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'We've been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content.'

Since when? As far as I know, what they are trying is to provide the ultimate protection to content, from the file format to the media player software to the output hardware.

You can try to show people HOW it helps you. Like drag them over and show them how it helps you, all the stuff you do to become more productive. You can always send them this. Also this. is a pretty good one. Just some googling will bring up a swathe of articles claiming statistics, usually up to 50%, so at the very least you can use those, or figure out what studies they use.

Personally, I've got a widescreen laptop, and the added screen real state made me start wondering if I should switch to two monitors to increase it even more! Now I have an old CRT screen to the right of me, usually it has all my documentation/references open while I work. For art programs, especially, it is just unbelievably valuable, been thinking about getting an LCD screen for a while, because the CRT is currently too bulky and too small to place where I want it to be (its like 2 feet away, not quite how most people use it). Not to mention, during breaks, I just switch the secondary to watch TV on it, while I can still do small bits of work.

Yes I'm productive during my breaks as well, its easy when you do something you enjoy.

I myself have 2 monitors at my workplace, it definitely helps do things faster, even better than having a single huge monitor...

More on this topic can be found here, here and here.

I also get time to do other things at office by the time saved :)
some examples are at my blog
http://techniche.blogspot.com/2006/02/some-pics-fr om-my-cubicle-in-office.html
http://techniche.blogspot.com/2006/02/expressive-p ictures-of-my-ferrari.html
http://techniche.blogspot.com/2007/02/harley-garag e.html
http://techniche.blogspot.com/2007/04/and-best-pic ture-from-my-harley-model.html

After a bit of Googlin':
Two Screens Are Better Than One

The best part is that it was done by Slashdot's nemesis. :)

Wrong. Both AAC and WMA require license fees for decoders as well as encoders. (although MS freely license if your software is aimed at the Windows platform)

In fact AAC's license fees appear to be higher than Microsoft's.

This is not true with MP3 and certainly not with Windows Media, which both require us to pay a percentage of the sale price of MP3 or WMA files to the encoder maker.

That is utter bullshit. Having been involved with selling music on-line for 6 years not once did we have to pay Microsoft anything when we used WMA. Heck, even their DRM SDK was free. Can you link to proof of your assertion that every WMA track you deliver has to involve a royalty payment to Microsoft?

Certainly you have to pay to license the decoder and encoder; shock horror, just like MP3 and AAC. Heck, MS even publish the license fees for such usage.

How you got marked "insightful" for FUD and lies is beyond my understanding.

Wrong.

On OSX: Eeewww. I did not know that. But, still, serialized objects aren't THAT bad compared to the registry. That seems like a way of simplifying reading in the config files more than anything else... And it's similar to a flat file system, isn't it? You can still edit them, right?

As far as Gnome goes, XML files are flat files. You can hand edit them, as you said. I prefer XML for config files, myself.

I don't think finding flat files is all that difficult. The program documentation or man page usually mentions any config file you need to know about. I don't think there's an issue here.

As far as Microsoft's intent for how companies use the registry, set that aside for a second. How is it actually USED? What are people doing with it? What is Microsoft doing with it? You yourself admit that Microsoft uses it to hold license key information for MS Word. What is a license key but a tool for restricting piracy? One key per computer, right? Take Windows Genuine Advantage for example. How does it "know" a system has been pirated? Serial numbers? License keys? Where would those be kept? The registry? If not, where else?

I'm not saying they don't have a zillion other reasons why they went with a registry, I'm just saying this one CERTAINLY figures in. I don't believe their motives were pure.

Now, on paranoia. I'm going to give you a big pile of buttery link goodness! It's an interesting story anyway. Here goes:

1. About what might be stored in a word document (very amusing!):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223790

2. Those wacky hidden tags!
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i33/33a04101.htm

3. Microsoft embeds a Global Unique Identifier in Word Files. This is interesting
because they used the GUID embedded in the Melissa virus, plus the MAC ID stored when
it was uploaded to a website, to identify files on another site written by the same
copy of Word (or something along those lines). This nabbed them the author.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-514170.html

4. Here's some info on GUID:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Unique_Ident ifier

See? NOT PARANOID. But it's interesting, isn't it? Anyway, the registry is the obvious place to store settings like this. If they put them in flat files, people would go in and change them to bogus numbers. In the registry doing so is a pain in the ass, and most people would be afraid to even TOUCH the registry. Nobody's afraid of a config file; you can always back it up and put it back if you break something. Not so with the registry... Or at least, not as easily.

ABOUT WINDOWS 98: Norton Ghost was probably out by then, so the cat was out of the bag and Microsoft didn't care anymore. Or other solutions had been released.

About your 2 justifications of a database approach, I agree that those are very nice, but you can get them using XML flat files without having to deal with a registry. And each application should still maintain their own config files as a matter of principle. Otherwise, who knows if one application won't accidentally step on another?

I like flat files. Mmm... Flat files. :)

Microsoft's USMT tool is actually pretty good if you are moving from one system to another. It grabs everything in My Documents, all Outlook settings and mail (including *.pst files), Favorites, and more. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=4af2d2c9-f16c-4c52-a203-8daf944dd555&Displa yLang=en It does NOT do patches, updates, or things like DivX codec. We combine the USMT tool at work with Ghost, and it work pretty well for deployment.

• Perform an inventory of the hardware in the machine. Note especially the vendor and model number of the major components. You'll need this later.
• Establish partitions on the boot drive (only if I'm dual-booting Linux or BeOS or something).
• Yank network cable.
• Install Windows from installation media. This takes a ridiculous amount of time, considering that most of the work is (should be) simply copying files. Reboot.
• Install Service Pack 2, which I conveniently have on a separate CD I burned. Reboot.
• Crank up Windows firewall to highest setting, or moral equivalent thereof (I'm behind a NAT router, so that works).
• Visit Windows Update, and download all security and bug fixes. Duration depends on connection speed, but it can easily consume an hour. Reboot.
• Using the hardware inventory you prepared earlier: for $item in $inventory ; do
  • Visit hardware vendor's site.
  • Locate, download, and install latest device driver(s) for $item.
  • Reboot.
• done

At this point, you have a usable machine. If it's my machine (and even if it isn't my machine), I usually install the following software:

• Firefox
• Vim
• VirtuaWin
• TreeSize
• PuTTY
• WinSCP
• TweakUI

Schwab

Links keep dissapearing from my posts! Here is teh link that goes with the parent post: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220. aspx

I actually looked this up a while ago. The short answer is yes, Windows will indeed auto-run a USB flash drive. The longer answer is that making it auto-run a flash drive involves some special setup of the USB drive, so if you just dump an autorun.inf file onto a USB flash drive nothing will happen.

Windows will only auto-run media that marks itself as "fixed" when it's queried. You can find details in this FAQ from Microsoft. (Note: there's no direct anchor to the question, so you'll need to scroll up two questions from the anchor I linked to.)

I'm not sure if it's possible to make any flash drive into a "fixed" device, but there have to be "special" drives designed to allow autorun, so plugging in random USB flash drives is definitely a bad idea - at least under Windows.

They may have a point as Microsoft "open sourced" their OS http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jan0 6/01-25EUSourceCodePR.mspx. No doubt they went through it and discovered some bugs.

I don't know if it will work on Vista (MS claims win95 onwards or NT4 onwards), but you may find BGInfo a handy tool for your laptop. It will publish your IP address and other system information on the desktop every time you boot. You can configure it to show just the information that you desire.

I don't mean to burst your bubble, but pre-release versions of Vista were available for free download from Microsoft under their beta test or "customer preview program" (closed now), and had a license that was supposed to be good for a year. Assuming that year hasn't passed (website says June), they did not pirate the RC2 copy, they obtained it legally. Microsoft obviously did not make the release version available for free download under any licensing agreement, so unless they paid for a license they would be pirating a release version. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they actually DID try it out on a pirated version of release Vista, but if they're going to come out in public and stand next to it, it's much better to do so with RC2, which they can claim they have under a legitimate license to.

The reality is of course M$ is shooting itself in the foot and then sticking the bloody stump in it's own mouth. It is an anti-Vista study. Not only did the company reject Vista, but they also went with an older version of Office. M$ is currently trying to sell the latest full version of M$ Office to Australian University students for $75.00, it is a non-student/education version, with out much success.

Check out the study for a whole list of reasons why to reject Vista and M$ Office 2007. When companies start wrapping themselves up in B$ advertising, is it amusing how confused they can get at times.

Most colleges have a VLK with Microsoft. My college of 6,000 sells legal copies of XP for $10 (the money goes to the acm) my brothers university 30,000+ you just go to the library give them your card and check out XP with the key printed on it, install and return.

the key is good until you stop going to school then technically you need to get a another key, and buy then Vista should be mature enough to use so keep your vista key around

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/default. aspx

I would. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307729

Vista is supposed to that and was written to do that. It consumes much more of your system's RAM for caching. As memory load (from applications) increases, the memory is given back and the amount of memory used for caching decreases accordingly.

See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues /2007/02/VistaKernel/default.aspx (and part 2) for more.

All operating systems crash with poorly written drivers.

Plus shall we mention this is the first time this has been done in a game?

Far from it: Microsoft flight simulator

X-Plane

Weather Channel Golf

And there has been weather integration in Second Life as well...

all I had to do to solve it was go to Realtek's site and download the latest version of their driver

The Hhctrl.ocx file that is included in security update 928843 and the User32.dll file that is included in security update 925902 have conflicting base addresses. This problem occurs if the program loads the Hhctrl.ocx file before it loads the User32.dll file.

I wasn't defending Vista. I was just saying your estimates were ridiculously off. My PC, which again cost only $300 over a year ago, runs Vista well (yes, even Aero). The only thing that is worse on my PC than on a Mini is the processor. Everything else is significantly better than the low level Mini. You can easily get a PC that runs Vista well for much less than your wildly overestimated $1200.

You don't have to lie and exaggerate to make your point. If you think Vista sucks, then say Vista sucks. I'm not gonna argue with that, it's not really that cool. Don't just make shit up, though. There are enough legitimate marks against it, you don't have to resort to that.

To answer your (obviously patronizing) question, the home premium edition of Vista has everything but full backup/restore, fax/scan, remote desktop, and drive encryption. It costs $160 to upgrade. I don't know why anyone would buy Vista Ultimate as it doesn't really make much sense, especially for a home user.

PS, don't say sheeple. It's a ridiculous term and makes you look like a condescending asshole. God forbid if someone has a different opinion than you.

"These problems" was used generally. As a matter of fact, to attest, I have been seeing windows updates break svchost for over a month now. This update was no exception. Then, like now, MS delivered a fix. They just delivered the fix faster this time, and it actually works ('cause I have not proven their last "fix" did.

To be honest, I didn't even realize it was breaking other things because I was too busy fixing that problem to notice.

P.S. - most of the fixes for the Generic Host errors that i read online were convoluted. ...I swear some people never heard of F8... Just glad I won't have to go through that again with the 200-odd systems in front of me.

"These problems" was used generally. As a matter of fact, to attest, I have been seeing windows updates break svchost for over a month now. This update was no exception. Then, like now, MS delivered a fix. They just delivered the fix faster this time, and it actually works ('cause I have not proven their last "fix" did.

To be honest, I didn't even realize it was breaking other things because I was too busy fixing that problem to notice.

P.S. - most of the fixes for the Generic Host errors that i read online were convoluted. ...I swear some people never heard of F8... Just glad I won't have to go through that again with the 200-odd systems in front of me.

I did this, it works great. The best software I found (free) is from a semi-abandoned Microsoft Research project called WWMX. Get their "location stamper" utility.

http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/D etails/eadb6a33-b1b8-4c4d-b713-64fae728f74f/Detail s.aspx

Give it a .GPX file from your GPS unit, then give it a bunch of pictures and it will add the location into the EXIF. Does backups of pics if you want -- gives you several options on how to deal with pics that don't match any obvious point in the gpx file.

The whole thing has been a joke and a colossal waste of money and resources... Personally I'd rather see Daylight savings time be tossed out entirely... Though Microsoft is loving it.

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean22

If you still had a Windows 2000 server on your network you had to either buy new software and give microsoft your money or pay $4000 to buy the DST hotfixes. Ironically leading up to change and for atleast one week afterwords you had to pay the $4000 fee to receive the hot fix. Now 3 weeks later they offer you a free manual update utility or the option to buy the $4000 hotfix. *The free manual utility was NOT available when everyone was rushing to update their older servers* Links to the old tech bulletin that only offered the pay for hotfix is no longer valid.

So out of curriosity, how much money did Microsoft make off the daylight savings change?

This has been available for a long time. Before they released the OS. Before it shipped to corp customers. Have you ever seen a car commercial? Or an advertisement for anything that includes options? They demonstrate the top of the line and they mention prices of the bottom of the line.

A new PC running Windows XP that carries the Windows Vista Capable PC logo can run Windows Vista. All editions of Windows Vista will deliver core experiences such as innovations in organizing and finding information, security, and reliability. All Windows Vista Capable PCs will run these core experiences at a minimum. Some features available in the premium editions of Windows Vista--like the new Windows Aero user experience--may require advanced or additional hardware.

A Windows Vista Capable PC includes at least:

* A modern processor (at least 800MHz).
* 512 MB of system memory.
* A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.

I'd bill you for the 20 seconds it took to find this, but since it was the first hit for the google search "minimum requirements vista aero", that seems a bit silly.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa 905075.aspx

There on the page is the breakdown between "Vista Capable" and "Vista Premium" (which includes aero).

You didn't look very hard, and neither did anyone else in this discussion.

So this constitutes nothing?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/footnotes.mspx

Aero != Vista but the Microsoft "Wow" marketing campaign certainly highlights it.

Go through the interactive demo for MS Vista "Wow starts now" and click on the "Easier" link (magnifying glass). Funny how the "3D flip" feature is displayed here without any sort of qualification on the product level or hardware level needed to use it. Even automobile advertisements include a note showing that some features are not "base model". While it may be obvious to advanced computer users that these features will require more system resources, the average PC user is not so educated to understand that the low end Dell they bought can't run the "Wow".

Most Microsoft materials include information that not all Vista capable computers can run all features:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/buyorupgrade/capable.mspx

(There is the official word, for example)

Of course, there is a lot of companies advertising, so I am not sure if they all included the fine print. But as long as they did, I don't think it can be considered false advertising.

I think Microsoft had prior art as early as 1998. http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0498/cutting0498.asp

The only thing worse would be a linux plugin for windows.

Windows Services for UNIX

Microsoft has been using this internally as a "killer app" for converting UNIX sites to Windows by not converting them to Windows for years:

http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.ht ml

Yep, that's one bang up set of tools. Not even SSH. Telnet. Yep, keeping up with the times. Real UNIX integration there.

But who runs this?

Either way, that article is virtually irrelevant to today's systems other than to point out the pThread issue, and that MySQL does/did have issues on OSX.

The APIs are documented on MSDN. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ is free. Have you heard of a little something called the internet?

      Sure. You can get free versions of the SDK. Usually a few months AFTER the OS/Program or whatever is released. If you pay, however, you get in early. My point stands.

The APIs are documented on MSDN. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ is free. Have you heard of a little something called the internet?

> and don't get me started on Flash and its ability to store data on your computer
> without you even noticing (a "feature" that's enabled by default, one might add,
> and that can't even (easily) be disabled without going to Adobe's website).

    In linux, add the following line to the user's crontab to zap the .macromedia directory in the "user" home dir every hour at the top of the hour.
0 * * * * exec /bin/rm -rf /home/user/.macromedia

In Windows, the "Windows Task Scheduler" does something similar. Obviously the "Flash-cookie" directory will be named differently, but the principle is the same. See Microsoft's knowledgebase article for instructions on running a command at scheduled intervals.

I was talking about the systems.

For $300 you can get a Vista Basic system with MS-Works on it. The Mac Mini costs $599.

PC makers give a good discount and also rebates to get lower than Apple on system prices.

Besides Vista Home Basic sells for like $199 or $99 for the upgrade, now show me a Macintosh that runs OSX and costs $199 new and I'll buy one.

True that the Vista Ultimate version is expensive, but not everyone needs the Ultimate version and can make do with Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium and Businesses make do with Vista Business.

If you want to compare prices of MS-Office on a PC to a Mac, be sure to include the cost of MS-Office for the Mac as well.

I was reading the Unix Haters Handbook the other day. Funny how something (about computers) written at the start of the 90s is still relevant today. This is one of the stupid things they were commenting on.

http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters. html

Add to games, the fact that everyone and their sister seems to be glued firmly to MS Office, and MS is sitting in a pretty good position.

http://www.af2k.com/go/mspalantir.jpg

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/default.mspx

What more do you want? Flames shooting from the logo and an evil voice in a tongue which I will not utter here?

Writing a secure browser is inherently difficult, particularily if you want to execute untrusted code, run complex parsers, or run neat active features.

Let's see.

• Internet Explorer 7
• Firefox 2.x
• Opera 9

Well, your competition has fared better so far - no critical vulnerabilities, and a lower number of unpatched ones. Opera is doing particularly well, it seems. It's still obvious from those graphs it's not all roses, but c'mon... surely Microsoft, with its resources, can do better at security than some small company from Norway?

MS took an enormous step in security with their release of IE 7

If you mean sandboxing, then it's only a half-measure, and not something I'd raise in this case if I were you. It is essentially saying, "we can't write secure code, so let's at least sandbox it". Not that sandbox is a bad idea, I very much like it, but this bug shows that more, shall we say, traditional approaches to security (like writing good code) were not explored as much as they could've been.

This bug would appear to involve one of those neat features. I have no doubt that it will be fixed in a timely manner.

It already haven't been. The guys who found the exploit say that they discovered it in December 2006, and immediately alerted Microsoft. They did not publicly disclosed the bug then, and it only surfaced now when it turned out that there were already exploits out in the wild for it. So it's been more than 3 months now, for a bug which should be rated critical under any system (remote code execution is a big deal). And yet we still have no patch. That is not an acceptable way of handling such a serious problem.

In protected mode IE, the process is running at a low integrity level. As such, it cannot write to normal integrity level items, and hence your data is reasonably safe from direct tampering.

It cannot erase my data, sure. Who but an angsty script kiddy would want to destroy my system, anyway? It can still read data from my home folder though, can't it? Things like, say, accounting software databases which are often kept under "My Documents" - could be handy, those credit card numbers.

Or one could just fashion a zombie machine. I would imagine that IE, even in protected mode, can open TCP connections to any host and on any port, right? SMTP not excluded?

Until a patch is released, turn off active cursors.

HOW? Because, you know, your very own security advisory only has such pearls as "Do not visit untrusted websites or view unsolicited email". It says nothing about how to turn the feature off, and whether it is indeed even possible. There were a couple of posts in this discussion about how it can't be done at all, but if you know otherwise, please share (and I'm sure that if you can get that SA updated, it won't hurt either)!

Only for sites that I trust do I enable additional functionality, using IE's zones model, a capability I do not find in Opera or FireFox, which I have used extensively.

Possibly because e.g. Opera (which I use personally; can't vouch for Firefox) is safe enough to view any website without risk, as it should be? Exploits happen, of course, but much rarer than they do with IE, and the Opera guys are really good at getting them patched fast.

Note that before I joined MS, I was only a modest MS user. After my experience with Apple - an iBook that burned through 4 motherboards and never ran more than 9 months without rep

There's a ton of Java developers out there. Their code does not run on MS OSes in general in production. Their tools are generally OS agnostic as well. In fact, in general, their tools run better on non-MS OSes. (Something about case-sensitive file systems)

There's the additional advantage that it's a *nix subsystem, which happens to mesh nicely with our targeted deploy environments.

I'd love to see a 16 or 32 core Mac Pro in the near future - imagine the processing ability of such a system. :)

Ah, least you forget that Microsofts security claims have a long long history of failure:

"Microsoft is dedicated to keeping our customers' networks secure, and Windows 2000 is the most secure operating system we have ever shipped," said Keith White, director of Windows marketing at Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2000/jan0 0/cybersafepr.mspx

mentioned in the Windows 2000 wikipedia entry too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000

So they've sucked at this for many many years while claiming otherwise.

LoB