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There are good reasons to criticize MS's closed file formats, but they've actually been very good about letting different versions of Office exchange files.

You can hold out from upgrading, and in return you can be guaranteed the following services:
* your documents will slowly stop being able to be read by other people since you don't have a current MS Office

You can hold out from upgrading, and in return you can be guaranteed the following services:
* your documents will slowly stop being able to be read by other people since you don't have a current MS Office

You can hold out from upgrading, and in return you can be guaranteed the following services:
* your documents will slowly stop being able to be read by other people since you don't have a current MS Office

The real problem is that you will slowly stop being able to read documents generated by other people with newer versions of software.

The real problem is that you will slowly stop being able to read documents generated by other people with newer versions of software.

Actually according to the MSDN license you can only use MSDN software as long as you have the subscription.

I think you've confused MSDN with the Action Pack.

The part about auto-boxing is generally not true, especially when it comes to low-level generic interface method invocation.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/1200/dotn et/ for a short instruction on how primitive types directly map to
objects in the language, the very same concepts of auto-boxing and unboxing take place as they are implemented in the Java
language.

Remember bCentral? I used to have a banner from the Link Exchange. Microsoft bought up a lot of banner companies, including the Link Exchange, and placed it under bCentral. I ditched it as soon as Microsoft started asking for money. Gee, that was back in 1998? So, if Microsoft can't make a banner business succeed, why are they complaining about Google's success? Oh, because it wasn't them? It isn't fair? Haven't I heard this before from Microsoft's competitors when Microsoft was king? Is Microsoft now the paun? Oh, Microsoft, where is thou sting?

So Google is not violating anti-trust. They are being a better competitor (I heard this too about Microsoft back in the day when Microsoft was slaying (mafia-style) companies and stealing technology - Caldera DOS, Stacker, Wordperfect, Visi-calc, Corel Products on Linux, Commodore/Amiga, CP/M, Lotus-123, Netscape to name a few...)

Of course, if Microsoft goes back and renigs on 20 years of anti-trust testimony defense and allows itself to be broken up and pay hefty fines that would bankrupt you for it's past sins, then I would say Google is heading toward monopoly status. But as it stands, Microsoft was a huge reason for the law to be blind about what Microsoft was doing. So they are "blind" now. Too bad Microsoft. You dug your own grave. There is still time to admit you were wrong and be held accountable.

bCentral
========

As of November 15, 2006 Microsoft will no longer accept new sign-ups for select Microsoft Online Small Business Services.

http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/online/serv ices-transition.mspx

These services, previously marketed under the bCentral(TM) brand, include Appointment Manager, Banner Network Ads, Commerce Manager, Customer Manager, FastCounter Pro, List Builder, Sales Leads, SharePoint®, Submit it!, Traffic Builder, and Web Hosting Packages.

Yeah, I got a deal breaker for Vista. I'm a network administrator and we have Exchange server. The mmc snap-in (admin tools) that allow me to change exchange settings on mailbox doesn't work in vista. I can't administrate Microsoft server software on vista, which is absolutely ridiculous! The only solution they have at preseant time is quote: "Work on exchange through Terminal Service" and the rumor is it won't be fixed to SP1 for Vista. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931903/en-us

Of course that begs the question will MS patch Office 2004 etc.

Indeed. Check out the EULA straight from Microsoft:

http://download.microsoft.com/documents/useterms/W indows%20Vista_Ultimate_English_36d0fe99-75e4-4875 -8153-889cf5105718.pdf
(warning: PDF file)

Right there on Page 11:

"4. USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system."

Seems pretty clear to me. It doesn't appear you can weasle out of it by claiming that the licensed device is the virtualization program, because it's still emulated hardware.

what is up with your fear mongers and your constant DRM raving how it is limiting me so much in Windows; only DRM I come across are some porn .WMV files.

I can do everything that I did in Vista like I did with XP before; I can run Nero to convert all my movies or I can use the 'DVD authoring' tool provided by MS to create all my pirated movies to which it automatically adds chapters for me, just copied over my original MP3 collection from XP that I have had for the last 8 years and continue to game and play/edit media like I have been doing forever now. Still can communicate with all my friends like before, share my folders in Windows with other users, Remote Desktop still connects, Office 2007 work and I can still use my blueprint programs for construction like I did before. Boy this Windows thing from MS sure has been such a terrible experience the last 15+ years and obviously people are leaving in droves.

OK we get it that Vista sales are down and that somehow by your definition this is going to be the end of Windows and mass switch overs to Linux/OSX; could have swore I have seen this type of argument modded up the last 6 years intensively if not long before that. I wish I had a time machine or could take some money bets on line that we will be exactly where we are with Vista as we are with Windows yet more stable with better drivers; yet the same arguments will be put up again. Hell we don't even need a time machine and all you gotta do is read all the articles from 5 years ago to see some of the nonsense that was modded up and where the computer industry is now. Come on get out of that little bubble you live in and get out in the real world to get your priorities straight.

Vista is very stable from all the gaming, multimedia editing, sharing, networking and just communicating like before but with a couple of additional things that are useful.

The 'March 2007 Windows Vista Application Compatibility Update' provided many compatibility updates for a huge list of applications including games also; there are many more of these to follow and the April compatibility should be released soon.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932246
Plus I get updates smoothly from Windows Update for my graphics card and just recently got the second update for my old network card which they still support; oh and that DRM WGA does not get in my way at all unlike when I used to pirate XP I would constantly run across it but now I have a legal copy I can access all the spots on the MS site easily with no inconvenience.

Even if it did, every time Outlook was started, it wanted to do its final install and first run configuration. Same with the other Office Apps as well.

Vista = Forced Obsolescence.

I think he as referring to the fact that some countries have a different layout.

Example: The French uses an AZERTY layout. Picture here: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/keyboards/kbdfr .htm

The 8-core Mac Pro is stupendous -- you can't even run XP on an 8-core system, period -- you'd need Windows Server Enterprise Edition for that. OS X runs happily on 8 cores without any special uber-expensive edition license... as long as those 8 cores reside in hardware that came from Cupertino, of course.

Microsoft actually change their licensing policy a few years ago, when dual-core processors were looming. They now license per "processor", meaning per physical package, rather than per core. Personally I have no idea why they did this, but it strikes me as generous. I'll take it. Read about it here: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/mult icore.mspx. The end result is that XP Pro systems CAN run 8 cores if it's in two quad-core packages like the Mac Pro you mentioned. And even lowly XP Home can run 4 cores in a quad-core package. This is stated plainly in the FAQ at the above link. Now I don't know how many people out there have quad-core packages, but I'm sure lots have dual-core. I don't even have a dual-core so I can't confirm. But can somebody out there confirm that they are running a dual-core successfully with XP Home, or even two dual-cores successfully with XP Pro? Anyone running quad-core?

At $1100 for 25 seats, versus $700 for 5 storage groups, monetarily I don't see the point...

If users wanted to continue getting security updates and support for OS X, then they had to upgrade to OS X 10.3 (released October 2003) if they were using 10.1 (sold September 2001 to July 2002). They had to upgrade to 10.4 (released April 2005) if they were using 10.2 (sold August 2002 to September 2003). Those are relatively short lifecycles for an operating system.

In comparison, Windows XP (released October 2001) will continue to get security updates and (paid) support until at least April 2014. Windows 2000 (released February 2000) gets updates and support until July 2010. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (released June 2006) will be supported until June 2009 (desktop version) or June 2011 (server version).

When I say create safe versions. I'm talking about figuring out something simple like writing a wrapper around snprint where no matter what the last character becomes '/0'.

quickly switch every call from snprintf to snprintf_safe where now at least it won't buffer overflow.

These safe functions should do all the error checking you need in it. Hell there's about a million otherways to solve these problems but the fact is someone has to do it and Microsoft needs to learn that they should take time to do it. It's a reason I don't use Microsoft products because they have these buffer overflow problems that should be easier to fix then "we can't" implies.

The primary "Defect" here is that number of different Vista versions are being decided by a former toilet paper salesman , rather than by any sane engineering rationale. There ought to be no more than three; "Client", "Server", "Really Big Server", ala NT 4.0. Cut the consumer-confusing price "optimization", and clone that feature from MacOS (or their own past) as well.

In rant mode, one could argue that they ought to charge you more if you run without virtualization from a more secure operating system, because you're going to have more problems. I'd love to see a Vista install instruction sheet that begins with, "have a competent admin install and secure Solaris-10 + VMWare on your laptop..."

Time Machine solves a different problem than Windows System Restore. Time Machine is a backup system designed to make it so easy for ordinary users to back up and restore data that they actually do it. It can back up over the network or to a secondary hard disk (FireWire, USB, internal, Airport Disk). It allows restore of individual files.

Time Machine
Leopard Technology Series for Developers
Time Machine

Although System Restore on Windows is a useful concept on Windows, it's not designed as a backup system for user data.

Windows System Recover
What is restored and what isn't?
System Restore FAQ: What files are monitored by System Restore?

Finally, System Restore solves a problem that to a large degree doesn't exist on Mac OS X (which has less of a tendency to randomly degrade into an un-usable or non-startable state due to regular activity like software installation and removal) and even if a system is rendered non-bootable, the Mac OS X installer allows easy restore of the system without losing user data.

"Redundant storage and hot pluggable drives for those for whom RAID is an insect spray can." If you don't know what RAID is, why would you bother specing a home-pc with hot swappable drives? "To add storage just slip in another drive and you are good to go." Yeah, assuming you got a server chassis with hot swappable drives. Which, by definition, the end-user this is targeted at doesn't.

They don't necessarily have to build their own machine. HP will have MediaMart Server, which is a headless machine with support for hot-swappable drives and will run Windows Home Server.

"Automated backups for every system on the net. Recover older versions of files. Single instance storage" Yeah, that's a good pitch, too. So far? Vapor-ware!

Several thousand are participating in the beta, and there's a forum full of people using it. Yep, sounds like vapor-ware to me.

"Remote access and administration. Remote control over the web --- again, intended for users who have no experience in any of this." Oh, there's a security hole just waiting for a portscan to come along!

Off by default.

This is aimed at Fanbois who just don't have the brains to make the leap to Ubuntu or Fedora.

WHS automatically replicates data across all attached hard drives, which can be internal/external and of different sizes, and will also automatically backup all my networked machines without duplicating files. If Ubuntu/Fedora can do that, then please enlighten me.

Have you been in a cave on the dark side of the moon since 2000?

During the last five years, Apple released major versions of OS X about every 1-1.5 years while all Microsoft had was XP.

We've already survived the worst. What else could be thrown at us?

It's news because some idiots will tell you there's not business model that will work at all. To them, and many others, the fact that small and large businesses are not only possible but exist and are thriving is the kind of news that contradicts previous lies.

Calc.exe had a few artithmetics errors over time. Some were actually mistook for manifestations of pentium FDIV bug.

Actually, if you read your Windows EULA, they only give you a limited, 90-day warranty, and all you can recover from them is the cost of the software that you're using:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx

You have to dig around further in their website to get the Office EULA, but it is equivalent in this regard to the one I've linked to.

It seems to be a typical response from Microsoft.

Another example I came across recently is here. What's the point of designing as such?

.ade .adp .app .asp .bas .bat .cer .chm .cmd .com .cpl .crt .csh .exe .fxp .hlp .hta .inf .ins .isp .its .js .jse .ksh .lnk .mad .maf .mag .mam .maq .mar .mas .mat .mau .mav .maw .mda .mdb .mde .mdt .mdw .mdz .msc .msi .msp .mst .ops .pcd .pif .prf .prg .pst .reg .scf .scr .sct .shb .shs .tmp .url .vb .vbe .vbs .vsmacros .vss .vst .vsw .ws .wsc .wsf .wsh

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925330/en-us

The program shipped with a USB20.dll file.

When you build Dynamic Link Libraries, you need to export the function names in order to be able to call them. This way you can call something like GetProcAddress(), which takes as parameters a handle to a DLL and a string representing the name of the function you're interested in calling.

Here, have some sample code.

typedef ULONG (WINAPI * External_Function)(/* parameter list goes here */);

HMODULE targetDll = ::LoadLibrary("USB20.dll");
External_Function H4X0R = (External_Function)::GetProcAddress(targetDll, "GiveAccess");
H4X0R(); // Memory stick is now unprotected

Personally, I think Media Center Extenders were always a much better idea than putting a powerful Media Center PC in the living room. Think Apple TV, but better. These extenders can control almost all of the Media Center functions from another room's PC, including DVR functions.

In order to complete the licensing process you will need to request and execute several license agreements with Microsoft. This is a complex process, but the detailed steps below will walk you through it.

In order to complete the licensing process you will need to request and execute several license agreements with Microsoft. This is a complex process, but the detailed steps below will walk you through it.

In order to complete the licensing process you will need to request and execute several license agreements with Microsoft. This is a complex process, but the detailed steps below will walk you through it.

Of course, Microsoft extended the lifecycle of Windows XP beyond the guaranteed four years because XP's successor (Vista) wasn't even available in January 2006. Unfortunately, unlike MS's "support lifecycle" policy, their "Desktop License Availability" lifecycle doesn't seem to guarantee availability for any amount of time after a product's successor is released. Hopefully, MS will have the sense to extend license availablity for XP (as they've done many times in the past for other products) if SP1 doesn't solve all of Vista's problems by then.

As all Slashdot readers should know, MS guarantees "Mainstream Support" for Windows for five years or for two years after the next version is released, whichever is longer. I think MS should have this same "two years after next version" policy for license availability as well.

It's not a black art, you have to license the SDK from Microsoft to develop filesystems.

There's a nifty trick I've been using for a while to get rid of the reboot pestering.

At Sysinternals (now owned by Microsoft) get the program called Process Explorer.

Use Process Explorer to suspend the execution of the windows update process, "wuauclt.exe." Don't kill it because it will just be respawned. There are two of these processes for some reason and you need to suspend both of them. (If you only see one, suspend it and wait for the other one to spawn. Oh, it will. )

When both of the processes are suspended, they won't bug you at all and you are free to finish the day (or whatever you're doing) before shutting down.

I think the idea that your OS could shut down (on purpose!) without asking is a terrible design decision.

Windows 2000 was made unavailable after 4 years (March 31, 2004) While XP will have been riding for more than 6 years. See the link for more info. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default .mspx

You're forgetting about Microsoft's downgrade rights. As long as you have a valid OEM Vista Business, Ultimate or any OLP, VLP, you can make user of the downgrade and use a previous OS. http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/2/3/d23b9 533-169d-4996-b198-7b9d3fe15611/downgrade_chart.do c It is more restrictive then the previous downgrade for WinXP Pro which allowed any corp with OEM WinXP Pro to use Win2k, though. However, any company that uses MOLP is fine and pretty much every IT shop will just rip out Vista and re-image WinXP using this downgrade for quite some time.

Yeah, it's a stupid idea. Here's what I should have said: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555444 Also, does your machine directly download updates, or does one of your companies servers hold them? Preventing IE7 from entering the update queue shouldn't be up to the user and patches should be approved before sending out.

Yawn, this story is a bunch of FUD. Look up "downgrade rights". This should get you started: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifelicensefaq

Try ClickOnce.

try MSDN

People should not read too much into this. To quote Gartner,

"On 17 January 2007, Microsoft published a bulletin outlining downgrade rights for Windows Vista
original equipment manufacturer (OEM) editions (see the Downgrade Rights Chart at
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/resources/volbr ief.mspx). Users buying PCs preloaded with
OEM versions of Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate may downgrade their PCs
to Windows XP Professional only."

Check out the full Gartner report here: http://www.gartner.com/resources/145900/145950/vis ta_oem_downgrade_rights_w_145950.pdf

This should suffice for 90% of the downgrade requests. Any more esoteric reasons can probably be handled on a case by case basis with Microsoft's Customer Support. The only big change with downgrade rights is that Vista will not allow you to downgrade to anything below XP, i.e Windows 2000.

This makes little sense considering when product support for XP ends:

Mainstream product support for XP ends on April 14th, 2009, with extended support (security patches only) until April 8th, 2014.

That's actually better than Windows 2000's support: 13 years of security updates as against 10 years for Win 2000 (whose extended support ends on July 13th, 2010).

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/

How about a 1 month jail sentence? It will not be that much on a heavy side, but will keep an average geek from doing it again and scare away others.

As for corporations, current laws are screwed. Anyone with a few K in the pocket can start their own personal corporation to evade responsibility for their actions against hundreds of laws. If a corporation commits a crime, everyone responsible should be charged according to degree of their responsibility. Rank and file will probably avoid imprisonment by ratting out the boss. In addition, corporations that repeatedly break laws should be banned as criminal gangs and foreclosed.

Have you heard of WGA Notifications? Every time you boot your computer it phones home to Microsoft and sends information about your computer. Every time you install Microsoft updates it phones home to Microsoft and sends information about your computer. If you Windows Update it sends information about your computer and forces you to install the wgatray spyware.

This is why I no longer use Windows Update. I use AutoPatcher (for existing installs) or RyanVM Update Packs (integrates into the cd, I use this for new installs. "RyanVM WGA Addon" contains the wga spyware).

Also, you should block the following domains at your router:

genuine.microsoft.com
mpa.one.microsoft.com
wpa.one.microsoft.com
wustats.microsoft.com

If you're using SquidGuard or similar, you should block or rewrite the following URLs:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=74005
http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/

If you have this spyware installed, XP AntiSpy can remove it.

Have you heard of WGA Notifications? Every time you boot your computer it phones home to Microsoft and sends information about your computer. Every time you install Microsoft updates it phones home to Microsoft and sends information about your computer. If you Windows Update it sends information about your computer and forces you to install the wgatray spyware.

This is why I no longer use Windows Update. I use AutoPatcher (for existing installs) or RyanVM Update Packs (integrates into the cd, I use this for new installs. "RyanVM WGA Addon" contains the wga spyware).

Also, you should block the following domains at your router:

genuine.microsoft.com
mpa.one.microsoft.com
wpa.one.microsoft.com
wustats.microsoft.com

If you're using SquidGuard or similar, you should block or rewrite the following URLs:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=74005
http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/

If you have this spyware installed, XP AntiSpy can remove it.

• Operating-system version number
  
• Internet Explorer version number
  
• Version numbers of other software for which Windows Update provides updates
  
• Plug and Play ID numbers of hardware devices
  
• Region and Language setting