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How did they search this out? by whitehatlurker · 2007-03-20 06:39 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages

Given the report in The Register today, the researchers could have been better off using Live.com as their search engine for researching this topic.

Seriously, I have had phishing email for some of these 80.77.x.y websites recently as well. A "Good on ya!" to MicroSoft & UC Davis! Root the bastards out and stomp 'em!

Xbox 360 with XNA is $894 by tepples · 2007-03-20 06:22 · Score: 1 · on Why Next-Gen Titles Cost $60

As I understand it, the XNA Creators Club subscription costs $99 per year per console for all users, not just developers. This adds $495 to the total cost of ownership over the five-year expected life of the Xbox 360 platform. XNA Game Studio software also needs a recent PC running Windows XP Service Pack 2, unlike Dreamcast and DS that get along fine with a not-so-recent PC. From XNA Frequently Asked Questions:

Right now XNA Game Studio Express is only designed and tested for Windows XP SP2. [...] The individual you are planning to share the game with must be logged in to Xbox Live and have an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club The $495 extra cost of XNA over the 5-year life of an Xbox 360 isn't far off from the $599 cost of a Wii-sized Mac mini computer to put on top of the TV.

Re:Microsoftie wearing a white hat? by Spy+Hunter · 2007-03-20 04:54 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages

Microsoft Research has always done great things. Check out their graphics research or their Singularity OS. Microsoft Research is almost like a completely independent entity.

Re:Microsoftie wearing a white hat? by Spy+Hunter · 2007-03-20 04:54 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages

Microsoft Research has always done great things. Check out their graphics research or their Singularity OS. Microsoft Research is almost like a completely independent entity.

Nice work by MysteriousPreacher · 2007-03-20 01:53 · Score: 4, Informative · on Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages

There's actually some pretty decent research here. The site cloning report is a good read.

http://research.microsoft.com/SearchRanger/Spam_At tack_by_Website_Clones.htm

The cloning of popular blogs as been a scourge for a while now, both for manipulating search engines and good old fashioned advertising - using someone else's content to draw visitors in

Remember him not for FORTRAN by Edward+Kmett · 2007-03-19 23:24 · Score: 5, Interesting · on John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN

I find it somewhat troubling that in this article John Backus is remembered primarily for the genie that he tried to put back in the bottle.

FORTRAN was utilitarian and procedural and good at enabling engineers and scientists to get work done. However, the problem with FORTRAN is the imperative pattern of though that it imposed led us to tell the computer a precise sequence of steps to accomplish each task. It doesn't offer information on dependencies, simply a "go here, do that" sequence of instructions. Imperative programs are inherently hard to reason about in terms of global state and effects and as written tend to be subject to off-by-one errors.

Backus saw this in 1978! See http://http//www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings /backus.pdf.

His insight spawned a great deal of the interest in functional programming languages. It was been credited by Paul Hudak of Haskell fame http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=72551.7255 4 (ACM membership required) (summarized here http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message4172 .html) and others as really helping to turn the tide and kept functional programming languages from being snuffed out.

A lot of people don't see the point, having never programmed in a functional programming language like Haskell or ML. However even those people see dozens of cores on the horizon and wonder how they are going to deal with the debugging issues associated with all of the threads to keep those processors churning.

Functional programming offers an alternative viewpoint that is arguably much better suited to handle multiple CPUs working on large datasets. A case for this was recently reiterated by Tim Sweeney of Epic Megagames fame who said "in a concurrent world, imperative is the wrong default!" http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/edu/seminare/2005/advan ced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf.

Haskell has brought Software Transactional Memory (STM) into play offering an alternative approach to traditional mutexes and locks that is compositional in nature unlike locking models. This is an approach that isn't readily emulable in an imperative setting because of the lack of guarantees about side effects. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/ index.htm.

These are solutions to real problems that we are experiencing today, not some academic sideshow, and they arise from a school of thought that he helped bring a great deal of attention to.

If you want to do something to remember Backus take the time to learn OCaml or Haskell or even just take the time to learn how to effectively use the map and fold functions in Perl, PHP or Ruby.

It is his willingness to turn his back on what was percieved as his greatest work when confronted with a better idea for which I will remember him and I am a better programmer today for having learned what I could from his ideas.

Re:I think I can help by QuantumG · 2007-03-19 16:33 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Microsoft Segments Linux "Personas"

Thing is, if you use open source software, you benefit from the fact that other people exist who do want to fix problems they run into. I ran into this bug with Visual Studio 2005 SP1 the other day:

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=101866

Just about everyone I know who installed SP1 has run into this problem. We're all professional developers. Check out Microsoft's "resolution":

Thank you for reporting this issue to Microsoft. It has now been fixed and the fix will be available in a future release. That's right. It's fixed, but you can't have the bug fix. It's only a critical part of the language they've screwed up. It only means you have to hunt through a few million lines of code to add workarounds for it. We'll give you the fix in "a future release".

Re:The 1990's called... by sootman · 2007-03-19 13:54 · Score: 1 · on Adobe Releases Cross-Operating System Runtime

Maybe HTA's, too.

Launching without being online.. by DelawareBoy · 2007-03-19 08:05 · Score: 1 · on Adobe Releases Cross-Operating System Runtime

"Once the Apollo apps are created, users can launch them from their desktops, without using their browser or connecting online."

Sounds a lot like Microsoft's ClickOnce technology: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa49 7348.aspx

And Microsoft "auto-updates" Windows machines (whether or not you want them to, it would seem) to include the latest frameworks and such. Regardless, how does what Adobe does improve on what Microsoft (and I'm sure some F/OSS alternatives) already do?

Conservative? by julesh · 2007-03-18 07:59 · Score: 2, Insightful · on MS Security Guy Wants Vista Bugs Rated Down

"The MSRC folks are, understandably, very conservative and would rather err on the side of people deploying updates rather than trying to downgrade bug severity"

Err, right. So if they're so conservative, how come they'll rate a remote code execution bug as "moderate" if the code is run in a restricted context (see, e.g. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin /MS06-013.mspx - particularly the DHTML bug)?

Re:Sherman Antitrust Act by h2_plus_O · 2007-03-16 19:04 · Score: 1 · on Financial Incentives for Live Search Data

Doesn't this violate the Sherman Antitrust Act: where a monopoly cannot use their market power (IE: existing customer base) to extend into other fields / markets.

Doubtful. IANAL, but first of all, Microsoft has been found to hold a monopoly in a narrowly-defined market only: Intel-compatible PC Operating Systems. They certainly don't have monopolies in anything relevant here (search? productivity apps? online gadgets? not even.) so there's not much they can leverage that would be unfair to the competition. They're giving their customers a discount on a product very few people use (Office Live) in exchange for their using another product very few people use, live search.
In other words, it doesn't look like they're leveraging a monopoly, so much as they're courting customers by giving them price incentives to try out the new gizmos.

TFA doesn't specify whether any violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act are happening, but this blog provides a bit more in the way of detail: customers who enroll:
1) choose how many computers they want to enroll,
2) these boxes get a 'bho' installed on them to measure search usage and presumably phone home about it,
3) they get credits based on the measurements.

This looks like a product-bundling incentive program. While searching for information on the legality of bundling, I ran across this discussion, which draws a distinction between what it calls 'mixed bundling' and 'predation'. He concludes thus:

If cross-subsidies from monopoly to competitive markets are considered potentially anticompetitive, a rule against mixed bundling should be based not on a comparison of price and cost, but on the market power in the bundled-product markets. The less likely it is that A is earning monopoly profits in the market for one bundled product, the less concern there is that a mixed bundle could have anticompetitive effects.

Re:Just don't bother... by MojoStan · 2007-03-16 18:09 · Score: 1 · on Vista Can Run Without Activation for a Year

"Unfortunately for those in an office setting, many will be forced to go to Vista when OEM dealers stop offering XP as an option. I know my office will be looking at Vista within a year because we are too lazy to buy XP licenses and reinstall Windows XP after wiping the HDD of Vista."

I'm pretty sure "those in an office setting" will have no problem finding OEM dealers offering XP until January 29, 2009, XP's end date on Microsoft's "System Builder License Availability" roadmap.

Sure, home models (e.g. Dell Dimension, HP Pavilion) are already phasing out XP as an option. However, the real business models (Dell Optiplex, HP Compaq 5000 Series) make a point out of maintaining long product lifecycles, which I assume includes Windows XP support (mainstream support ends 4/4/09, extended support ends 4/8/14).

Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane' by Bluesman · 2007-03-16 04:42 · Score: 1 · on Ballmer Says Google's Growth Is 'Insane'

I think that's one reason their online documentation has always sucked.

Huh? If there's one thing Microsoft does right, it's extensive online documentation.

They need it because their API is a schizophrenic mess, but it's the best online documentation I've seen for closed source software, by far.

RE: C# Book Recommendations by jdkc4d · 2007-03-16 02:32 · Score: 1 · on C# Book Recommendations?

I learned a lot from this book: Pro C# 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Platform. Since C# relies heavily on the .NET or MONO frameworks, I would also suggest downloading the MSDN Library. While you can read this all online, having it locally is very helpful when learning about .NET (also its free). Unless you have Visual Studio, I would also recommend downloading the C# Express IDE from Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcs harp/

RE: C# Book Recommendations by jdkc4d · 2007-03-16 02:32 · Score: 1 · on C# Book Recommendations?

I learned a lot from this book: Pro C# 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Platform. Since C# relies heavily on the .NET or MONO frameworks, I would also suggest downloading the MSDN Library. While you can read this all online, having it locally is very helpful when learning about .NET (also its free). Unless you have Visual Studio, I would also recommend downloading the C# Express IDE from Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcs harp/

Re:MSDN by soosterh · 2007-03-16 00:02 · Score: 1 · on C# Book Recommendations?

Oddly the parent article is correct. C# is one of the few languages that has comprehensive on-line documentation. If you start here: Visual C# you will find that there is plenty of quality material. Also most the reference material is NOT specific to those running MS Dev Studio. The reference material gives nice clear examples.

A section of that page:

Using the Visual C# IDE
Introduces the Visual C# development environment.

Writing Applications with Visual C#
Provides a high-level orientation covering common programming tasks using C# and the .NET Framework, with links to more detailed documentation.

Migrating to Visual C#
Compares the C# language to Java and C++ and describes how to use the Java Language Conversion Assistant to convert Java and Visual J++ applications to Visual C#.

C# Programming Guide
Provides information and practical examples on how to use C# language constructs.

C# Reference
Provides detailed reference information on C# programming concepts, keywords, types, operators, attributes, preprocessor directives, compiler switches, and compiler error and warnings.

C# Language Specification Links to the latest version of the C# Specifications in Microsoft Word format.

Visual C# Samples
Sample source code demonstrating how to program using Visual C#.