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What might an attacker use this function to do?
An attacker could try to exploit the vulnerability by creating a specially crafted web page. An attacker could also create a specially-crafted email message and send it to an affected system. Upon viewing a web page, previewing or reading a specially crafted message, or opening a specially crafted email attachment the attacker could cause the affected system to execute code. While animated cursors typically are associated with the .ani file extension, a successful attack is not constrained by this file type. Perhaps you could expand your research into the actual issue. (Above italics taken from the microsoft advisory, clearly indicating that arbitrary code can be executed and it's not a "relocated hot spot").

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin /MS05-002.mspx It's a new vector on an old problem as the parent said, it's been around a while.

1) Last time I tried to download the Windows SDK, I found it was tied to having a valid license for Windows XP or something more recent. That's not free, it's bundled.

It seems that the March 2006 edition requires Windows validation, but the April 2005 edition does not. If you don't have Windows XP or anything newer, do you really need the newest one?

2) I don't know if you've tried using Visual Studio Express, but it lacks features that are a basic requirement for developing Windows software IMO -- including basic resource editors like the ability to add an icon to your program. There are hacks, but they rely on you knowing how to use the resource scripting language, which AFAICT is no longer documented by MS.

You mean this documentation?

1) Last time I tried to download the Windows SDK, I found it was tied to having a valid license for Windows XP or something more recent. That's not free, it's bundled.

It seems that the March 2006 edition requires Windows validation, but the April 2005 edition does not. If you don't have Windows XP or anything newer, do you really need the newest one?

2) I don't know if you've tried using Visual Studio Express, but it lacks features that are a basic requirement for developing Windows software IMO -- including basic resource editors like the ability to add an icon to your program. There are hacks, but they rely on you knowing how to use the resource scripting language, which AFAICT is no longer documented by MS.

You mean this documentation?

1) Last time I tried to download the Windows SDK, I found it was tied to having a valid license for Windows XP or something more recent. That's not free, it's bundled.

It seems that the March 2006 edition requires Windows validation, but the April 2005 edition does not. If you don't have Windows XP or anything newer, do you really need the newest one?

2) I don't know if you've tried using Visual Studio Express, but it lacks features that are a basic requirement for developing Windows software IMO -- including basic resource editors like the ability to add an icon to your program. There are hacks, but they rely on you knowing how to use the resource scripting language, which AFAICT is no longer documented by MS.

You mean this documentation?

We do something similar except we use a stripped down version of debian linux that runs vmware player.

The way we get around is to make C: a non-persistent image which means that it will not retain any modifications when vmware player is stopped and restarted. When you need to do windows update or make any real changes you simply change it to persistent and then change it back to non-persistent after you are done making changes.

To allow people to actually get work done.. you make another image for a D: drive that is always persistent. Using a little tools from sysinternals called junction you can make the c:\document and settings actually exist on the D drive. With this people will be able to use outlook to send and receive email on their local computer, use bookmarks in ie, save documents to my documents, and many more things.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/File AndDisk/Junction.mspx

There are ways a virus could get on the machine and survive reboots like putting itself in the startup menu.. but if you can follow me this far I'm sure you can handle that :P

With ssh and the correct vnc server program you can even remotely access these machines to do maintenance including checking out the employees live session without them knowing or with them knowing when they need a little help. Pretty much the person sitting down is using a vncclient to connect to x themselves locally but they can't tell. :)

Devek - too cool to register

Yup - with a helluvalot of effort, even Windoze can be made secure. Here is the manual:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=d39d0028-7093-495c-80da-2b5b29a54bd8&Displa yLang=en

If you do it right once, then ghost it, you can make as many secure PCs as you need.

Admins who don't secure corporate PCs are just lazy, stupid or both...

That condition is not a whim, is the only mechanism known to work to protect Free as in Speech in software. Free code as in the BSD and MIT licenses is how software was created at the beginning, and it quickly derived into an incompatible set of compiting closed, proprietary systems.

Yeah, it was awful. All the BSDs went away, and nobody used their code anymore.

Seriously, though, the BSD license has worked out well for many projects. I don't know who said this, but "the goal of the GPL is to make all software free; the goal of the BSD license is to make all software better."

Microsoft should least survive a slashdotting:
http://assets.xbox.com/en-us/games/g/grandtheftaut oiv/grandtheftautoiv.zip

Rockstar, well their website doesn't usually:
http://media.rockstargames.com/flies/1280x720.zip

Streaming the 720p trailer to an xbox360 looks really good, here's some more HD wmv files:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musi candvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx

News out today is that Windows( including Vista ) has another security risk in the animated mouse code. That's right, another one. The previous one was in early 2005 and I guess their Trustworthy Computing people forgot to look at the rest of the animated mouse code cause they moved it right into Windows Vista.

I did see where McAfee said that Firefox on Windows blocked this so I'm only guessing that it's yet another Windows w/Internet Explorer flaw since one of the temp fixes is to turn off html rendering in MS Outlook and that's probably the MS IE code there too.

pretty sad when a mouse can open security holes so far into the system. Supposedly, MS Vista does somewhat contain this but I'm not sure if that is with a standard install.

So tell your friends to watch where their mouse has been.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory /935423.mspx

LoB

You know, I honestly believed Publisher was purchased as well, but I can't Google any sources that say anything besides version 1.0 in 1991 made right there in Redmond.

The reason I thought it was purchased is of course that the general interface and menu structure bears less of a resemblance to the rest of the Office suite. Powerpoint and Excel look and feel like Word. Publisher 2003 just doesn't seem cut from the same cloth. That could be good and/or bad.

But then again I grumble about Adobe Illustrator not having the same interface as Photoshop. Maybe it's time I broke down and switched to a skinnable GIMP. /sigh, and CS3 looks so pretty, despite the vistaflavors.

Microsoft itself measured 5% virtualization overhead on Mainframes. http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/e/73e77 129-db34-4c95-b182-ab0b9bd50081/MainframeBenchmark Proj.pdf

And they are not talking about a single image, they are talking about 60 or 90 images in this 2003 Mainframe-Benchmark.
Would be interesting to see what is the performance and throughput penalty with a 90 image IIS-Setup.

Are you kidding me? I absolutely love his keyboard layouts! I use it anytime I find a co-worker that has left his station unlocked! http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/windowsxp /keyboardlayout.aspx ;)

In other news a story on Microsoft's Get The FUD campaign mysteriously disappears, the title was: 'TJX Chooses Windows Over Linux for Reliability and Security'.

I'm joking, but you never know. On a more serious note: what mystifies me is why these companies need to store customers credit card details at all?! Having had experience with POS (Point of Sale) I know that the system should keep these details long enough to complete a transaction, then it should delete it.

Security starts with only keeping the information you need. Courts should be questioning why these companies retained this data in the first place!

If you are a full-on Free Software advocate and only care about writing free/open source software, then I can see why KDE/Qt is usually the best choice. On the other hand, if you are interested in commercial development, like myself, you need to look at pricing as well. If you only want to develop for Windows, then the "SDK" is free and the "IDE" can range from free to a couple of grand with a premium MSDN subscription. But Qt itself costs around $1780 to $6600 on a per developer basis depending on console/GUI one/two/three platform development. If you work for a company with any clout, you can probably cut that cost in half for either platform.

Although I'm not doing anything now, the first thing I would use for a lean startup cross platform development is ACE with wxWidgets on Visual Studio Express or Eclipse with CDT.

It is just my opinion, but I think the pricing for Qt is too high. I wonder how big the Linux Desktop "pie" could grow if we could all settle on Qt if it fell under LGPL or BSD? Trolltech's smaller piece of a bigger pie, might still be bigger than the one they have now. Putting GPL/Free Software asisde for a second, from a commercial perspective, I don't want a "new Microsoft" on the Linux Desktop. Perhaps someone with some cash could revive the Harmony Toolkit...

The DET (Department of Education and Training in ACT, Australia) struck some deal up with MS to let them run a number of 2003 licences on one box for the cost of one (I have no link, I was working in a school at the time and was actually talking to people who were managing this, not just reading it off the web). Their plan was to virtualize in just this way

I was skeptical, but it turns out you're right

http://www.zlib.net/zlib_tech.html

zlib, used in PNG files
"He goes on to note that the current implementation limits its dynamic blocks to about 8 KB (corresponding to 8MB of input data); together with a few bits of overhead, this implies an actual compression limit of about 1030.3:1. ...
By way of comparison, note that a version of run-length encoding optimized for this sort of unusual data file -- that is, by using 32-bit integers for the lengths rather than the more usual 8-bit bytes or 16-bit words -- could encode the test file in five bytes. That would be a compression factor of 10,000,000:1"

This file is probably quite close to the maximum compression ratio.

Mind you RLE in BMP files uses 8 bit lengths

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms532328. aspx

Actually, I reckon a JPG with a insane quantisation matrix that chucks away all the data should be able to have an enormous compression ratio, but I'm not sure what the entropy coding limit after the DCT is.

With a dual processor CPU you'll never want to use XP Home

Why not? (Granted, I prefer XP Pro, but for other reasons) XP Home is perfectly capable of supporting processors with 2 cores and has support for hyperthreading for those two cores. Theoretically, you can have two cores each doing hyperthreading and thus showing up as four CPUs in the task manager, and all of this on Windows XP Home. See the next-to last question on Multicore Processor Licensing.

As far as I understood, a 16-core processor should work on XP Home too (as they charge per processor). Now, I'd like to see that with my own eyes, but according to their claims it does.

True, my "real" SMP system, meaning two single-core CPU's is not supported by Windows XP Home. That's why it runs Debian Etch.

When MS says "cross-platform" they mean mobile devices (running a Windows-esque OS of course). Look at the system requirements for the compact .NET 2.0 runtime and it should be obvious enough: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=9655156b-356b-4a2c-857c-e62f50ae9a55&displa ylang=en

Microsoft actually released the 1.0 CLI sourcecode with support for BSD and OSX, and the license is not that bad, except for a small paragraph which prohibits any commercial use (breathe easy, the catch has been revealed). http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/002/097/S hSourceCLILicense.htm

When MS says "cross-platform" they mean mobile devices (running a Windows-esque OS of course). Look at the system requirements for the compact .NET 2.0 runtime and it should be obvious enough: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=9655156b-356b-4a2c-857c-e62f50ae9a55&displa ylang=en

Microsoft actually released the 1.0 CLI sourcecode with support for BSD and OSX, and the license is not that bad, except for a small paragraph which prohibits any commercial use (breathe easy, the catch has been revealed). http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/002/097/S hSourceCLILicense.htm

(...) if MS wanted a fully functional port of the .Net framework for *nix, they would do it themselves (...)

If Microsoft was interested in interoperability, they could have it, anytime. They own the platform, for goodness sake, and if they wanted other their framework to work on other O.S., they would do it themselves. Microsoft strategy is not and will never be help to other platforms to run their applications, they prefer people locked in, with no choice. What is the main excuse for Mono? "To help people that are locked in .Net applications to migrate to Linux". (btw, if those people had plans to migrate to Linux, they would not choose .Net in the first place, as the technology is widely known as MS only. It is not as if it was a market standard, it is 6 years old, tops). Microsoft, on other hand, lists .Net as an advantage over "Unix". Why would they give up that advantage? On the goodness of their hearts?

I say it again: if MS wanted a fully functional port of the .Net framework for *nix, they would do it themselves (like the PS3 people ported linux to their console). The truth is that they don't want.

• Openoffice.org (use word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and similar applications)
• Picasa (view/edit photos)

Internet Tools

• FireFox (browse Web sites)
• Gaim (chat with users of AIM, YIM, MSN, IRC, etc.)
• Thunderbird (e-mail)
• Pegasus Mail (e-mail)
• Macromedia Flash Player (watch Flash animations within Web browser)
• Java Plugin (run Java applications inside Web browser)

Basic Tools

• 7Zip (compress/decompress files)
• EditPad Lite (edit text files)
• vim/gvim (edit text files--advanced)
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (view PDF files)
• PDF Creator (create PDF files)

Security Tools

• ZoneAlarm (firewall - detect unwanted Internet access)
• Avira Antivirus (detect/remove viruses)
• ADAware Personal SE (detect/remove spyware)
• SpyBot Search & Destroy (detect/remove spyware)
• HiJackThis (detect/remove spyware)
• Discombobulator (make Windows more secure)
• Shoot the Messenger (make Windows more secure)
• Unplug-n-pray (make Windows more secure)
• PGP (encrypt/decrypt files or e-mail for privacy) - see admin for more details

Advanced Tools

• Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP (mount ISO images as filesystems) from MSDN
• IMAPSize (manage/search/backup an IMAP mailbox)

• Openoffice.org (use word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and similar applications)
• Picasa (view/edit photos)

Internet Tools

• FireFox (browse Web sites)
• Gaim (chat with users of AIM, YIM, MSN, IRC, etc.)
• Thunderbird (e-mail)
• Pegasus Mail (e-mail)
• Macromedia Flash Player (watch Flash animations within Web browser)
• Java Plugin (run Java applications inside Web browser)

Basic Tools

• 7Zip (compress/decompress files)
• EditPad Lite (edit text files)
• vim/gvim (edit text files--advanced)
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (view PDF files)
• PDF Creator (create PDF files)

Security Tools

• ZoneAlarm (firewall - detect unwanted Internet access)
• Avira Antivirus (detect/remove viruses)
• ADAware Personal SE (detect/remove spyware)
• SpyBot Search & Destroy (detect/remove spyware)
• HiJackThis (detect/remove spyware)
• Discombobulator (make Windows more secure)
• Shoot the Messenger (make Windows more secure)
• Unplug-n-pray (make Windows more secure)
• PGP (encrypt/decrypt files or e-mail for privacy) - see admin for more details

Advanced Tools

• Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP (mount ISO images as filesystems) from MSDN
• IMAPSize (manage/search/backup an IMAP mailbox)

(yes, I know)

Sorry. Cygwin DOES NOT work AT ALL! Why? Because of microsoft Virtualized File System and some security restrictions (ie. you can write a file from Windows but not use any cygwin tools to modify it!). You see, the geniuses at MS thought that it is better to be a PITA to current developers than get people to select some Compatibility mode for old apps to enable Virtualization explicitly.

What is Virtualization? Well, see,

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965884. aspx
http://www.runrev.com/newsletter/march/issue21/new sletter3.php
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927387

Essentially, a normal 32-bit EXE without an embedded manifest (a manifest that can crash XP!) will be treated as legacy and any write operation to LOCAL_MACHINE/Software or the file system outside /Users will be "Virtualized". That is, the write open will succeed but will be silently redirected to some subdirectory in /Users or CURRENT_USER registry key. You can image how stupid this is by default.

Embedding a manifest is a freaking pain the in the ass. MS Visual Studio doesn't even do it properly by default. At least its embedded manifest does not work (disable the freaking virtualization in Vista). And as a consequence, things like Cygwin are now hopelessly useless because file access outside /Users is disabled (writing) even when the user has permissions to write and modify said files.

Sorry. Cygwin DOES NOT work AT ALL! Why? Because of microsoft Virtualized File System and some security restrictions (ie. you can write a file from Windows but not use any cygwin tools to modify it!). You see, the geniuses at MS thought that it is better to be a PITA to current developers than get people to select some Compatibility mode for old apps to enable Virtualization explicitly.

What is Virtualization? Well, see,

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965884. aspx
http://www.runrev.com/newsletter/march/issue21/new sletter3.php
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927387

Essentially, a normal 32-bit EXE without an embedded manifest (a manifest that can crash XP!) will be treated as legacy and any write operation to LOCAL_MACHINE/Software or the file system outside /Users will be "Virtualized". That is, the write open will succeed but will be silently redirected to some subdirectory in /Users or CURRENT_USER registry key. You can image how stupid this is by default.

Embedding a manifest is a freaking pain the in the ass. MS Visual Studio doesn't even do it properly by default. At least its embedded manifest does not work (disable the freaking virtualization in Vista). And as a consequence, things like Cygwin are now hopelessly useless because file access outside /Users is disabled (writing) even when the user has permissions to write and modify said files.

and it avoids unnecessary strain on slashdot/mozilla/other servers, too.

fatal error
fatal error

fatal error
fatal error

Atleast with the compatibility update recently they have added a long list of applications that now seem to be working a lot better.
Here is the list of applications, games and compatiblity fixes; there is many more of these big list to come and have fixed several issues I had with older software.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932246

Unfortunately AOL9.0 is on that list and I wished they just left it in the handicapp section

Please note that Bootvis.exe is not a tool that will improve boot/resume performance for end users. Contrary to some published reports, Bootvis.exe cannot reduce or alter a system's boot or resume performance. The boot optimization routines invoked by Bootvis.exe are built into Windows XP. These routines run automatically at pre-determined times as part of the normal operation of the operating system.

If you are an end-user seeking to resolve issues for boot/resume performance on your PC, we recommend that you contact the vendor from whom you purchased the PC. For information from Microsoft on specific issues, you can search Knowledge Base for Windows XP product issues related to "resume time." Knowledge Base is a free information service available at: http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=fh;%5Bln%5D;kbh owto

You can also post questions to the Microsoft Windows XP Newsgroups at: http://www.microsoft.com/communities

If you are a software developer or system designer seeking assistance for using Bootvis.exe in your development efforts, please work with your usual Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) contacts for developer support. To get developer support if you do not already have a contact, please see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/support/

The Bootvis.exe tool is no longer available from this site.

Please note that Bootvis.exe is not a tool that will improve boot/resume performance for end users. Contrary to some published reports, Bootvis.exe cannot reduce or alter a system's boot or resume performance. The boot optimization routines invoked by Bootvis.exe are built into Windows XP. These routines run automatically at pre-determined times as part of the normal operation of the operating system.

If you are an end-user seeking to resolve issues for boot/resume performance on your PC, we recommend that you contact the vendor from whom you purchased the PC. For information from Microsoft on specific issues, you can search Knowledge Base for Windows XP product issues related to "resume time." Knowledge Base is a free information service available at: http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=fh;%5Bln%5D;kbh owto

You can also post questions to the Microsoft Windows XP Newsgroups at: http://www.microsoft.com/communities

If you are a software developer or system designer seeking assistance for using Bootvis.exe in your development efforts, please work with your usual Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) contacts for developer support. To get developer support if you do not already have a contact, please see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/support/

The Bootvis.exe tool is no longer available from this site.

Please note that Bootvis.exe is not a tool that will improve boot/resume performance for end users. Contrary to some published reports, Bootvis.exe cannot reduce or alter a system's boot or resume performance. The boot optimization routines invoked by Bootvis.exe are built into Windows XP. These routines run automatically at pre-determined times as part of the normal operation of the operating system.

If you are an end-user seeking to resolve issues for boot/resume performance on your PC, we recommend that you contact the vendor from whom you purchased the PC. For information from Microsoft on specific issues, you can search Knowledge Base for Windows XP product issues related to "resume time." Knowledge Base is a free information service available at: http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=fh;%5Bln%5D;kbh owto

You can also post questions to the Microsoft Windows XP Newsgroups at: http://www.microsoft.com/communities

If you are a software developer or system designer seeking assistance for using Bootvis.exe in your development efforts, please work with your usual Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) contacts for developer support. To get developer support if you do not already have a contact, please see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/support/

The Bootvis.exe tool is no longer available from this site.

You're wrong. I'd post a screenshot, but I'm lazy. Here's a knowledge base article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281980
This discusses what you're talking about, which is opening task manager. That only happens when you've got it set up to use the 'Welcome' screen. The rest of the time, it pops up a little widget that has

(Lock Computer) (Log Off) (Shut Down)
(Change Password) (Task Manager) (Cancel)

buttons on it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605/en-us

Believe it or not, Microsoft has actually done this. It's called Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs. The reason you haven't heard about it is because Microsoft does not advertise it at all, and also because it's only available to corporate customers.

See the Wikipedia article for more information.

Most DLL calls get linked at load time rather than runtime - the exe files has an import table full of function pointers - _imp_FunctionName, and the loader maps the DLL into process memory and fills in the addresses there. Since the API providing DLLs are used everywhere and are thus already in memory, this is a fairly cheap operation.

You can linux elf style call time dynamic linking, either manually by LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress, or using the linker's delay load functionality.

Incorrect, XP can only manage 3 GiB of RAM. You can install 4 GiB, but you'll have one unused.

Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing company.

Forth has become the application submittal for as many patents as they can get, even stupid stuff that is clearly not patentable. In the battle against open source this will become combined with the third priority more and more.

What you don't see in any of the above is genuine innovation.

Of course nevermind that VS2005 defaults to strict XHTML 1.1 code

You know, it would have been better if they hadn't. The problem is they make code that pretends to be XHTML, but it isn't. They still use the HTML mime type: sending XHTML with the text/html mime-type is bad. If they had stuck with XHTML 1.0 Transitional that would have been okay, because those specs make room for nasty browsers that don't support XHTML, but XHTML 1.1 should always be sent as application/xhtml+xml.

So, you mean that they abuse their economical power... But it is ok, since they do that with a nice GUI? Or are you saying (falsely) that Microsoft has not extended those protocols? Because they have extended (or tried) almost all of them, DNS being the only exception, and irrelevant since they already tried to extend TCP.

• AD can serve a standard DNS domain (even if mixed with Linux BIND servers), including an LDAP backend and dynamic updates: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317590
  
• AD can also serve Kerberos for Linux clients (in a standard way): (here), it can also do RADIUS as well.
  
• AD is LDAP compliant so use can also use nss_ldap to grab user information on Linux system from it
  
• Linux and Windows nodes can perform two directional file sharing via standard* CIFS protocol
  
• AD (with addition of certificate services) can serve as s X509 Certificate Authority.
  
• AD + Exchange will understand SMTP, SMTP-AUTH (over LDAP), POP3, IMAP, IMAPS, NTTP protocols (additional web based access is also provided).
  
• With Windows Server 2003 R2, AD can also serve standard NIS, NFS, CUPS and similar UNIX protocols.
  
• If you include non standard (but known) protocols in the mix, Windows and Linux machines can also interoperate via DFS (Distributed File Sharing), RPD (Terminal Services), etc.
  
  
  The required setup is done less than an hour, and will require a (less competent) system administrator for maintenance in the long run.
  
  (It can be argued that the Linux side will require a more educated - i.e: more expensive - system administrator, and preparation of many site specific scripts and configurations - yet this may not seem objective for some people).
  
  Don't misunderstand I'm not proposing converting all the systems to AD. I'm telling AD is also a fine solution based on open protocols.

So, you mean that they abuse their economical power... But it is ok, since they do that with a nice GUI? Or are you saying (falsely) that Microsoft has not extended those protocols? Because they have extended (or tried) almost all of them, DNS being the only exception, and irrelevant since they already tried to extend TCP.

• AD can serve a standard DNS domain (even if mixed with Linux BIND servers), including an LDAP backend and dynamic updates: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317590
  
• AD can also serve Kerberos for Linux clients (in a standard way): (here), it can also do RADIUS as well.
  
• AD is LDAP compliant so use can also use nss_ldap to grab user information on Linux system from it
  
• Linux and Windows nodes can perform two directional file sharing via standard* CIFS protocol
  
• AD (with addition of certificate services) can serve as s X509 Certificate Authority.
  
• AD + Exchange will understand SMTP, SMTP-AUTH (over LDAP), POP3, IMAP, IMAPS, NTTP protocols (additional web based access is also provided).
  
• With Windows Server 2003 R2, AD can also serve standard NIS, NFS, CUPS and similar UNIX protocols.
  
• If you include non standard (but known) protocols in the mix, Windows and Linux machines can also interoperate via DFS (Distributed File Sharing), RPD (Terminal Services), etc.
  
  
  The required setup is done less than an hour, and will require a (less competent) system administrator for maintenance in the long run.
  
  (It can be argued that the Linux side will require a more educated - i.e: more expensive - system administrator, and preparation of many site specific scripts and configurations - yet this may not seem objective for some people).
  
  Don't misunderstand I'm not proposing converting all the systems to AD. I'm telling AD is also a fine solution based on open protocols.

Most of the limitations you and parent poster refer to are not arbitrary but rather have a technical explanation. 4gb RAM is due to 32-bit hardware, FAT32 has an 8-tebibyte volume limit using 28 bits of a 32 bit pointer (the 32gb "limitation" is just a bug in Win XP setup), and I'm fairly confident the 65536 rows in Excel is due to the rows being addressed using a 16-bit unsigned integer. Sure they could bump it up but if you're using Excel to hold a spreadsheet and a single sheet needs more than 2^16 rows, you are doing something wrong. Workbooks ended the need for spreadsheets to be longer than about a screen long ago.

Now, if you want to store a database in Excel ... buy Access :) That's what it's there for.

What do you mean by 'going through the dymanic linker'? No offense, but that sounds like technobabble. Calls into a DLL just need an extra level of indirection - they are a CALL [func] rather than a CALL func, but there's no 'dynamic linker' involved.

But from the page I quoted
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683614. aspx
"This function is implemented as an inline function using a compiler intrinsic where possible. For more information, see the section on Compiler Intrinsics in the Visual Studio documentation."

And it turns out the compiler does indeed knows how to turn this into a LOCK INC instruction
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2ddez55b( VS.71).aspx

So even the normal call [func] rather than call func overhead you'd get from a DLL call doesn't apply in this case, it's ends up being as good as you could do with inline assembly.

What do you mean by 'going through the dymanic linker'? No offense, but that sounds like technobabble. Calls into a DLL just need an extra level of indirection - they are a CALL [func] rather than a CALL func, but there's no 'dynamic linker' involved.

But from the page I quoted
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683614. aspx
"This function is implemented as an inline function using a compiler intrinsic where possible. For more information, see the section on Compiler Intrinsics in the Visual Studio documentation."

And it turns out the compiler does indeed knows how to turn this into a LOCK INC instruction
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2ddez55b( VS.71).aspx

So even the normal call [func] rather than call func overhead you'd get from a DLL call doesn't apply in this case, it's ends up being as good as you could do with inline assembly.

The 64 bit version of the OS currently max's out at a few terabytes.

Here, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294418 is an overview of the address space and memory resources.

The chipsets for workstations and servers max out at 64 GB.

How long is it going to be before those chip sets support terabytes? I don't know, but it ain't happening soon.

Eventually the OS limit will go up, but can we say that it really matters right now?

Yup, the 64 bit OS only works on 64 bit hardware, but wha' da' want? Egg in your beer?