate that they have given ~$40 billion dollars to shareholders since 2003.

Earlier, you complained that their cash on hand went from $50 billion to $17 billion, a decrease of $33 billion dollars, and used that to claim that they were not showing a profit. I am pointing out that they have taken more than that $33 billion off of their balance sheet in a way that is good for shareholders(this is what a dividend does, it transfers assets from the company to the shareholders), so you can't use that number to show that they are doing some sort of tricky accounting.

If you total up their net income over that same period(2003-2006):

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar06/staticversion/10k_fh_fin.html

You end up with another $40 billion dollars. So out of $90 billion(your 50 on hand and my 40 in income), it is easy to account for the $40 billion in dividends paid, and the $34 billion that they had in cash and short term assets at the end of fiscal 2006, a total of $74 billion.

That leaves at least $16 billion to figure out what happened to(more if you want to factor in income before 2003), but that's a good deal less than the $40 billion that shareholders got paid(If shareholders had got paid $24 billion, there wouldn't be anything to figure out), so it doesn't demonstrate a loss(just some potential imprudence). It wouldn't be all that shocking for a $200+ billion dollar company to invest $16 billion back in itself over 4 years(or so, maybe more, over a longer period), so I wouldn't sweat it.

What it amounts to is that Microsoft is among the most profitable companies in the world. Their growth is amazing; they add as much new business each quarter as Google is adding in a year, but they are already so big, no one notices.

Where are you getting your numbers? Here are good places to look for the net income for the last quarter and last year:

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY08/earn_rel_q2_08.mspx#income
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar06/staticversion/10k_fh_fin.html

I see ~$4 billion for the quarter ~$12.5 billion for the year(2006, they have not reported 2007 yet).

Note that those numbers are after taxes and such, so they are the 'net' numbers, the operating income is somewhat higher.

Maybe you were talking about Yahoo!'s earnings?

Where are you getting your numbers? Here are good places to look for the net income for the last quarter and last year:

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY08/earn_rel_q2_08.mspx#income
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar06/staticversion/10k_fh_fin.html

I see ~$4 billion for the quarter ~$12.5 billion for the year(2006, they have not reported 2007 yet).

Note that those numbers are after taxes and such, so they are the 'net' numbers, the operating income is somewhat higher.

Maybe you were talking about Yahoo!'s earnings?

Looks better with Firefox. With IE there is a white rectangle in the right side. Plain ugly...

And this is the stupidest way to get it.

All they get by this is a lot of duplication of services, they probably will attempt to merge them... and drive all those who never liked Hotmail and/or MSN to say pas and go for Google.

So if they get yahoo they should not count on its market share.

I'm not against MS, but I don't like they way they are present on the web.
Just for fun... to see what I'm saying - go to http://microsoft.com/ with firefox and then with IE and watch for the differences...
If for the front page of their main site they can't keep it the same across browsers think how would you interact with the services they provide, you'll have to use the tools they want you to use, not the ones you want to use.

In the end MS+Y!=MS... not thanks.