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Of course the laptop can't run Vista. That's a hilarious suggestion. It would never work.

Microsoft aren't going to ship an ancient unsupported distribution (98, 2000), which leaves only versions of XP. XP was first sold in 2001, and Microsoft intend it to be usurped by this years Vista. Production of XP is due to be phased out in 2008 (that's next year folks), and retail and OEM licenses won't be available from January 31, 2008 (that's nine months away) according to their following page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default .mspx

They can't stick to that date. Dell customers have shown the demand for XP remains; Dell's profits dropped the months it wasn't available. So it's no surprise Microsoft choose to bundle XP for $3 over Vista. The truth is Vista, their more expensive, more recent product that they really want to push is less desirable to most users, and this a consequence of Microsoft's own policies. Microsoft succeeded in creating the ultimate lock-in system with XP, and this has now hit them hard. Most XP users see the system as perfectly functional, they've become incredibly accustomed to even the dysfunctional parts and many of them don't remember or never experienced previous upgrades (they've had XP for six years). It's true that upgrading will only introduce hardware problems, the trouble of data migration, loss of settings, and fewer compatible applications.

If they do phase out XP, I'm going to stockpile discs to sell with filament lightbulbs the months after the stores dry up.

Deprecated MDAC Components

These components are still supported in the current release of MDAC, but might be removed in future releases. Microsoft recommends that when you develop new applications, you avoid using these components. Additionally, when you upgrade or modify existing applications, remove any dependency on these components.

        * Jet: Starting with version 2.6, MDAC no longer contains Jet components. In other words, MDAC 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, and all future MDAC releases do not contain Microsoft Jet, Microsoft Jet OLE DB Provider, or the ODBC Desktop Database Drivers.

Prior to Vista, you could drag files from Explorer to cmd.exe to have it type in the filename for you, exactly like on Mac. However, due to overzealous security changes by Microsoft, this does not work in Vista.

In NT, console windows are actually owned by the most privileged user-mode process in the system, csrss.exe. One of Vista's big security changes is that processes cannot send window messages to windows owned by processes of higher security clearance. This means that Explorer cannot send a message to console windows telling them that there is a file being dragged to it. Starting Explorer as Administrator does not help, because csrss.exe runs with higher privilege than that.

Rather than fix the insane design issue of csrss.exe owning console windows, they decided to leave it the way it is. Never mind that there have been exploits against csrss.exe through the console system in the past.

To give you an idea of how bad of a hack the console implementation is, kernel32.dll's WriteFile detects console handles, which are fake handles, and translates the call into an RPC call to csrss.exe. This breaks all kinds of stuff.

A banned API is one that is likely to cause security vulnerabilities. There are replacements for most of them that are less likely to have problems, but they aren't part of the official C standard library.

Microsoft's build tools will treat any calls to banned APIs as errors. They aren't removed from the system because they are used by many existing applications. For example, both strcpy and strncpy are banned at Microsoft. Yet many people have been using strncpy as a replacement for strcpy, so it needs to be in the CRT library.

Take a gander at Microsoft's list. If the Safe options are on, the API is not available.

It's all kinds of sexy... but basically, it removes functions in which programmers have frequently used incorrect or for which there is no absolutely correct way to use them and still validate user supplied data.

this is from here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;Q303528 its a hilarious read in this context.

Microsoft Jet is a file-sharing database system. A file-sharing database system means that the processing of the file occurs at the client. When a file-sharing database, such as Microsoft Jet, is used in a multi-user environment, multiple client processes use file read, file write, and file locking operations on the same shared file across a network. If a process cannot be completed, the file may be left in an incomplete state or in a corrupted state. A process may not be completed for either of the following reasons:
        When a client is stopped unexpectedly
        When a network connection to a server is dropped

Microsoft Jet is not intended for use with high-stress server applications, high-concurrency server applications, or 24 hours a day, seven days a week server applications. This includes server applications, such as Web applications, commerce applications, transactional applications, and messaging server applications. For these types of applications, the best solution is to switch to a true client/server-based database system, such as Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) or Microsoft SQL Server. When you use Microsoft Jet in high-stress applications such as Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), you may experience any one of the following problems:
        Database corruption
        Stability issues, such as IIS crashing or locking up
        Sudden failure or persistent failure of the driver to connect to a valid database that requires re-starting the IIS service

According to Microsoft's SEC Filings page net income has gone up 65% as advertised. Revenue went up 32%. This is as compared with the Windows XP launch that saw Revenue up 18% and net income actually *down* 13%. However(!), Windows XP was released about a month after 9/11, in a very unstable economic period, which presumably caused the 50% jump in "Cost of Revinue" and the near fourfold increase Administrative Expendetures, whereas the total outlays for 1st quarter 2007 were only up 11%. Also Windows 2K and ME were still being sold on consumer machines; plus, Windows XP was released in the 4th quarter, versus Vista in the first quarter, though canonically that means that Windows XP should come out ahead though.

Conclusion, there is no good way to compare the release of XP to the release of Vista. Let's try something different. 98 vs. Vista. It's 3rd quarter vs. 1st quarter, around the same economic situation, no competing product, and no massive terrorist attack. 98 showed a 26% increase in revenue and a (get this) 155% increase in net income.

So, as good as Vista's doing, 98 did better.

Vista has been chugging out the compatibility updates for lots of very popular applications.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932246
This is onlyt the March update and many more to come; now compare that list to Ubuntu and how many it can run of all those.

Microsoft has an answer to Bash

http://www.microsoft.com/powershell

Power Shell?

An anonymous reader writes "Despite reports, it seems Microsoft is not only alive, but has been thriving these last few months.

Isn't it inevitable?

I see no reason to think so.

Do you really think that Microsoft will keep XP activation around forever? Especially once they drop "support" I would assume they would take the approach that activation is part of that. Of course they would be very sorry that you could no longer activate your software, but, well, it isn't supported any more is it?

I expect, they will keep the activation servers running for the entire support lifetime of XP (so, at least 2014) and most likely for some time after that (after all, I can still use Windows update to update Windows 98). Further, as outlined as indicated here, I expect at EOL a patch of some sort will be released that removes the need for activation.

The suggestion that Microsoft will use activation to "force" upgrades is supported by neither historical experience, nor reasonable speculation. It is the epitomy of paranoid fantasy.

However, even on the unlikely, slim chance they don't, I can't imagine there'll be many people trying to run XP in 2015+.

That's his point - he doesn't. He treats everyone like a legitimate customer, which is what he feels is ethically correct. I for one agree.

Sounds like a good way to get used. Although it's probably a reasonable course of action for niche and/or specialised applications. That hardly describes operating systems, however.

Vista is selling slow on Planet Slashdot only; in RL, Microsoft just announced today the financial results, and it roundly beat analysts' expectations. Here is MarketWatch's take on this.

I'll accept your funny problems and raise you another:
AMD K6/2 too fast for Windows 95: News MS Support

The only problem with that is that only with retail versions do you get both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions. I built a new PC late last year and got a Windows XP Pro license (32 bit, OEM) with a free upgrade to Vista. I got my upgrade, Vista Business (32bit). There was no way for me to upgrade to the 64 bit version. I'm not quite interested in running 64bit quite yet but I want to do it in the future but unfortunately, unless I buy the retail version of Vista I'll be out of luck and the same will be the case for anyone that buys an OEM verisons.

It means that they were able to successfully remove the blood sucking parasites from the kernel.

Most kernels use a periodic system timer tick to do various housekeeping chores, like rescheduling tasks, sending packets, flushing files from the cache, etc. Usually this occurs at some periodic rate, i.e. every 1-10ms for Linux and every 10-15ms for Windows (according to this article.

This is a bit wasteful of CPU resources, since the kernel might not need to do anything for quite a while, or it might want a high resolution timer with higher accuracy than normal system timer. For example, when the system is idle, the CPU still must wake up and process a timer interrupt for every timer tick, and if it's set to 1ms there are 1000 interrupts per second.

A tickless kernel instead only schedules the next tick for when it is needed, so if the system is idle and nothing needs to happen for 50ms, then the next tick will be scheduled 50ms later. On the other hand, if a timer needs to go off in 750 microseconds, the kernel can schedule the next interrupt to go off then, giving much higher accuracy.

You're confusing Linux with this Windows 95/98. However, this problem or this another problem are even more funnier

You're confusing Linux with this Windows 95/98. However, this problem or this another problem are even more funnier

You're confusing Linux with this Windows 95/98. However, this problem or this another problem are even more funnier

I can think of a few things: the old backup program, ntbackup.exe, is no longer included. The replacement, sdclt.exe (Vista Backup) is a joke. You can't even select the files you want to backup, or put the output in a file of your choosing. It doesn't backup registry hives correctly and doesn't use volume shadow copies (both of which ntbakcup does). The ntbackup for XP or 2003 is incompatible with Vista.

Winhlp32.exe is no longer included (the file called winhlp32.exe is a stub that pops an error message telling you that a functional winhlp32 is no longer shipped), although for some reason its Win16 counterpart, winhelp.exe, is. Any program that uses .HLP files is broken. Some parts of the OS still use .HLP files for documentation (like the What's This? for the offline files share control page), so those links are broken now.

There are fixed promised, but OpenGL is still broken, or very slow with most video drivers.

The new sound system does not support any kind of hardware acceleration or features. Companies like Creative are scrambling to get game developers to adopt OpenAL with an end-run around the Vista sound system so that users aren't left with $300 sound cards equivalent to an AC'97. This does nothing for older games that depended on DirectSound for this.

Here's a list of more things.

On XP, Office 2007 breaks the spell check in Outlook Express, which is ridiculously popular with Joe Average. Looks like Joe will have to go get Vista.

Just like people do with other abandonware, people bypass those mechanisms. They are already bypassed. And if Microsoft isn't supporting the applications, they have some very patchy legal ground to take action against anyone with a legitimate license for their product, regardless of the method used to fulfill the license.

I'd also like to point out, as you mention yourself, if Vista becomes obselete, then... why would you use it?

Nobody uses Win98 or 3.11 anymore (apart from a few crazy nutjobs).

Well that makes some sense, *in theory*:

1. You're buying an OEM version therefore purchasing a motherboard and CPU.
2. If you're buying a x86_64 CPU and compatible mobo then you can get 64 bit Window's drivers for said hardware.
3. 32 bit application compatibility on 64 bit Window's will be perfect.
4. Given the above you should run a 64 bit Window's.

The only 'slight' hiccup's are that #2 doesn't take into account any existing hardware you may have, and that #3 just isn't true given the state of some Window's software out there. My point is pushing people buying new hardware to 64 bit isn't a bad thing and if you do your research before purchasing it is possible to have a smooth 64 bit experience on newly purchased hardware. I've been dual booting Windows XP "x64 Edition" with Linux since February last year and haven't come across a single 32 bit Window's app that couldn't be persuaded to work flawlessly.

I won't go as far as to say you made a bad choice choosing the 32 bit XP Pro license because even though, according to the Vista upgrade path webpage, as an XP x64 user you would have been eligible for upgrade pricing when moving move to a "better edition" of Vista (Presumeably Home Premium, Business or Ultimate) I've never actually seen XP x64 Edition on sale with a "free upgrade to Vista" coupon.

Microsoft will offer a minimum of 10 years of support for Business and Developer products. Mainstream support for Business and Developer products will be provided for 5 years or for 2 years after the successor product (N+1) is released, whichever is longer. Microsoft will also provide Extended support for the 5 years following Mainstream support or for 2 years after the second successor product (N+2) is released, whichever is longer. Finally, most Business and Developer products will receive at least 10 years of online self-help support.

Consumers get a little less time:

Microsoft will offer Mainstream support for either a minimum of 5 years from the date of a product's general availability, or for 2 years after the successor product (N+1) is released, whichever is longer. Extended support is not offered for Consumer, Hardware, Multimedia, and Microsoft Dynamics products. Products that release new versions annually, such as Microsoft Money, Microsoft Encarta, Microsoft Picture It!, and Microsoft Streets & Trips, will receive a minimum of 3 years of Mainstream support from the product's date of availability. Most products will also receive at least 8 years of online self-help support. Microsoft Xbox games are currently not included in the Support Lifecycle policy.

Ok. Minimum of 5 years. Seems kinda short, I guess. What's Ubuntu's policy?

From their announcement https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/ 2005-October/000038.html:

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for your desktop or server, with a
fast and easy install, regular releases, a tight selection of
excellent packages installed by default, every other package you can
imagine available from the network, a commitment to security updates
for 18 months after each release and professional technical support
from many companies around the world.

18 months. Now for the price, that's exceptional, but your argument had nothing to do with price, and everything to do with version upgrades. If updates are your metric for determining whether users are "forced" to upgrade, look no further than the announced support cycle for Ubuntu 5.10.

They looked like they'd gotten better, no doubt. With 6.06, you get 5 years of upgrades--the same minimum guaranteed by Microsoft http://www.ubuntu.com/news/606released:

Ubuntu is freely available, including security updates for five years on servers, with no restrictions on usage and no requirement to purchase support contracts or subscriptions per deployment.

But wait. The 7.04 release of Ubuntu reverts back to 18 months--they say that the 6.06 series was a "long term support release" https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/ 2007-April/000102.html.

Ubuntu 7.04 will be supported for 18 months on both desktops and servers. Note that 6.06 LTS is a long-term support release, and so users requiring a longer support lifetime may choose to continue using that version rather than upgrade to or install 7.04.

So we're back to 18 months. Microsoft's stated support minimum is more than 3 times longer than Ubuntu's, except for the aberration of Ubuntu 6.06.

So who's 'forced' to upgrade in order to keep support?

I mainly focused on Ubuntu because that's what the person you replied to was talking about. Redhat, arguably the best known Linux vendor, gives their cycle here: http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/ They give you 7 years of

Well, for starters, you can't upgrade from XP Pro to Vista Home Premium. You have to do a clean install. And even though you can look up the differences yourself, I'll point them out: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/editions/choose.mspx?wt_svl=10033VHa2&mg_id=1 0033VHb2

The only one that seems really stupid is the "Fax and Scan" missing from the home editions. Where did they get the idea that home users never want to scan photos?

Microsoft is trying something like this with PNRP (peer name resolution protocol)

-> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/p2p/pnrp. mspx

This might prove a viable way to establish a decentralized DNS in the future. Version 2 of the protocol ships with Vista.
Makes me wonder what Apple will come up with next in that field.

I think you may be misunderstanding the server products.

You cannot buy IIS, and there is no enterprise version.

If you're looking for a webserver, you dont want Windows 2003 Server Enterprise, you want Windows 2003 Web Server Edition. Both of which include IIS6.

Getting the enterprise version of server would be way overkill.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/eva luate/features/compare.mspx

And it'll run you a few hundred dollars ($380 at newegg):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16832116114

And for small to medium-sized uses, you can just download SQL Server 2005 Express, for free.

You can also do the same thing on your XP Pro box with no additional costs whatsoever, but with some scalability limitations (ie, good for dev box, no good for real production box).

What are IIS' equivalents of the and directives?

Is there a word missing here, or is apache lingo that I just dont know? What is an 'and directive'?

Do you mean what is commonly referred to as 'security modules and directives'?

The 'allow' and 'deny' directives are largely present in IIS. Not so simple to do partial host-names and partial-IP addresses in quite the way that apache directives do them, but its doable. An IIS filter written in C# is always your fallback here.

'AuthGroupFile' equivalent functionality is also present, you just stick the user/pass pairs in the metabase.xml (iirc).

All of the 'AuthName', 'AuthType', etc functionality is there, its just configured differently than apache does it. Same for the 'options' directive.

I pulled all of these from here.

How can I use TLS SNI with IIS?

You've got me there. But be patient, SNI is very young, and from what I found in a quick google, isnt well integrated into apache yet either. In a pinch, as I said earlier, you could always write a filter yourself if you wanted to.

Then again, how about just use one IP for each SSL enabled domain. It's not that big of a barrier. Or am I missing something? I'm not hugely up to speed on the driving force behind this.

How do I use IIS as a backend for a subversion server?

Do you mean as a front-end to a subversion server? As I am not aware of a way to use apache as a backend to a subversion server. You either stick it in the file system, or use BerkeleyDB.

If you mean use IIS as a front-end to SVN, then there's no easy way to do it without writing some code. IIS supports WebDAV but I'm frankly not sure how much support there is for DeltaV, which SVN over a web server requires.

So here the answer (to the probably correct modification of your question), is no. There is no software currently written to allow you to use IIS to host SVN. Like so many things, probably very doable if you want to do the code, but no one is doing it yet.

How can I set up filters that deny requests based on the occurance of suspicious strings in their headers?

This one is easy. URLScan.

Now mind you, using URLScan on IIS6 isnt as common as it was on previous versions, but its very doable, and gives you this nice of control.

Another thing to mention, URLScan is just an ISAPI filter written and loaded into IIS, anyone can write similar modules.

How can I have an IIS server publish its virtual hosts via DNS-SD?

Not that I can find. Though in all honesty, DNS-SD and TLS-SNI is some pretty esoteric stuff at the moment.

How can I set it up to fire off requests for different virtual hosts as different system users, so that I can grant different priviliges to different web applications?

Trivially. Each host uses its own application pool, which can run as whatever user account you want. So if you want 600 different sites, each running under its own unique user-account, then you just do it. Thats how shared-hosting services on IIS are done.

How can I have IIS get the value that it uses for the Content-Type header of its responses from an extended attribute on the file being served, rather than a dumb lookup in a table of file extension (god, don't get me STARTED on file extensions!) to media type?

Well, no, but this isnt much to do with IIS, its more of a windows philosophy thing.

In addition, not everyone buys into determining content-type via magic numbers. And its definitely not how its done in the windows world. So even if IIS offered this, it wouldnt do you much good, as not much in the windows world

Clickable link

Around the IE4 time frame, an equivalent feature to bookmark keywords did exist - description. I have no idea where to get that anymore though, neither do I know if it still works...

Ugh... Netzero, yeah, that POS. I remember hacking that software to get rid of the adverts. It got harder and harder to keep the adverts away with each release.

You shouldn't have thrown away the hard drive!? To wipe LILO off the MBR, it was a simple undocumented command in Microsoft's Fdisk: A:\>fdisk /MBR to get your DOS Master Boot Record back.

• As of IIS 6.0 the 'metabase' configuration is all in an XML file - you can edit the xml files directly or programmatically.
• There a few configuration settings you can set via nant tasks - which I think use metabase APIs themselves...

On an unrelated note, I wasn't aware the .NET SDK was free. Interesting, but I can't see the justification in using F# over Ocaml. Of course, if you're using .NET you might as well get an MSDN kit and visual studio, so I can see where they're going with it.

.NET SDK 2.0. Also, as I mentioned, Visual Studio Express products are available for free for many different uses (app development, web development, database development, game development, etc). If you're developing software professionally, you probably would want to spring for a full Visual Studio product, but for individuals and small projects the Express SKUs work great. XNA's Game Studio Express is built on top of Visual C# Express, for example, and allows you to build games for Windows and/or Xbox 360.

As for why you would use F# instead of OCAML, IronPython instead of Python, Ruby.NET instead of Ruby, etc, is for interoperability. Because the languages are implemented to compile down to IL (.NET's Intermediate Language), they can be used with any other .NET language. For most people it's just a novelty, but it's still cool in a geeky way. BTW, this is no different than building compilers to target languages to the Java VM, like Jython. Why would you use Jython rather than Python? Because it can more easily interact with Java components and other languages compiled to the Java VM. Not a big deal if you're only doing Python work, but invaluable if parts of your product are written in Java and it makes sense to build other portions with Python.

On an unrelated note, I wasn't aware the .NET SDK was free. Interesting, but I can't see the justification in using F# over Ocaml. Of course, if you're using .NET you might as well get an MSDN kit and visual studio, so I can see where they're going with it.

.NET SDK 2.0. Also, as I mentioned, Visual Studio Express products are available for free for many different uses (app development, web development, database development, game development, etc). If you're developing software professionally, you probably would want to spring for a full Visual Studio product, but for individuals and small projects the Express SKUs work great. XNA's Game Studio Express is built on top of Visual C# Express, for example, and allows you to build games for Windows and/or Xbox 360.

As for why you would use F# instead of OCAML, IronPython instead of Python, Ruby.NET instead of Ruby, etc, is for interoperability. Because the languages are implemented to compile down to IL (.NET's Intermediate Language), they can be used with any other .NET language. For most people it's just a novelty, but it's still cool in a geeky way. BTW, this is no different than building compilers to target languages to the Java VM, like Jython. Why would you use Jython rather than Python? Because it can more easily interact with Java components and other languages compiled to the Java VM. Not a big deal if you're only doing Python work, but invaluable if parts of your product are written in Java and it makes sense to build other portions with Python.

There's plenty of choice on Windows. The only difference is that these choices involve paying money for things whose worth you can't evaluate until you've used them for longer than a month.

If you're going to claim that you have to pay for everything on Windows, you probably ought to choose better examples.

IDEs - visual studio, eclipse, netbeans, dev-c++, codewarrior, just to name a few I've used

Visual Studio (Express versions), Eclipse, NetBeans, Dev-C++ -- all free

The various .NET languages

Again, free. You don't need anything but a text editor and the .NET SDK (free) to build .NET applications. Also, other languages like F# (variant of ML) and IronPython (uh ... Python on .NET) are free as well. In fact, IronPython is even open source.

Databases

SQL Server Express, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, all free. Sure, SQL Server (non-Express), Oracle, and db2 are not free, but Oracle and db2 are not free on Linux either.

Webservers, IIS, apache, or something else?

IIS is "free" (comes with the OS you paid for), and Apache is obviously free as well.

If you're just moaning about how Microsoft has a large vertically integrated set of tools, well, there's Java. Nobody does this, because its stupid and they have the choice not to.

They have the choice not to moan about Microsoft's vertically integrated toolset? Or they have the choice not to use Java?

For independent or small developers, an integrated set of tools isn't really all that important (though nice). For a medium to large business, it's critical if you want to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time without reinventing the wheel over and over again. That toolset doesn't have to be Microsoft, but they do provide a compelling set of developer utilities (Visual Studio is easily one of the best IDEs available for any price, for example). That's what the article was getting at -- when it comes to developers, Microsoft Gets It(tm) (queue Ballmer's infamous "Developers developers developers" video here).

Perhaps... but to what extent? :-)

http://www.microsoft.com/voicecommand

I strongly doubt you can achieve this level with your combination.

Per the terms of the license he is entitled to the upgrade, as was I. All I had to do was fax in my receipt from newegg, I didn't even have to show that I bought a new PC because I was the "System Builder"

http://oem.microsoft.com/downloads/Public/sblicens e/2007_SB_Licenses/English.pdf
""System builder" means an original equipment manufacturer, an assembler, refurbisher, or pre-installer of software on computer systems."

You must agree to the above license, and there are limits to the OEM license. As others have stated the big one being you have the right to move the license from one machine to another with the retail but not the OEM version.

More like they think that they can get enterprise customers to pay them for simplifying push email to one application rather than having to setup Exchange or Notes or whatever setup to support Windows Mobile devices, and they are right. There are plenty of IT departments out there that are tasked with supporting whatever technology the business decides to use and if they can reduce their own workload for the fairly minimal cost of a BES license they WILL pay.

Uh, I don't know about you guys, but we actually didn't have too much trouble getting our Exchange server to work with the Windows Mobile clients. In fact, right now, we're having more trouble doing a migration/upgrade of our BES than we are working with Exchange 2K3 and Windows Mobile 5.

Pretty much, as long as your Exchange server is up to date (as in, 2003 with latest service pack or 2007) and has Outlook Web Access enabled, plus your WM5 device has the Messaging and Security Feature Pack (which is default with most devices nowadays, I do believe), you should be able to sync with no issues. Getting the free ActiveSync Web Administration add-on for Exchange helps greatly, too.

In all, for the cost of an SSL cert for the OWA, we got just about the same security as the Blackberry and removed a point of failure. (Our WM5 devices still kept working while RIM had their outage.) We didn't have any real trouble setting it up, either, and easy directions are available on the net. I could be mistaken, of course, but all in all, I find it a bit difficult to believe that the cost of a BES plus individual licenses is less than the cost of setting up Exchange 2003 for Windows Mobile access.

Just my $.02...

More like they think that they can get enterprise customers to pay them for simplifying push email to one application rather than having to setup Exchange or Notes or whatever setup to support Windows Mobile devices, and they are right. There are plenty of IT departments out there that are tasked with supporting whatever technology the business decides to use and if they can reduce their own workload for the fairly minimal cost of a BES license they WILL pay.

Uh, I don't know about you guys, but we actually didn't have too much trouble getting our Exchange server to work with the Windows Mobile clients. In fact, right now, we're having more trouble doing a migration/upgrade of our BES than we are working with Exchange 2K3 and Windows Mobile 5.

Pretty much, as long as your Exchange server is up to date (as in, 2003 with latest service pack or 2007) and has Outlook Web Access enabled, plus your WM5 device has the Messaging and Security Feature Pack (which is default with most devices nowadays, I do believe), you should be able to sync with no issues. Getting the free ActiveSync Web Administration add-on for Exchange helps greatly, too.

In all, for the cost of an SSL cert for the OWA, we got just about the same security as the Blackberry and removed a point of failure. (Our WM5 devices still kept working while RIM had their outage.) We didn't have any real trouble setting it up, either, and easy directions are available on the net. I could be mistaken, of course, but all in all, I find it a bit difficult to believe that the cost of a BES plus individual licenses is less than the cost of setting up Exchange 2003 for Windows Mobile access.

Just my $.02...

You can rest easily. I happen to have the Games for Windows specs in my bookmarks, and they only specify that if your game supports gamepads, it must support the 360 controller, and the 360 controller must be the default controller (as well as some other, minor, generally good practises).

I'm no Microsoft lover, but as a game developer, it would be useful if Windows standardized on a gamepad. Keyboard and mouse are great for lots of games, but they can be very limiting for many other games. And as much as it pains me to say it, Microsoft's controller is probably the best controller available for the PC.

If you can get your mitts on Service Pack 4, MS says yes.

Since you're an absolute moron who seems to enjoy replying to himself. Read the fucking license yourself. That's the license that my OEM copy of Windows XP came with (and there's a sticker on the manual that points to that website):

"By accepting this license, you agree that you are a system builder. ... "System builder" means an original equipment manufacturer, an assembler, refurbisher, or pre-installer of software on computer systems."

It goes on to define an "assembled" computer as being CPU, motherboard, drive and case. ie: If you bought those components separately and screwed them together - you're a system builder, and this is the version of Windows for you. It then says that you're allowed to resell and distribute a computer with this software installed - but it doesn't say that you must.

The catches - and there are two - is that (1) these OEM versions are generally not upgradeable. You have to buy another full copy of the next release of the OS (although according to their definitions, I see nothing from stopping you from getting another OEM version since you did build the machine yourself.. and I guess "refurbishing" could be defined as an OS upgrade). And (2) you get no technical support from Microsoft - none whatsoever - since the system builder / OEM (that's you now) is supposed to provide technical support.

I'm not a lawyer, but it would seem to be perfectly valid to buy OEM software for a computer you've built. And Microsoft would certainly be fools to stop people from doing this - people building their own machines is one of the demographics that's most able to instantly migrate over to Linux (indeed, I and many of my friends are dual-booting Windows with some flavor of Linux and wouldn't really miss Windows much).

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musi candvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx

Hey, it's the minimum required to run. No one said it would be pretty, or particularly useful, only that it would run.

Here's What You Need to Use Windows XP Professional
PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system); Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space
Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
CD-ROM or DVD drive
Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/s ysreqs.mspx

I have actually run XP on a PII 450 with 128 MB of RAM and it did run fine.

So they bought a copy of XP and reinstalled. 3D looked like what a top of the line card should be able to do and dialup worked. Performance in general was vastly improved. Still had the 2GB memory limit though, probably not much to there except go to a 64bit system and suffer the issues involved with that... not worth it.

In XP you can up your limit to 3 GB by using the /3GB switch in boot.ini. According to this page, the same thing is accomplished somewhat differently on Vista.

2GB issue related to
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/serv er/PAE/PAEmem.mspx ?

Could you use the /3GB switch?

to expand upon this point, all Microsoft has to do (and have set into motion) is enact an end-of-life for XP then people will be forced to upgrade to Vista. With real monopoly power, it doesn't matter if Vista is poor. The masses *will* be assimilated.

This is a problem that is known by Microsoft and fix/KB Article was generated for it around the Feb/Mar timeframe. The link to the KB is:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932094/

Additionally, if you check Toshiba's support site - they have a link to update their RAID driver for Windows Vista on Protege tablets/laptops that specifically addresses this at the following URL:
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_d tlViewDL.jsp?soid=1663403&moid=1209152&BV_SessionI D=@@@@0267420348.1177345927@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccchad dkkdidhdkcgfkceghdgngdgmn.0&ct=DL

From their site: This driver corrects a "blue screen" issue that occurs when a movie or audio file is played from the hard disk drive, using Apple's QuickTime player. This driver is for Windows Vista computers only.

This probably is the hotfix listed at the Microsoft site. Try it and see if it solves your problem...