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You know, it's funny you mention the VM thing... I was recently giving another go at getting Dungeon Keeper 2 to work on XP (which I've got in Boot Camp), and found this page on Microsoft's website.

One of things it points out is that Microsoft Virutal PC 2007 is a free downloadable application that can be used to run older operating systems at the click of a button.

But if that's the solution, I'll just use VMWare Fusion and stay in OS X.

Suppose you are writing a technical paper with a coauthor at another institution who uses Word 2003. You upgrade to 2007. You discover that in compatibility mode you can't edit the equations in your own paper (they're graphic images). And if you switch out of compatibility mode, your coauthor will be unable to edit the equations you create. WTF??? How much time is being wasted on this kind of crap for people who were happy with 2003. And if you think I'm making this up, here it is from Microsoft:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444751033.aspx

And the ribbons? I'm sorry. I'm glad you're happy, but for many of us who knew the keystrokes, and took the time to learn the capabilities of the software, it's a huge step backward. I heard the hype and I gave it a chance, but I agree with PC World on this one. If the ribbons are optional, I have no complaint. But they take up a huge amount of precious screen real estate (esp on a small notebook) and they practically force you to use a mouse, which some don't mind, but it slows me down enormously.

And WRT those little icons that you claim have menu counterparts: where is the menu item "Accept all changes in document" when you're tracking changes? Seriously. If it's there I would like to know.

Yau should have signed it: "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spydermann"

I wouldn't want to be friendly with THAT neighbor - would you? ;-)

No it's not open source, but any company with 1500+ SA seats of Windows gets access to the source at no additional cost for debugging and security/privacy audit purposes. State and local governments appear to have access provided that they are in certain geographical areas (it's not entirely clear, but it looks like the 1500+ seat requirement doesn't apply). National governments also get zero-cost read-only access to the source code for Windows and Office.

No it's not open source, but any company with 1500+ SA seats of Windows gets access to the source at no additional cost for debugging and security/privacy audit purposes. State and local governments appear to have access provided that they are in certain geographical areas (it's not entirely clear, but it looks like the 1500+ seat requirement doesn't apply). National governments also get zero-cost read-only access to the source code for Windows and Office.

Speaking of C#, MS just released a technology preview that adds extensions / namespaces to C# that make it pretty easy to write parallel-executing code:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e848dc1d-5be3-4941-8705-024bc7f180ba&displaylang=en

Essentially, they turn
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
    a[i] = a[i]*a[i];
}

into

Parallel.For(0, 100, delegate(int i) {
    a[i] = a[i]*a[i];
});

and the hint tells the .NET runtime to execute the solution in parallel. No shared memory, no locks, all done for you. That's the way parallelism should work, IMHO

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/Futures/default.aspx

Speaking of C#, MS just released a technology preview that adds extensions / namespaces to C# that make it pretty easy to write parallel-executing code:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e848dc1d-5be3-4941-8705-024bc7f180ba&displaylang=en

Essentially, they turn
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
    a[i] = a[i]*a[i];
}

into

Parallel.For(0, 100, delegate(int i) {
    a[i] = a[i]*a[i];
});

and the hint tells the .NET runtime to execute the solution in parallel. No shared memory, no locks, all done for you. That's the way parallelism should work, IMHO

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/Futures/default.aspx

• The PS3 bluetooth implementation may be spotty, but that doesn't change the crux of the argument:
  1. Bluetooth is designed to play nicely with WiFi
  2. The PS3 uses the bluetooth standard, so it plays nicely with WiFi.
  3. MS designed a proprietary protocol, which happens to break WiFi.
  4. MS could have used Bluetooth as well, thus averting this problem.
  5. Thus, MS reinvented the wheel, poorly. (At least, given this metric)
  6. This is not out of the ordinary. MS has quite a history of breaking things.
• Your comments about the battery have no context in this conversation. I'm not discussing the pros & cons of a PS3, merely the technologies used in various controllers.
• Your comments concerning WiFi interfering with other devices is likewise irrelevant. Again, I wasn't discussing the console, but the controller.

• The PS3 bluetooth implementation may be spotty, but that doesn't change the crux of the argument:
  1. Bluetooth is designed to play nicely with WiFi
  2. The PS3 uses the bluetooth standard, so it plays nicely with WiFi.
  3. MS designed a proprietary protocol, which happens to break WiFi.
  4. MS could have used Bluetooth as well, thus averting this problem.
  5. Thus, MS reinvented the wheel, poorly. (At least, given this metric)
  6. This is not out of the ordinary. MS has quite a history of breaking things.
• Your comments about the battery have no context in this conversation. I'm not discussing the pros & cons of a PS3, merely the technologies used in various controllers.
• Your comments concerning WiFi interfering with other devices is likewise irrelevant. Again, I wasn't discussing the console, but the controller.

Besides, with a perfectly good, free, open source alternative (i.e. OpenOffice) why should anyone put their data at risk by using some web based application?

Real time collaborative editing?

BTW, I suspect that, after acquiring Groove, Microsoft is hard at work trying to implement RTCE in MS Office (although it had already been implemented for MS Word independently of Microsoft in CoWord by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore).

The OpenOffice community seems not to notice or understand the need for this functionality. They better started designing and coding this right away, since OpenOffice may soon find itself years behind technologically-wise (some may half-jokingly mention it already is).

This is a preliminary doc that explains why they did what they did:

2007 Office System Document: Developer Overview of the User Interface
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5ae8ea78-6ba9-4de4-aabd-2616d010caa7&displaylang=en

I feel a LOT better about the ribbon now that I've read this. Office 2007 seems to be a so-so implementation of some really clever UI concepts.

I work for a Windows development shop, and we've decided to use the ribbon for our UI redesign. It addresses some of our biggest goals quite handily.

Does this make me evil...?

It is part of my job to be aware of EULAs and other licensing in the solutions I propose to my clients. For some reason software companies keep their EULAs concise and to the point, as they'd rather not have anyone violate it

You must have a very different definition of the word concise.

You take a very small excerpt from a random MS EULA and point out that it can be understood. So what. Quote the other 20 pages and see how reasonable it is. But that sounds like an exaggeration so let me produce something solid to counter your nonsense claim that EULAs are short.

Since you picked a EULA let me point you to:
http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx

- The Microsoft Word 2007 EULA is 19 pages in Acrobat format.

- Vista has a combined EULA for Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate. It is 14 pages long.

So if you buy a computer and with a word processor you're expected to digest 30-35 pages. Add a handful of other programs (heck add office) and soon you're into over a hundred pages. By the time you have a usable system for a power user you're probably somewhere around 500-1000 pages. So come on, be honest, even if you reject what I say (and I don't think it's an even slight exaggeration), even if it's only a couple of hundred pages, name me 5 people you know that read that many pages before touching their software! Be honest, and don't include people who are paid to do little other than evaluate software, or manage large installations.

It's getting worse too. The XP Pro EULA was just over 5 pages long.

Hey it's not just Microsoft, though they're becoming particularly bad offenders. Even the GNU Public Licenses take some time to understand fully, and even then there are debates about meaning. Heck I could spend all night adding up the pages for each EULA on the machine I'm using to prove my point conclusively, but I don't have any intention of wasting that time. You know I'm right.

EULAs are often long.

EULAS are often vague.

EULAs often include onerous or questionable restrictions
http://www.eulahallofshame.com/yahoo-tos.html

EULAs often can't be rejected as publishers and distributors refuse or make it very difficult to take it back once the shrink wrap is broken (because assuming everyone is dishonest and will infringe on copyright is acceptable). So why bother reading something when you've already made the choice to buy the software?

This is not a reasonable way for things to be, and if you honestly expect people to be reading these, you're quite plainly gibbering mad.

Here's a link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/default.mspx

The specific one you want is TweakUI for your OS.

Microsoft Silverlight satisfies all of those requirements.
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

Never. Replacing Microsoft with Google will ultimately mean nothing. Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss. You're just replacing one monopoly with another. Proprietary closed-up code and vendor lock-in is bad no matter whose name you attach it to.

Responding by number:

1. IO priorities. Yes, these are quite nice, although it'd be nice if more than 2 priorities were implemented (currently only background and normal are supported). Memory priorities are new in Vista as well, and are also quite useful.

3. Much of the UMDF has been backported to XP as a redistributable.

6. IO cancellation. The NT kernel has always supported cancellation of pending async IRPs. The kernel always tries to cancel pending IRPs in a dying process so it can be terminated. However, there have been places where drivers would hold on to an IRP for a long time without letting it be canceled, and some of the places where that was happening have been addressed in Vista. A notable case was during a MUP open, i.e. when the system was trying to locate the host and service behind a UNC path. Vista does now allow cancellation of a synchronous IO operation, which previously could only be done by killing the thread.

5. Shell multithreading. I don't agree that Explorer and the shell have become substantially more multithreaded. Synchronous IO is still done heavily in the GUI thread, which causes the window to stop responding. The aforementioned ability to cancel sync. IO in another thread was added to make it possible to abort such blocking, which is a poor workaround.

7. Async IO in SMB (the LanmanRedirector filesystem internally). It has always supported async IO. The new CTRL+C ability to abort is used to cancel synchronous IO in the UI thread. One issue is that some APIs can only be done synchronously, such as file opens. You can only associate a file with an IOCP after the file is opened. From the application perspective, this could be fixed by having worker threads do the blocking open operations in the background.

8. Transactions. Yes, very nice. The transaction engine is even extensible: ISVs can add their own transaction resources (MS SQL server supports this), and the DTC service can coordinate them across multiple machines.

9. VSS put to better use. Well, Microsoft has a bad habit of putting good features into the system and then dropping the ball when it comes to making use of them. It's like the teams don't communicate with each other. Something that XP did use VSS for was in ntbackup, to archive a locked file by copying the shadow version. Vista backup does not supports this, and ntbackup is incompatible with Vista.

In the end, I'm with you: until they fix the things that have been broken in Vista, I plan to stay with XP and 2003 for some time.

That's what they did with Windows NT (as opposed to the line Windows 3.x/Win95,Win98), and ran DOS programs in virtual mode.

Oh and they have Virtual PC as a virtual PC solution. But there is no way in hell they would start from scratch, because of the performance hit (try 3D games in VMware), and also if you are going to run XP virtualized, then why not simply use Mac OS X?

So far as IDEs go, Microsoft has the best. I've got 4 or 5 Visual Studios and Expression Studio - Granted, Microsoft screwed up the install disk on Visual Studio 2005 Standard and you have to do an xcopy from a copy of the cd on harddrive to another place on the harddrive.They screwed up the volume label on the cd. After trying to get support from their forum who insisted I call them, who insisted I take the CD back to the college, who had to get get a new CD. Of course, the new CD has the same error. Then you find out that the install MUST be installed over top of the express edition. You can't change the path. You can't have both installed at the same time.

So far as everything else goes, my toolbox doesn't contain many Microsoft products. Not because I'm fighting evil, I'm trying to get my job done with as little hassle as possible.

Now, what are these good computing practices you're speaking of? You have left absolutely no context clues as to what you're talking about.

This is one of those situations where it's very easy for a human to know what the correct thing to do is (after all you just saved it as Windows 1252) but very difficult for the computer to get it right 100% of the time. Text files have no headers to tell Notepad or any other app what the encoding it, so Notepad has to guess. In this case, the 18 bytes that represent "this app can break" in Windows 1252 (or ASCII for that matter) also represent a string of 9 Japanese characters encoded as UTF-16.

For example: t is 0x74 and h is 0x68, and 6874 happens to be the Unicode codepoint of the first character displayed (these would not be unprintable to you if Asian language support was installed on your machine) - and so on - the byte representation of every subsequent pair of letters matches up to a UTF-16 representation of a valid Japanese Unicode character.

Notepad probably calls IsTextUnicode to figure these things out.

If that's all Notepad is doing, then it's being kinda dumb. I just tried this with the SciTE editor under a full-patched WinXP install, and SciTE was able to correctly open the file (though admittedly SciTE might be smart enough to add encoding info somewhere in the save process). I started with just "this app can break"; SciTE opened it and showed me "this app can break". So I tried explicitly entering the Unicode character found at 0x6874 for Japanese (for the record, ikada "raft", or bachi "pick / plectrum / drumstick") in place of the initial "th"; SciTE opened it and showed me that same Japanese character followed immediately by "is app can break".

So sure, what you describe might be what Notepad does, but it's not smart. And it's somehow no surprise that its dumb behaviour hasn't been fixed by MS.

Incidentally, if your analysis is correct as to why Notepad screws this up, it should then theoretically screw up when opening any text document beginning with "th". Can anyone confirm this? I no longer have Notepad on my machine.

Cheers,

Actually, IE7 is a step backwards. I work in software support for a large computer manufacturer. You would not believe the amount of calls we get from people who downgraded from IE6 to IE7 and IE7 suddenly stops working. Granted it has the reset button which is a step forward, but sometimes that too fails. No amounts of registry edits, or system restore gets it working. It stops. We install Firefox and the customer is happy.

Now that I think of it, our team should really be getting some ffox swag. A t-shirt would be nice. We do maybe 5 or 10 ffox installs per tech per day :)

BTW, I think you'll "appreciate" the following link: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/frontpage/HA010429271033.aspx :)

No, the "IE won and thus reigns king" crowd needs to accept that IE doesn't even have its own set of standards and that this is the real root of the problem. Version to version, we see some bugs fixed, some bugs ignored, and wholly *new* ones appear. When you do a QA cycle on a site and find that IE6 actually renders something mostly okay while it totally breaks in IE7, you can see how ridiculous this is.

Yes, it's a tremendous pain in the ass when there's a standard everybody else either complies with or at least makes a sincere effort to comply with, but when the one player who doesn't follow it doesn't even prove itself to be consistent internally, the resulting product is worthless. They don't even provide any documentation as to what coding standards *should* be followed for their browser; this is why they outright recommend conditional comments as a fix for (qutoing them) "pages that display correctly in browsers other than Internet Explorer."

Now, you can either keep lying to yourself, or you can accept the fact that IE is crap and in need of either serious repair or published documentation of how to code for it, and will remain crap until such a time.

Oh, standards indeed. Would you like me to inform you on how incompatible microsoft is with microsoft?
Let's limit us to address books for example.

Outlook express 4 and 5 not compatible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244459

MS outlook to MS spam software, not compatible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/179962

Outlook E supports folders in address book, but not exporting folders:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241875

That was only from the first result page using keywords address book import error... If they can't standardize on a way to store contact information, can you even claim that microsoft makes *standards*? There is nothing standardized in that company. Show me a single nontrivial webpage with CSS that looks the same in IE 5,6 and 7 WITHOUT any nonstandard hacks. Even when following Microsofts own guidelines, or software that is not possible.

Oh, standards indeed. Would you like me to inform you on how incompatible microsoft is with microsoft?
Let's limit us to address books for example.

Outlook express 4 and 5 not compatible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244459

MS outlook to MS spam software, not compatible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/179962

Outlook E supports folders in address book, but not exporting folders:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241875

That was only from the first result page using keywords address book import error... If they can't standardize on a way to store contact information, can you even claim that microsoft makes *standards*? There is nothing standardized in that company. Show me a single nontrivial webpage with CSS that looks the same in IE 5,6 and 7 WITHOUT any nonstandard hacks. Even when following Microsofts own guidelines, or software that is not possible.

Oh, standards indeed. Would you like me to inform you on how incompatible microsoft is with microsoft?
Let's limit us to address books for example.

Outlook express 4 and 5 not compatible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244459

MS outlook to MS spam software, not compatible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/179962

Outlook E supports folders in address book, but not exporting folders:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241875

That was only from the first result page using keywords address book import error... If they can't standardize on a way to store contact information, can you even claim that microsoft makes *standards*? There is nothing standardized in that company. Show me a single nontrivial webpage with CSS that looks the same in IE 5,6 and 7 WITHOUT any nonstandard hacks. Even when following Microsofts own guidelines, or software that is not possible.

...And it doesn't even handle text encodings correctly!

Try this: write "this app can break" (without quotes), or any other text with the same pattern of spaces, in an otherwise-blank file, save it, and then reopen it. It'll show up as unprintable characters because that's (apparently) the magic sequence to switch Notepad to Unicode mode.

This is one of those situations where it's very easy for a human to know what the correct thing to do is (after all you just saved it as Windows 1252) but very difficult for the computer to get it right 100% of the time. Text files have no headers to tell Notepad or any other app what the encoding it, so Notepad has to guess. In this case, the 18 bytes that represent "this app can break" in Windows 1252 (or ASCII for that matter) also represent a string of 9 Japanese characters encoded as UTF-16.

For example: t is 0x74 and h is 0x68, and 6874 happens to be the Unicode codepoint of the first character displayed (these would not be unprintable to you if Asian language support was installed on your machine) - and so on - the byte representation of every subsequent pair of letters matches up to a UTF-16 representation of a valid Japanese Unicode character.

Notepad probably calls IsTextUnicode to figure these things out.

To reiterate, if any app is presented with the 18 bytes above - it has no way to know if those bytes correspond to input in ASCII/Win1252 or UTF-16 representation of Japanese - any app must guess (or simply default to ASCII - which is what most apps do anyway because they are ignorant of internationalization.)

The only way to avoid such problems is to use file formats that make encoding choice explicit. Guessing works well most of the time (MSIE does a good job guessing the language of a webpage, if the meta information was not provided, for example) but it's clearly not perfect.

IE not only has bugs, it even has bugs v2.0!
Beat that, Opera

The GP whines about Microsoft's "promise" to support their nearly 8-year-old operating system for another two and a half years, yet fails to mention the meaning of "extended support".

Ever used notepad with anything larger than a couple of hundred KB? Absolutely, unforgiveably, awfully slow.

Although I'll agree that Word is probably not the right tool for the job, I'd agree with the other posters that say that to do a job such as this, most of the standard MS-based tools are inadequate.

Disclaimer - I haven't used the Microsoft Logfile Parser which _may_ be better suited to this task, but I do a fair bit of work with large plain-text files in a Windows environment and usually end up using Programmers File Editor or Textpad.

NLB in this context is "Network Load Balancing", a Microsoft specific technology (part of Windows Server), as opposed to an external / third part Network Load Balancer appliance. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/240997

I don't care how many people are in your enterprise; when you create a resource for the public (like MSDN), publish your entire API references etc. there, your URIs should not be changing every month. I've had the same experience as the OP, where I'll bookmark something on MSDN and try to pull it up merely a few weeks later, only to hit a 404. Even the MSKB URIs keep changing around. "This article (876543) was previously known as 'Q876543'" and such tripe. Pick a consistent gosh-darned convention and stick with it. It seems to have something to do with constant reorganization of their "tree" navigation structure, but whatever the cause, it's damned annoying.

Five years ago, I could go to http://php.net/fsockopen and be taken to the documentation for that function. The same URI works today. There's no reason that I shouldn't be able to go to http://microsoft.com/api/win32/wsastartup and rely on that URI to point wherever Microsoft has decided that documentation wants to go today...

***can't recall more than 5 problems upgrading from 95 to 98 back in the days***

Speaking of Windows 95, or is Windows 9x? Do you know what's a real good way to get me ROTFLMAO???? Check this out: Try 49.7

Winders would crash, JUST SITTING THERE. ha hahahahahahahahahah Is that effing funny or what?

For one answer, lets look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb972745.aspx
Next to nothing there. No surprise. They talk about updates offering improvements, then say SP1 is another mechanism. Meaning not the same as the updates? Recent reports say performance and compatibility aren't part of the mix, so we can hope it's reliability. Oh yeah, and hardware. Ok, they address customer feedback, but they don't say they made improvements, just addressed them. "Yes, I understand your pain. But we're a monopoly so too bad" is addressing a problem.

I'm much more interested in WinXP SP3 or Win2k SP5...

Win2k SP5 will never happen because MS wants people to think that Win2k is obselete abadonware, even though they've promised to support it until summer of 2010. They refused, for instance, to make a public patch for Win2k's Daylight Saving rules. I doubt they'll even do another post-SP4 patch rollup -- probably just the same trickle of IE6 and DirectX patches we've seen for the last couple of years.

(Of course, you can make your own SP5 and use third party time zone updates. There will probably be a lot of third-party patching as MS continues to drop the ball, pushing the new shiny stuff instead.)

Information on RC1 of XP SP3 can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsxp/0a5b9b10-17e3-40d9-8d3c-0077c953a761.aspx Looks like you currently have to be a Technet/MSDN Subscribers to get it.

What will Microsoft provide?
We will provide to you the software and necessary licensing to accomplish the data collection. Specifically Microsoft will provide you with:

        * All software, including documentation, required to gather data regarding your home computer use.
        * In consideration of your participation, a license covering the software provided, under the terms and conditions that accompany that software. Please note, except as expressly licensed to you in those Licenses, Microsoft retains all right, title, and interest in and to the Microsoft software provided under the Windows Feedback Program.

You work in IT and don't understand the concepts of how to get rid of GRUB and reload the Vista bootloader? How did you get your job? Seriously, if you had just googled for "Vista Restore MBR" the first page was this, and it tells you how to restore the MBR, and then you just have to repartition or just format the Linux install partition(s).

They must just now be discovering Microsoft's leet speak tutorial archives.

Microsoft got boring though, now that page simply redirects here instead.

It's interesting to follow the revision histories on that page on archive.org. It started out pretty much as my first link, then they removed the "illegal activities" section probably out of political correctness and not wanting to damage their reputation, and now there's no info on leetspeak at all.

http://wfp.microsoft.com/FAQ.aspx It's neither. It seems to me that they needed some sort of excuse to prevent users reading the data collected about them.

Ok, I'll begrudgingly give you that, but only because I set myself up. Since I put it the way I did, I allowed you to find *one* example and allowed you to make that representative of all Open Source. The fact of the matter is, though, that if Firefox is so god awful, as you put it, why is it's uptake growing? And comparing Firefox to Vista, if Vista *isn't* so god awful, why is it's uptake not as good as Microsoft would like? Think about *that* for a bit.

As I've said in other posts, I actually *like* Vista's user experience *better* than XP's. But the bugs in Vista are just too fundamental for me to believe it's a quality piece of software. Compare your Firefox example to this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942435/en-us and tell me that the comparison isn't apples to oranges. I dunno, but it seems to me that copying files is something that should *just work* in an operating system.

Actually you *can* force "Documents and Settings" to a different partition during installation. You have to use the unattended install option. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236621 - but by the time you get all the correct options to work you may wish you had not started! There is a "Setup Manager" tool which will help create the unattended install scripts. And you may find you have to clean out some of the extra Administrator and user accounts created during each of the attempts you make before you do it correctly.