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I'm not saying Vista with Aero enabled is not a resource hog (especially memory), but I think it's been grossly exaggerated on many highly-moderated Slashdot comments. I do think Vista was released too early and many hardware manufacturers only had flakey Vista drivers when Vista was released. Intel's drivers were fine, though.

I agree that a clean Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 and all Windows Updates is not as secure as it should be without additional sofware. However, Comodo (and others) provides a good free firewall for Windows 2000. AVG and Spybot (and others) provide the needed protection against viruses and malware. Internet Explorer 6 is still getting security updates, but I think most users would be better off with the current versions of Opera or Firefox.

Getting back on topic, Windows 2000 is probably not a good solution for the "low-end PC market" anyway. There's a reason the only client version was called "Windows 2000 Professional." They could make it more usable for novices if they added an XP/Vista style "Security Center" that prompted the user to download free 3rd party firewall, anti-virus, and anti-spyware software.

I agree that a clean Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 and all Windows Updates is not as secure as it should be without additional sofware. However, Comodo (and others) provides a good free firewall for Windows 2000. AVG and Spybot (and others) provide the needed protection against viruses and malware. Internet Explorer 6 is still getting security updates, but I think most users would be better off with the current versions of Opera or Firefox.

Getting back on topic, Windows 2000 is probably not a good solution for the "low-end PC market" anyway. There's a reason the only client version was called "Windows 2000 Professional." They could make it more usable for novices if they added an XP/Vista style "Security Center" that prompted the user to download free 3rd party firewall, anti-virus, and anti-spyware software.

$130??? Office "Standard" which is just Word, Excel, Powerpoint & Outlook is $400. Office Ultimate is $680!!!

MS has a low-cost version of Windows, they just don't sell it in the US of A - it is called "Microsoft Windows XP Starter Edition" - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/WinXPStarterFS.mspx

After 2008 what options will you have?

XPSP3 is currently planned for 1H CY2008

More to the point: Why did the parent poster get a five when (s)he misses the main point by a million miles?

It's not "... just aren't rich enough to provide computers for their students". It is "...just aren't rich enough to provide books for their students".

Let me add to the chorus: It's an education project, not a computer project. The little green computers are just terminals to enable the kids to turn the information presented thereon into knowledge in their brains.

If J. Dvorak had the wit to be able to do so, he would have at least experimented with the software by downloading an emulator from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads/ and the OLPC software from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/virtualbox/. The build OLPC-625.zip works for me. If J. Dvorak had actually installed it, he would have discovered that the said little green box is the work of a team of top level geniuses, instead he just confirms the fact that he is just an ignorant shill squeaking mindlessly for that (in)famous Harvard dropout.

Had he spent just a couple of hours doing that he would have discovered that Nicholas Negroponte et all really do deserve a Nobel Prize.

Straight from the horse's mouth.

Besides, what, exactly, is the problem with saying "You can do this, but it's not supported?"

What, are they trying to save money per word downloaded?

Bullshit!

You cannot create a >32GB FAT32 partition on Windows XP using Microsoft's built-in partitioning tool. My '98SE box ran 60-120GB FAT32 partitions for years, and the drives were partitioned with nothing more special than FDISK that shipped with '98 (the patch only changes the display -- even the old FDISK will work), and formatted with nothing more than the FORMAT.EXE that shipped with '98. (98 has a real drive size limit of 127GB due to failure to anticipate large drives ten years ago, but even that can be circumvented by patching \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\ESDI_506.PDR)

Microsoft put the bogus restriction into the XP partitioning utility because they wanted to drive XP users to NTFS. By doing so, they could ensure that drives were unreadable in 9x systems, and not reliably writable in just about everything else available at the time.

The 32GB FAT32 "limit" in 2K/XP is entirely artificial and exists solely for vendor lockdown purposes, or as Microsoft puts it whenever they have a vendor lockdown "feature" they just say, this behavior is by design and offer no justification for the design decision.

You don't have to dig our your DOS 6.22 floppies; there are plenty of third-party formatting/partitioning utilities that will let you partition FAT32 partitions, from within XP, up to the limit of 8 terabytes.

Bullshit!

You cannot create a >32GB FAT32 partition on Windows XP using Microsoft's built-in partitioning tool. My '98SE box ran 60-120GB FAT32 partitions for years, and the drives were partitioned with nothing more special than FDISK that shipped with '98 (the patch only changes the display -- even the old FDISK will work), and formatted with nothing more than the FORMAT.EXE that shipped with '98. (98 has a real drive size limit of 127GB due to failure to anticipate large drives ten years ago, but even that can be circumvented by patching \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\ESDI_506.PDR)

Microsoft put the bogus restriction into the XP partitioning utility because they wanted to drive XP users to NTFS. By doing so, they could ensure that drives were unreadable in 9x systems, and not reliably writable in just about everything else available at the time.

The 32GB FAT32 "limit" in 2K/XP is entirely artificial and exists solely for vendor lockdown purposes, or as Microsoft puts it whenever they have a vendor lockdown "feature" they just say, this behavior is by design and offer no justification for the design decision.

You don't have to dig our your DOS 6.22 floppies; there are plenty of third-party formatting/partitioning utilities that will let you partition FAT32 partitions, from within XP, up to the limit of 8 terabytes.

Bullshit!

You cannot create a >32GB FAT32 partition on Windows XP using Microsoft's built-in partitioning tool. My '98SE box ran 60-120GB FAT32 partitions for years, and the drives were partitioned with nothing more special than FDISK that shipped with '98 (the patch only changes the display -- even the old FDISK will work), and formatted with nothing more than the FORMAT.EXE that shipped with '98. (98 has a real drive size limit of 127GB due to failure to anticipate large drives ten years ago, but even that can be circumvented by patching \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\ESDI_506.PDR)

Microsoft put the bogus restriction into the XP partitioning utility because they wanted to drive XP users to NTFS. By doing so, they could ensure that drives were unreadable in 9x systems, and not reliably writable in just about everything else available at the time.

The 32GB FAT32 "limit" in 2K/XP is entirely artificial and exists solely for vendor lockdown purposes, or as Microsoft puts it whenever they have a vendor lockdown "feature" they just say, this behavior is by design and offer no justification for the design decision.

You don't have to dig our your DOS 6.22 floppies; there are plenty of third-party formatting/partitioning utilities that will let you partition FAT32 partitions, from within XP, up to the limit of 8 terabytes.

I thought so, too. Then I read this review of the EEE PC. I was with them right up until this bit:

For more advanced tasks, consider getting a full-fledged laptop with a dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and Windows Vista.

First, what does "more advanced tasks" actually mean? I could use an EEE PC for programming, ssh access, and, I'm sure, many other things that this reviewer has never heard of.

Second, and most important: Why the fuck are they recommending Windows Vista? I was curious, so I found this other page, with these gems:

Windows Vista offers an array of improvements over XP aside from visual enhancements, new multitasking features and simpler home-network setup....

And, of course, no mention of the downsides -- of why you'd want to keep XP. (Well, there's a sort of casual mention of "If Vista does nothing for you, you can still buy a new PC with XP", but no mention of the insane number of bugs that still exist in Vista.)

Microsoft offers three versions of Vista

No, it offers four.

Mac OS is considered by many to be easier to learn and use than Windows, and it's more secure against online threats because it's less of a target for malware writers.

Not to bring up the old debate again, but the fact that there is a debate is worth some mention, at least, right?

Linux, a free operating system with source code anyone can modify, is most appropriate for users who aren't intimidated by technology.... The only things you won't find are sophisticated 3D games.

Doom 3 isn't sophisticated? What about the new Unreal games?

Or did they mean "sophisticated" in the artsy/intellectual sense? As in, say, Neverwinter Nights, Neverball, Wesnoth, and the like?

I'm not claiming the situation is good for Linux gaming. But to claim there are no sophisticated games for it, even if we're all willing to ignore Wine/Cedega, is factually untrue. By "factually untrue", I mean it's in the realm of 2+2=5. Even for very large values of 2, that statement is wrong, and always will be.

You'll need additional software to access other file formats such as MP3 or iTunes.

No mention that it's free and easy to download/install this software. Oh, and it does seem to support mp3s out of the box.

As for Linux, you'll need more than just a casual knowledge of operating systems, because the interface is not entirely graphical.

That's a nonsensical statement. It's "not entirely graphical" in the same way that Windows and OS X are -- I can still run cmd.exe or Terminal. If they mean that you may occasionally have to do things with the commandline, well, that's also untrue -- and they must know this, having used Ubuntu.

If all you do is Web browsing and e-mail you can probably get by, but if you use a wide variety of applications, you're better off passing on Linux.

If all you do is Web browsing and e-mail and word documents and finances and web development and education and PDF reading and listening to music and creating music and putting music on your iPod and basic camera and photo scanning/editing and CD/DVD burning and scanning/OCR and Skype and instant messaging and IRC..... *inhal

Ahem.

I'd say that $100 was wasted, VMWare has the capability to convert VirtualPC images. (dunno whether it might want to reactivate because of the changed virtual machine hardware though)

Microsoft gives away FREE images for just this purpose.

I think the proper name that every knowledgeable should use for it is "Microsoft Office XML (MSOXML)", because this is exactly what it is.

The all-time Kings of FUD are stepping up to the plate and saying that they are considering offering an obsolete and unsupported operating system for entry level users running certain hardware? Let me know how that works out. I would watch just for the train wreck but I can't see how MS plans to even begin to show up unless they plan to "innovate" Linux lock, stock and filesystem. Even then, I don't think they have the chops left to do much more than put a penny on the tracks.

You get to chose one or the other. Forever.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/f/4/5f4c83d3-833e-4f11-8cbd-699b0c164182/royaltyoemreferencesheet.pdf

"Q. Can end users return to Windows Vista
Business or Windows Vista Ultimate software
after they downgrade?
A. Yes. End users who downgrade may reinstall
the original software when they are ready to
migrate. For example, an end user who
downgrades to Windows XP Professional may
later return to Windows Vista Business software
provided that the end user deletes the Windows
XP Professional software from the PC."

its [sic] VERY easy to fix with your xp cd (and with zero data loss) - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 will show how.

You're forgetting that the vast majority of PC users only own one computer and won't be able to easily access the internet to search for a solution, let alone find that knowledge base article. I'm sure it only took you 5 seconds with Google, but you're special (as are all /. readers).

Most will end up calling a PC/MS support hotline, hiring someone to fix their computer, or just full-on reinstalling the OS... which is a tremendous PITA for a broken game update.

From here

Can you even edit the registry in a console?

Yes

The captcha is from a Microsoft Research project called Asirra. More info here. At a tech event last year these guys had a cage with cats and kittens that were up for adoption - needless to say their booth was very popular. They also ran out of cats a few times due to the animals being adopted by people at the event.

. People claiming it "bricks" their machine are just trying to spread the FUD as its VERY easy to fix with your xp cd (and with zero data loss) - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 will show how.

Several people have pointed this out, but here's a question for you: What if you don't have an XP disc? A lot of OEM machines only come with a "restore disc", which are normally just a disc image. Running one of these will normally wipe the entire contents of the HDD as well, causing, well, data loss.

Also, to your claim that the machines are not actually "bricked", I would say that they might as well be to a lot of users. I have plenty of friends who play a lot of MMOs, and most of them would not have the first clue what to do if confronted with this problem.

... its VERY easy to fix with your xp cd (and with zero data loss) - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 will show how.

As for why this didnt get caught by QA, they don't reboot their machines

Anyone will tell you the odds of a mistake are bigger the longer you go without making one

What's even worse is that MS removed the * hack

As a standards web developer, one can only say that's a good thing. Since that time MS and some of the big name web standards developers have come out in having people use the IE Conditional comments to target specific CSS code to (any) IE. It allows you to keep your main CSS files IE hack 'clean'.

Cheers,
Fozzy

I have XP, I installed the patch and I DID NOT get this problem. People claiming it "bricks" their machine are just trying to spread the FUD as its VERY easy to fix with your xp cd (and with zero data loss) - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 will show how.

As for why this didnt get caught by QA, they don't reboot their machines. I rarely do either. Plus I expect they have permissions in place to prevent the overwrite. Plus this is the only patch in the thousands of patches they make for the test server which had this problem. Anyone will tell you the odds of a mistake are bigger the longer you go without making one.

If you're going to mention OpenOffice's "wonderful" support for PDFs, why not mention Microsoft's free download that adds PDF support to MS Office 2007?

Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.

This is absolutely not true. IE has had debugger hooks since forever (at least IE4, which is the earliest IE that mattered). You simply need an external debugger in order to use them. Visual Studio works great, but you can use one of the free Express versions like Visual Web Developer Express, or you can use the archaic Microsoft Script Debugger. Enabling debugging does require poking around in the Tools -> Options Advanced tab to flip the counter-intuitively named "Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)" to off (yes, the checkbox is a negative, so when it's checked debugging is disabled and when it's unchecked debugging is enabled). Once you've done that, you can attach your debugger to the iexplore.exe process or you can use the new debugger-related options in the "View" menu to attach, break, etc (may have to restart IE for those menu options to show up), or you can just wait for something to break and present with you a "do you want to debug?" prompt.

While hooking a debugger to IE is not quite as simple as it is in Firefox (install Firebug, you're done), it does allow you to work in a familiar interface (assuming you're familiar with Visual Studio, of course) and is sufficiently powerful. Couple that with the IE Developer Toolbar for DOM inspection and Fiddler for session inspection and you have all of the tools you need to debug even the largest of web applications. When you're done, don't forget to Drip for memory leaks.

The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.

Not directly to HTML, but Microsoft was responsible for creating XMLHTTP, the precursor to XMLHttpRequest, without which the whole "web2.0" "AJAXy" stuff wouldn't exist. I believe XMLHttpRequest is now a w3c standard, which never would've happened if not for XMLHTTP (and yes, IE7 finally does support a native XMLHttpRequest object so you don't have to have branches for XHR vs. XMLHTTP if you don't care about supporting IE6). Similarly, there would be no SVG if it weren't for VML (not to be confused with VRML). Saying that marquee is the best Microsoft's ever been able to contribute to the web is very, very shortsighted.

Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.

This is absolutely not true. IE has had debugger hooks since forever (at least IE4, which is the earliest IE that mattered). You simply need an external debugger in order to use them. Visual Studio works great, but you can use one of the free Express versions like Visual Web Developer Express, or you can use the archaic Microsoft Script Debugger. Enabling debugging does require poking around in the Tools -> Options Advanced tab to flip the counter-intuitively named "Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)" to off (yes, the checkbox is a negative, so when it's checked debugging is disabled and when it's unchecked debugging is enabled). Once you've done that, you can attach your debugger to the iexplore.exe process or you can use the new debugger-related options in the "View" menu to attach, break, etc (may have to restart IE for those menu options to show up), or you can just wait for something to break and present with you a "do you want to debug?" prompt.

While hooking a debugger to IE is not quite as simple as it is in Firefox (install Firebug, you're done), it does allow you to work in a familiar interface (assuming you're familiar with Visual Studio, of course) and is sufficiently powerful. Couple that with the IE Developer Toolbar for DOM inspection and Fiddler for session inspection and you have all of the tools you need to debug even the largest of web applications. When you're done, don't forget to Drip for memory leaks.

The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.

Not directly to HTML, but Microsoft was responsible for creating XMLHTTP, the precursor to XMLHttpRequest, without which the whole "web2.0" "AJAXy" stuff wouldn't exist. I believe XMLHttpRequest is now a w3c standard, which never would've happened if not for XMLHTTP (and yes, IE7 finally does support a native XMLHttpRequest object so you don't have to have branches for XHR vs. XMLHTTP if you don't care about supporting IE6). Similarly, there would be no SVG if it weren't for VML (not to be confused with VRML). Saying that marquee is the best Microsoft's ever been able to contribute to the web is very, very shortsighted.

Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.

This is absolutely not true. IE has had debugger hooks since forever (at least IE4, which is the earliest IE that mattered). You simply need an external debugger in order to use them. Visual Studio works great, but you can use one of the free Express versions like Visual Web Developer Express, or you can use the archaic Microsoft Script Debugger. Enabling debugging does require poking around in the Tools -> Options Advanced tab to flip the counter-intuitively named "Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)" to off (yes, the checkbox is a negative, so when it's checked debugging is disabled and when it's unchecked debugging is enabled). Once you've done that, you can attach your debugger to the iexplore.exe process or you can use the new debugger-related options in the "View" menu to attach, break, etc (may have to restart IE for those menu options to show up), or you can just wait for something to break and present with you a "do you want to debug?" prompt.

While hooking a debugger to IE is not quite as simple as it is in Firefox (install Firebug, you're done), it does allow you to work in a familiar interface (assuming you're familiar with Visual Studio, of course) and is sufficiently powerful. Couple that with the IE Developer Toolbar for DOM inspection and Fiddler for session inspection and you have all of the tools you need to debug even the largest of web applications. When you're done, don't forget to Drip for memory leaks.

The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.

Not directly to HTML, but Microsoft was responsible for creating XMLHTTP, the precursor to XMLHttpRequest, without which the whole "web2.0" "AJAXy" stuff wouldn't exist. I believe XMLHttpRequest is now a w3c standard, which never would've happened if not for XMLHTTP (and yes, IE7 finally does support a native XMLHttpRequest object so you don't have to have branches for XHR vs. XMLHTTP if you don't care about supporting IE6). Similarly, there would be no SVG if it weren't for VML (not to be confused with VRML). Saying that marquee is the best Microsoft's ever been able to contribute to the web is very, very shortsighted.

Wow. Check out this new feature of Windows Vista! Microsoft engineers have thought of a brand new concept called symbolic links which allows a file to appear in two different directories! No other OS has this!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363878.aspx

Because PAE is a modern reincarnation of LIM EMS--i.e. "expanded memory". Expanded memory, not extended memory, allowed even an IBM XT from 1983 (or even an original IBM PC from 1981) to address as much as 32MB of RAM, provided your DOS-based app could use it. It was a (necessary) hack then and PAE's a hack now...

Oh, and Vista does have the ~3.2GB problem... See this M$ KB article.

Speaking of scaremongering, have a look at this MS ad that was on Slashdot.

ftp.apple.com is still up and running and still accepting anonymous logins, [...]

So is ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/

The second O. It's "Office Open XML", though they also just say "Open XML". Putting the adjective after the noun feels so forced that it's embarrassingly sleazy; it's obviously intended to be confused with the deprecated OpenOffice.org XML format, which was often simply called "OpenOffice XML".

It's already confusing enough...

• Office Open XML (MS-OOXML) text files have extension .docx and replace legacy blob files with extension .doc, all developed by Microsoft. MS-OOXML is natively supported in Office 2007, and MS offers plugins that add support to all versions back to Office 2000. It's supported by a couple of third-party applications such as NeoOffice and the "Novell Edition" of OpenOffice.org.
• OpenDocument text files have extension .odt, and are based on the "OpenOffice.org XML" format developed by the OpenOffice.org project, based in turn on the StarOffice file format. Sun Microsystems is pretty much running this show. OpenOffice.org is considered a reference implementation for the OpenDocument format (aka ODF, aka OASIS OpenDocument.) Other products that support ODF include KOffice, AbiWord, IBM's new beta of Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and, using any one of four different plugin projects, Microsoft Office.

then I would be inclined to agree with Mr. Ranum's points. But the fact is that there are lots of people out there working on Real Security. Let's see, there's OpenBSD's work to integrate cryptography as a system service, there's Neils Provos' work on systrace, there's GCC's ProPolice stack-smashing protection, there's OpenBSD's write XOR execute protection (which, BTW, Windows now has to some small extent), there are phishing mitigation features in Firefox, there are Free implementations of good authentication systems (e.g., MIT Kerberos, Heimdal), lots of programs now ship with sane defaults (ala Postfix and qmail), there are safe-string libraries of all license stripes, and on and on and on! The fact that Microsoft apparently does not use their own safe-string implementation is indicative of the problem here. Microsoft writes crap. If you want systems where security is a real concern, it's easy to find it. That's not to say that those systems are "secure"-- security is always a work in progress-- but to say that "our responses to those problems also remain the same" is disingenuous. Projects like OpenBSD (among many others mentioned above) have attempted to identify entire classes of problems, and solve them on the big-picture level instead of doing the patch-a-week thing.

... but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.

July 12, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It seems that David Clark, who led the development of the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there even was a '70's? - wants to create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the current Internet is plagued with. The New Internet's engineers will be much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than the first one did.

I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this New Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the physical location of the offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives r

Aww darling, you got me a powerpoint template..

You can use "fsutil" to create hard links.

C:\>fsutil hardlink create /?
Usage : fsutil hardlink create <new filename> <existing filename>
Eg : fsutil hardlink create c:\foo.txt c:\bar.txt

You can't create hard links spanning multiple volumes/filesystems, for the same reasons you can't on other operating systems. You also can't create a hard link to a directory.

Symlinks (junctions or reparse points) are a bit trickier, and made my brain hurt. Seems like you can only use them for directories, not individual files. I think your best bet is to use a SysInternals tool (junction) to manage them. This page has a bunch of information about Windows hard and soft links. This bit is particularly ... odd:

I would kind of like to use symlinks to help manage our software archive (so we can list file it by vendor but also browse the filesystem by category, for example), but now I'm pretty much too scared.

NT works similarly to UNIX. It supports hard links, so the file instance could be considered an inode. On NTFS, files also have a unique number that could be considered the inode number.

The main difference comes from how NT has mandatory locking. When you open the file, you specify what file permissions other processes are allowed to use. Naturally, very few programs grant the "delete" sharing permission.

There's also another constraint in the way deletes are done under NT. When a file is opened, the directory entry used to open it is remembered. If the "delete" sharing permission is granted, other processes are allowed to remove or rename that directory entry.

However, when an open file (directory entry) is deleted, that directory entry is marked as being in the "delete pending" state, and no other access to it is allowed. The entry stays in place until the last reference to it is closed, at which point it is removed. (If there are no other hard links to the file, the file itself is deleted at this point.) This differs from POSIX in that POSIX removes the name immediately, but NT requires that there always be a name present. Essentially, NT does not allow anonymous files to exist.

Hard links in NTFS are just like POSIX hard links: they simply add a new directory entry for an existing file on the same filesystem. They cannot cross filesystems. In API terms, CreateHardLink() will create one. For commandline utilities, XP and later support fsutil hardlink create.

Symbolic links have been added in Vista, but I do not have much information on them at present. 2000 and up have something roughly like symbolic links for directories only, called Junction Points. They allow a directory to refer to another directory on any volume (filesystem). There's no simple API for them, because the underlying mechanism is NTFS's Reparse Points, which are basically filesystem-level hooks implemented by filter drivers. 2000 and up just ship with a built-in driver for junction points. There is also no included commandline tool, but both the Resource Kit and sysinternals have one.

I recommend using the NTFS Link shell extension; it makes managing both hard links and junction points easy, and teaches Explorer how to properly handle junctions in UI terms. (Normally Explorer will delete the contents of the referenced directory when you try to delete a junction point. That makes working with them bare somewhat dangerous.)

You'll find that running a business is much more than having the best products.

I've always found cable to be a bizarre industry, though. Because the only differentiating product feature is "most uptime". Recent (dumb) cable TV ads have tried to promote the monopoly they have over local content (i.e. community news and school broadcast channels), but this is silly because local channels would be available (freely) over-the-air if people really wanted them. So yeah... the fundamental problem with Comcast would be their "uptime". With my personal experience, I have recently dropped Cablevision/IO in favor of over-the-air network broadcasts and borrowing wireless internet from a neighbor. Cablevision/IO is absolutely horrible... with "uptime" numbers that barely break into the 90% mark. In all seriousness, it is routine to see digital static jump in and out of the TV and to just get cut off from internet randomly during peak hours.

Maybe Comcast's goal is to be just a little bit better than Cablevision/IO.

You fail to differentiate between .Net and C#. By and large, I criticize the former. I can see where you might get the wrong idea, though, so I'll elaborate.

The .Net framework suggests that the prototype for an event is as follows: "ret_type event( Object sender, EventArgs_subclass e )". Compare with a "typical" windows callback mechanism: "ret_type function( HWND hParam, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam )". Suspiciously similar, neh? HWND corresponds to "Object sender", and the W- and L- PARAM objects are wrapped into EventArgs.

EventArgs and its sub-classes encapsulate all of the data given to a particular handler, much like W- and L- params, which changed meanings depending on call context. Some EventArgs subclasses also perform odd tasks, for instance the CancelEventArgs.Cancel property. This is the downright stupidest OOP implementation I've ever seen. Cancel is not data, it's an action. I don't want to specify the "cancelness" of the data, I want to cancel an operation. A better design would be to send a message back to the sending object that says, "I can't validate this." Unfortunately, because .Net event handlers use the ambiguous "object handle." I'd need a cast before I could send my response.

The complexity of implementing a cancel message is likely greater than CancelEventArgs, but the solution is far more intuitive. We don't even need to go as far as sending a message, though. Provide a real type to the sender argument (for instance, ICancelableControl, or just Control), and provide a Cancel method, and I'd be happy.

Performance is a shoddy argument for the lack of a message passing system, because .Net treats the event system as a messaging network anyway. AFAIAC, use events, but add more formality to the event system. Call your EventArgs what they are -- a message--and type the sending object appropriately. Finally, differentiate functioanlly between events and multicast delegates. Events should manage their subscription list; if an object subscribing to an event is garbage collected, fail silently. If the event lacks subscribers, then succeed.

And now for something completely different.

Everyone knows MSDN is a steaming pile of crap. What's worse, Microsoft seems to be doing very little to correct that image. IMHO, this is a mistake. As a developer, my first exposure to .Net is through MSDN--fundamentally, it's marketing for techies. It should be thorough, describing how components interact, typical real-world use cases for code, the history or motivation of a particular interface, etc. MSDN should serve the same function as an O'Reilly book--set a mood and mindset for development.

MS can spend as much money developing the perfect language as they want, but without the proper supporting tools--and don't get me started on the woes of VS--their efforts piss people off. This is precisely the motivation for the GGP's note that Objective-C developers are so "happy" and my "bullshit" post.

Hmm... Microsoft's homepage lists a bunch of Windows Mobile phones that support QR codes, hence this is nothing new:
http://www.microsoft.com/japan/windowsmobile/wm50/prodinfo/device/default.mspx

I got QR code stamped on my passport at immigration when entering Japan, back in 2003. In Japan, virtually all new phones that have a camera can also recognize QR code (pretty much like 99.999% of them).

This technology has been available since way way way way back in 1994. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code Welcome to technology three years older than this website.