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Yes, install more Microsoft software, which may or may not support formats in the future, as they've proven from their previous actions. Not to mention the management issues with getting all that software pushed out to users, which requires all the latest patches (some of which are often understandably not pushed out by IT departments until they're properly vetted). Sounds like a great idea to me. Reminds me of a quote...

"Thank you sir, may I have another?"

One word: Singularity.

Frankly, nothing I've seen that started in the open souce community, outside a university, that is as innovative as Singularity. Plan 9 came from Bell Labs. Even an oft-cited example, BitTorrent, was really and implementation of basic innovations (chunking, caching, and replication) made previously in distributed file systems such as Coda. Coda has been around since 1987 at Cernegie-Mellon.

Fortunately, many universities now release their research product as some form of open source. But without corporate or university sponsorship, the "open source community" itself doesn't seem to generate much innovation, only re-implementation and refinement of ideas that started in commercial or university settings.

It isn't mentioned what version of windows was used or what they did, so I can't be sure but anyway according to:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885936

By simply using Windows XP and then share the file on a windows network you can possibly corrupt the file.

You can find a table of possible nFib Values here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B938810&x=16&y=18

(Search for the string "Blocked file format")

The writing style is standard for MS KB entries, i don't really get where the problem is. I've been working with Windows for a few yours though, and probably got used to it.

yes.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922849 has the registry change details. You basically change a registry switch and it opened no problem afterwards.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810/en-us Of course M$ expects each and every casual word/office user to be a programmer :(

Maybe not OS files but it is known to spontaneously corrupt files:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943393
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885936

Maybe not OS files but it is known to spontaneously corrupt files:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943393
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885936

Maybe not OS files but it is known to spontaneously corrupt files:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943393
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885936

The XBOX 360 is a marvel of design and XBL revolutionized on-line play

The key to finding "professional/business" notebooks with Windows XP is looking in the "Business" sites, not the "Home & Home Office" sites. Unfortunately, I've noticed most brick-and-mortor stores (even "office supply" stores) don't carry these real "business" notebooks (just "home office" notebooks at best).

And if there is an equivalent for Linux then I'd love to hear about it, because find|grep and similar are sometimes just too damn slow, and can't provide the level of inspection of dedicated file content filters. Actually, is this what beagle is trying to do?

I suggest you read this link and then tell me that you Vista doesn't defrag in idle time. Also, indexing improves search speed, which I believe I mentioned. I'm sorry if I put two different things in the same sentence and you had trouble comprehending it, so maybe I should do this again for you.

Windows Vista defragments your hard drive in idle time which improves program loading speed and geenral hard-drive access times.

Windows Vista indexs your hard drive in idle time which makes the Vista search function perform faster.

Both use CPU time. There are other system operations that also occur in idle time, e.g. Superfetch functions and other system tasks. You only asked for one example, though. I suggest if you want a full accounting for every MHz that is being used on the poster's computer that you ask him for a screenshot of his task manager.

You just made the authors point for him, bravo.

To say that UNIX is a "wheel" is garbage. UNIX (and Windows, which is based on similar concepts) is a moth eaten dirty piece of cloth. It's got giant problems. Look at malware for one. Look at how many jokes revolve around software crashes of some sort, for another.

Before claiming that UNIX is like a wheel, go read up on modern operating system research. Seeing as you have a low opinion of Microsoft, might as well start there - try reading Singularity: Rethinking the software stack from Microsoft Research. They describe an operating system that, amongst other things, operates in a single address space without using hardware memory protection. There are no traditional processes, or syscalls. Instead the basic unit of software is a "Software Isolated Process" or SIP that is statically verified and compiled to machine code at install time. SIPs cannot be arbitrarily modified after installation. The whole thing is a single address space microkernel, except without the performance problems that scuppered previous microkernel attempts (because there are no context switches). A new security model based on verifiable type systems, state-machine based messaging and pre-declared intents allow for the construction of systems that are far more resistant to malware and unstable 3rd party extensions than today.

And they only just got started.

Closed source software is very important to how people use computers, even if they tend to use OSS. For example, if, say, Windows XP or Mac OS X were fully open source, would you really choose Linux over them?

In a nutshell, the point I'm trying to make is that closed source software can be very good. True, that can't be said of certain products, but Windows XP wasn't all that bad, Office 2007 (ignoring OOXML) is excellent, and since Mac OS X was introduced, Apple have always made a brilliant example of how to create good software; I'm typing this on Mac OS X Tiger now and it's excellent. True, its kernel is open-source, as are the GNU tools, and several of the APIs, but the rest of it is closed, and I truly don't mind using it.

While it's good to have something for free, it will take something enormous to get open-source on almost every machine in the way, say, Windows is. For example, a real innovation that makes open-source software dead simple to set up, and different to anything before it. Because - let's face it - Linux is a jargon minefield for the inexperienced user, and while Vista is no better, XP and Mac OS X are dead simple - two editions, that's it.

That said, I do have a problem with fierce monopolisation of software using closed-source, which makes Vista my case in point. So my case briefly is that I don't mind using closed-source software if it's good enough and reasonably priced. If it's open-source, that's the icing on the cake.

Look at Windows and how long it has taken them to get away from Win32.

A great example of this is Single Threaded Apartments, which even plague WPF.

For legacy reasons, an implementation using the 1900 date base system shall treat 1900 as though it was a leap year. [Note: That is, serial value 59 corresponds to February 28, and serial value 61 corresponds to March 1, the next day, allowing the (nonexistent) date February 29 to have the serial value 60. end note] A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (nonexistent) date February 29 has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1.

Unbelievable! So... I have egg on my face, but Microsoft has far more on theirs. So I did a little digging, and it seems that Microsoft are spinning this like crazy. Brian Jones, a program manager in Office, actually has the temerity to blame Lotus 1-2-3 for the problem. Quite frankly, I'm amazed. If you don't believe me, read it yourself. Firstly he quotes this Microsoft KB article.

His justification is that it would break all the existing spreadsheets...

If we decided to fix this bug and shift each date value down by one, how many spreadsheet formulas out there would we break? Here's a really simple example, where the following function that had worked in previous versions would no longer work:

=IF(TODAY()=39013, "Due Today!", "Not Due Today!")

Amazingly, he then states that "We not only wanted to create an open format that folks could build solutions on top of, but we wanted the format to be something that our customers would actually use... otherwise what's the point? We didn't want this to just be another optional format that only some people would use, it's the new default format and we hope that all of our customers will use it."

When he was openly questioned about it, he said the following:

Sinleeh,

I wish it were as simple as you and Ben suggest, but it's not. We can't just tell our customers that they are idiots.

Especially when that are doing something that has been supported since the first version of Excel shipped. I'm sorry but that's just not an option.

Again, this format is designed to fully support the existing base of binary documents out there. It's not a format that's designed to be the format to end all other formats. It's fully documented so that anyone can use it, there is nothing that depends on a particular operating system or office application. Remember though that it's an open standard that was designed to be fully compatible with the existing set of extremely valuable documents. If you build the ultimate general file format and no body uses it, what's the point? Our customers would never use the formats if they broke existing formulas.

There is no way we can predict what people are doing in their files and with their formulas. If you take the date 12/10/2004 in both Excel and in OpenOffice and you format that date as a number, you get "38331". So are you suggesting we should change this so that in the new file formats 12/10/2004 is now equal to 38330 instead?

The only inconsistency comes into play for 2 months (from 1/1/1900 to 3/1/1900). It sounds like you and Ben are suggesting that that inconsistency (which is super easy to workaround) is bad enough to actually cause real pain to customers either by breaking their existing formulas, or even worse, by mak

Dear Steve Jobs, I will *never* buy a iphone if you keep pulling this BS. (along with the fact that you are tied into AT&T) Stop behaving like MS, or I'll just build another PC next year vs purchasing a iMac.. and of course, install linux on the PC.

Funny. Microsoft allows complete and open access to their Windows Mobile OS (whether or not you can load your apps onto the phone is left to the decision of the carriers). In fact they even opened the source for the OS (okay, it's a Shared Source license, and it requires having an officially licensed version of Windows Embedded CE 6.0, but the source code is all there if you want to modify it while building a new device of your own). I think this is a case where you want Apple to act more like Microsoft rather than less.

On the other hand, I'm an iPhone user. I spent a fair amount of time playing with Windows CE in the past, and while I like the system I was not a fan of any of the current phones using it today. So I bought an iPhone, and I like it. The current lack of an SDK isn't slowing me down, since I probably wouldn't write any iPhone apps anyway (as much as I'd like to think I would, I know that I'd just dabble a bit and never actually finish anything). Sure, there are some things that are missing (GPS, full Exchange connectivity, an IM app), but I can live without those at least for now.

As this story is talking about Windows Home Server, I would just stick to the topic.

You still have to install windows (going through all its specific hurdles too), and configure it.

No. The HP is already selling the box, just very much like an those Linux installed harddrive enclosure. The hardware should be similar, those just with network output with no monitor output, expect a low power x86 CPU.

But this HP box is with Windows Home Server (WHS) pre-installed.

The enclosure themselves are ready to use : buy it, throw some drives inside (or have the computer parts shop do it), plug it into your network :

So does the WHS. Installation wise, it would be the same as those Linux harddrive enclosure.

Everyone knows Windows has great hardware support. Ok sorry, I mean Hardware vendor has great support with Windows. With Linux, you still risk of finding an appropriate CUPS driver for your shinny Laserjet (I know zero-Postscript support shouldn't really be count as a Laserjet, but HP is selling some of those), or have to do ton of research to get a right one. Windows? To John doe, it just works.

Also I completely fail to see the point on having a full blown graphical interface on a *file server*.

It just a added bonus in case you want to use it to do something else with it. Like hosting a few more BitTorrent session wouldn't hurt. Not necessary. Windows Home Server also comes with an interface for remote file management over web.

There are numerous solution for backup that exist on Linux. Some research may be important.

Talking about the software bundled by those Hardware enclosure 3rd party. Will you trust them? I mean if you bought an average Linksys/DLink/Buffalo box, not those very expensive one, between WHS and them, I would trusted the WHS more (See Disclaimer below).

You even mention PartImage, Amanda...I have digged into those too, don't you think it's too hard for an average user to set them up? While WHS, it could backup your Client machine in File-to-File accessible basic, also provide Symantec-Ghost-like total client machine recovery, all accessible with just One Click (Ok, could be a few...).

To John Doe, it's unbeatable that no research is needed, not to mention setting up his computer with an unfamiliar OS. And you want to tell him setup the Soft RAID with Mdadm/Evms/LVM just with non-user-intuitive Text mode, and there is no obvious way to know the Health/Update status of the server? He will say "You must be kidding."

Linux still has a lot of room to grow, in terms user friendless / UI area.

If they are a little bit more computer savvy or if you have some time to help them

I do and already did. Yes our friends and I like Fon, we like re-freshing WRT54G to OpenWRT, we run Ubuntu for server at home. But spreading that idea to an average Uncle/Aunt? It's not the time yet. Firefox, TugZip, Thunderbird, OpenOffice may be more than enough for them at this moment. Putting a Ubuntu Live CD into their machine, telling them that sorry you couldn't draw on the Pidgin-MSN is a painful process.

Disclaimer: I work in Microsoft. The WHS team is just sitting next to my office. But I do love Linux and running Asterisk at home, not going to convert to WHS anytime soon.

I think you need to read more carefully.

Quoth Jobs:

When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content.

...

What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that.

...

We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net's gonna fail, Press Play's gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45's; then they bought LP's; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD's. They're going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music.

He didn't actually use the words "Digital Rights Management", but I think his position in 2003 was crystal clear. DRM is not going to work in the long term. I'll say one thing for Jobs: his view of the near future is extremely good, and unlike most corporate types, he has no mental investment in his point of view. He understands the difference between sunk cost and new costs, and he watches technology evolution constantly then branches in new direction like a speed skater picking a line. He doesn't keep throwing money at bad ideas.

Run Visual Studio in a VM on your Linux desktop and call it even. :)

In all seriousness, do whatever will result in producing the best code. If that means using Visual Studio, for whatever reason, stick with it. IMO, the amount of time you save in a familiar environment makes up for the extra work ensuring your code builds elsewhere. However, you may have a few more hoops to jump through to make sure that code actually runs elsewhere.

Would be nice if it automatically generated make files too

If you use VS 2005 or later, you can easily transform the project file (which is just a MSBuild file) into anything you want. For example, you might output a simple NAnt script, which could be a quick and dirty way to target multiple platforms (NAnt will run on Mono).

If you use VS 2003 or earlier, upgrade.

but I write Solaris code in windows !

So how's life at Intuit? Tell Kai I say hello!

1. The dependencies reported from apt-get are declarative (stated in a manifest), not necessarily from actual code dependencies. As it has already been stated, upgrading some of these dependencies improves performance, but many of them are also security updates (the openssl update, for example).

2. Other OSs DO install and replace more than one file in their update schemes. This is a random update I clicked on the Windows Update site http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979. I count 111 files to be replaced in the 32-bit version of Vista. Also, keep in mind that core updates, like the Windows equivalents of binutils and libc++ would have been taken care of in a previous patch, because they are system-wide enhancements, not just related to a small utility (kruler).

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897435.aspx

Holy mackeral, how can you be the only person that caught this!

Could be wrong, but I'd bet that these apps use alternate data streams for certain data.

This is fantastically informative ... here's the direct KB article on this, linked from the parent's article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943393/

Good find, and thank you for posting that!

You are editing a file that is saved directly to a shared folder on WHS, which WHS accepts and gives the A-OK signal to your software, then later has a problem writing the file, and tells you about it, with no chance of recovering the file at that time. Since this can happen after you have exited your software, you have no way of recovering the file.

The problem is not:

• You make backup files, then try to edit them directly on the WHS share folder.
• Your backup files get corrupted.
• You are doing something that WHS was not intended for.

The third one is the trickiest. See, if you go to the current WHS Discover site (click Help and How-To's) you will see that the big thing is Remote Access, Media Sharing, and Computer Backup. This would lead people to believe that any other use, is not what it was meant for, and when something goes wrong, you should have known better.

But, one only needs to look back at previous pages for WHS to see that Sharing was a central feature. Yes, full sharing, not just Media Sharing. Even the Overview of that page focuses on sharing first, and backup (protection) was third. The first overview item was Sharing, and that is simply what this problem is about, shared folders. Either for your own use as a networked server, or to share with other users.

Now, if you go to Eric Bott's blog, you will see the explanation that the largest factor is "a home server is under extreme load." Well, I'm sorry, but if the touted role, even at the beginning and not right now, was acting as a share folder to save your stuff to, then by damn it better do that. If the server gets loaded down, it should not pretend it got the file and tell you later that it didn't, it should just either not respond (and your software would have to let you know it couldn't do it) or it should give an error response (your software's problem now).

Honestly, this product was marketed as a home server for storing and sharing your files, with acting as a backup server making 3rd on the list of features. Now, they want to change that and say that it is for backup first, file sharing from special locations and under special conditions, and not really for file storage.

I think Microsoft's surface PC already does this.. although in a slightly different way.. but the idea is same... just give the order without waiting in line and while sitting at your table.

"... as long as you don't edit the file on the server, you're ok."

Maybe, but that's not what it says. Is even the Microsoft web page a buggy beta?: Microsoft Support article: "When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server."

That quote says the bug appears only on a home computer that "uses" Windows Home Server. Does that mean the home computer uses Windows Home Server as a server, or the home computer operating system is Windows Home Server?

Once again, Microsoft has sold sloppy, unfinished software, supported with sloppy and unfinished support pages.

Further, does that sentence mean that, if it is an office computer, there is no problem? The whole purpose of using the word "Home" is apparently to try to intimidate less-technically-minded managers from using the software in a small business office.

Do evil if it will make more money?

Actually, it's a little bit more than that. For example, you can completely restore a PC, like if you had use Ghost, but at the same time it gives you full access to the files as if you used a file backup. What's more, it consolidates duplicate files in the backups so that they don't take up extra space.

You can also add storage to the thing just by dropping in a new disk and telling it to use it. No re-partitioning, or mounting partitions in subfolders. it spans drives and provides automatic redundancy without RAID and the associated probles with adding new storge to RAID volumes.

It also has a neat "plug-in" feature that allows third parties to extend it. Here's some examples:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/partners/challenge.mspx

I'll grant you that today, it's still in the "it has lots of potential" phase.

The problem isn't actually anything to do with backups.

The problems is probably due to Windows Home Server file shares not catering for NTFS streams (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941914).

There is a hotfix for this issue. It fixed the problem for me.

Maybe you'd care to enlighten us?

From looking at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/features.mspx?tab=At%20a%20glance , about the only thing that I can see here that a hard-disk-in-a-box couldn't do is automatic remote backups. If someone's capable of working any backup program (even Windows' delightful "ntbackup") then they're capable of writing a backup to a bit of remote shared disk.

Am I missing anything?

Quote from Microsoft's support article: "When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server."

A large amount of Microsoft's profit, in my opinion, comes from selling unfinished software, and then getting money for "upgrades". Microsoft won't get money for the fix to this problem, but I think you will agree that Microsoft is the largest supplier of unfinished software, and making the whole world a beta tester is cheaper than selling a finished product.

Therefore, MOD PARENT UP.

I notice that people are inventing nonsense about this; the problem appears not to have anything to do with editing backups.

Windows Home Server performs automated backups. In fact it is listed as one of the "features" on the Windows Home Server FAQ and how it is superior to other backup solutions.

I use Robocopy
http://www.ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html

There's a front end online somewhere but I built my own...

Here's the MS pack it's included in if youre running xp
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=4544

lots of switches. I just have an external hard drive and
run this once a week
robocopy d:\ x:\ *.* /R:0 /S

Well since the article NEVER mentions backup I'm trying to figure out why the blurb and everyone is going on about backups being corrupted. What is actually happening is that there is a bug in WHS folder sharing. If you edit files with particular programs that exist on a WHS share the files will be corrupted.

Here is the KB article http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/946676/en-us?spid=12624

It too doesn't mention using WHS to backup but does say that you should backup the possible affected files before storing them on WHS.

Why would anyone edit the backed up files anyway, sorta defeats the purpose if they are stored copies of backed up files from the clients. Just edit the files on the client and let them backup again. No need to store data on a share... /sarcasm

Obligatory link to KB article

MS also don't recommend you put your Outlook Personal Folders on a server (or 'network drive') either, which in this case could be an "Enterprise" server...

Yes really: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019

So what does that make people who are stupid enough to mistake Internet Explorer for Windows Explorer?

So what does that make people who are stupid enough to mistake Internet Explorer for Windows Explorer?

So what does that make people who are stupid enough to mistake Internet Explorer for Windows Explorer?

So what does that make people who are stupid enough to mistake Internet Explorer for Windows Explorer?

So what does that make people who are stupid enough to mistake Internet Explorer for Windows Explorer?

So what does that make people who are stupid enough to mistake Internet Explorer for Windows Explorer?

So what does that make people who are stupid enough to mistake Internet Explorer for Windows Explorer?

If I can't video drivers for Linux, how the heck can I get Robot drivers?

Aside from that, Microsoft actually came out with ROBOT support, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/default.aspx, a while back.

From the site: The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware.