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You can either use tzedit from Microsoft or the unofficial IntelliAdmin patch. I used IntelliAdmin, no poking about necessary.

The timezones, including the new dynamic definitions, are kept under the software key. Check this article for the locations http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928388. I did some more digging and found out how to rebuild the Unix timezone file. Not too difficult, but a tad more effort than simply letting AU install patches on the windows boxes.

Here is an example of what i'm talking about. A hard-coded DST change in MSVCRT.dll is having potential health impact on medical patients. Tell me about "backward compatibility" and "user confusion" now.

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?Pos tID=1220111&SiteID=1

They are doing everyone a big favor. Vista's upgrade process is absolutely not robust enough yet for the average consumer.

Last weekend, I spent two days upgrading to Vista on a machine that was just purchased in October. I did succeed in the end, but it was not without a considerable amount of hair-pulling.

The essential problem is that if ANYTHING goes wrong, the upgrade suddenly becomes a non-consumer-friendly train wreck. The most painful thing is that there are any number of small hardware problems that can cause the boot to blue screen. If the boot blue screens, Vista tries to boot again. That is, you end up in a boot-loop. The blue screen does not stay up long enough to read it. So, anyone debugging the problem needs to learn about the F8 menu, where they can request that the machine not reboot on boot failure. THIS time. Then, you have to look at the blue screen, and hope that it's something that'll give you SOME clue as to what's wrong. After all...

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL ...could mean, oh, your audio hardware is having some issue, or it could just mean you have 4GB of RAM (See KB929777), or any number of other things.

Vista WILL NOT FINISH INSTALLING until you have done at least one clean non-Safe-Mode boot. However, it WILL NOT allow you to use Safe Mode until it has finished installing. So, there is no way to remedy any problems (short of yanking hardware out of your machine) unless you boot off of the install DVD, and go into the command line tool there. However, you cannot get to the command line tool directly. You have to ask for it to do a Repair first. However, Repair hangs on some machines. (Man, I wish I was making this up.) So, you may have to cancel out of Repair, just to get to the command line.

None of the three distinct problems that were preventing my upgrade were detected at all by the tool that was supposed to determine if my machine was Vista compatible. Not a single one of them. So, I had no idea where to start looking for problems.

Okay, now imagine your typical first-level tech trying to guide a consumer through this swamp.

They can't. This is not something that can be realistically handled by first-level customer support. Moreover, the "just do a clean install" line that Microsoft has been feeding to anyone who contacts tech support REALLY isn't going to fly with people who were told their machines would be ready for a Vista upgrade when it became available. They have already been using their machines, and they expect a smooth upgrade -- not a clean install.

These companies have a vested interest in making sure that the Vista upgrade process is not going to blow up in the faces of their customers. Because their equipment is very consistent, they face a situation where it's either going to be a disaster for everyone, or it's going to run smoothly for almost everyone. The stakes are very high for them to get this one right. The cost of botching it up will be phenomenal. So, give them some time. Let them get this one right. Or, their poor customers are going to find yourself with your machine torn apart all over the floor, gnashing and wailing, like I was. Upgrades should never be this hard.

They do make the control available for Vista: here

This is the "application" version - not the safe for scripting version. Wrap it in your own control if you have to.

. . .show me some of these huge security holes while you're at it.

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

KFG

Seems like there was a good reason to remove the control from Vista. Also, it appears there are solutions for desktop apps that use the control.

whine whine bitch bitch. Maybe you should just download and use the free plugin that allows you to import 2007 documents into 2003?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displa ylang=en

Yep, it's called WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) and can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updat eservices/default.mspx

(Or if you can't cut & paste, simply type www.microsoft.com/wsus)

Who did you trick into paying you to do IT work? I have some ocean front property over in Arizona...

And once he's through with that. He can address those ridiculous resource requirements. I suspect most geek computers exceed those by a mile since they're the only ones who will be buying the OS.

With this update you can import and export to Office 2007 formats with Office 2000 and above: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displa ylang=en

This article says Outlook 2000 is fine as long as the OS is patched: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues

This article discusses how CDO is the only reason Exchange needs to be patched: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926666

The Outlook appointment tool is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

The Exchange server version is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930879

This article says Outlook 2000 is fine as long as the OS is patched: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues

This article discusses how CDO is the only reason Exchange needs to be patched: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926666

The Outlook appointment tool is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

The Exchange server version is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930879

This article says Outlook 2000 is fine as long as the OS is patched: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues

This article discusses how CDO is the only reason Exchange needs to be patched: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926666

The Outlook appointment tool is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

The Exchange server version is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930879

This article says Outlook 2000 is fine as long as the OS is patched: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues

This article discusses how CDO is the only reason Exchange needs to be patched: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926666

The Outlook appointment tool is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

The Exchange server version is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930879

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues#a5

You're exactly right, except for the parts where you're talking out of your ass. There are automatic updates for XP and 2000, and instructions for updating Nt4 manually. Vista does in fact ship with the updated DST rules.

We're already having serious problems with this change. Patched windows workstations show different appointment times than unpatched workstations. We're planning to roll out the windows patch, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928388, to all computers ASAP.

And it performs brilliantly with any product you want: MS Office Ultimate 2007, MS Office Professional 2007, MS Office Enterprise 2007, MS Office Standard 2007, or MS Office Small Business 2007.

Details here.

Note that this is because the backup application uses the shadow copy service to take a snapshot of the system

Also note that you can download the old backup program for Vista Business / Ultimate, IIRC.

It's because the music executives are realizing that if they insist on DRM, they may well end up at the mercy of a company who's DRM scheme gains monopolistic market share or that other company who wants its DRM scheme to gain monopolistic market share.

as it is a 64 bit operating system

Not in every case, according to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/editions/64bit.mspx:

64-bit media is included in the box with Windows Vista Ultimate.

its innards have been significantly beefed up, as it is a 64 bit operating system

So was XP. What else about it is "beefy" without also being labeled "cruft"?

One key thing to take away from this is that the authors of the software made it really easy to pull the device keys out of memory for two reasons

      1. They kept them in variables that were physically near the variables for the volume key
      2. They zero-ed them out after use, leaving big gaping holes of zeros in memory in a place where that kind of looked funny, drawing attention to those areas

Yes, but even if they learn from these mistakes in future versions, we still have the keys for these early discs. When the player is loaded up with an early disc, the known key will be loaded. We can simply trace the execution until we find bytes from those keys loaded into registers. At worst, this will give us a small number of candidate keys to try until we find the right one. At best, it'll lead us straight to the key wherever they put it.

If they are smart (and if the MPAA even give them another chance), the powerdvd/windvd authors will reimplement their AACS decryption code to never store the keys in memory. Without double-checking, I believe the keys are only 128 bits, they could be loaded into the SSE registers in encrypted form and then decrypted on chip. The authors will still need to take measures to prevent an OS context switch from storing the registers in kernel-private memory during the period in which the device keys are present, but that is not an extended period of time, presumably they can kick their priority up high enough that it won't happen without hurting the system much.

Even that approach isn't hack-proof, but it is a lot harder to dump the cpu registers under such conditions than it is to trace memory accesses.

Not really. You just run as an administrator and use GetThreadContext. A user process *can't* prevent an OS context switch from occurring. You use SetThreadContext to put the CPU into single step mode, and catch the exceptions caused by that in your process using WaitForDebugEvent. See here for details.

Sure. Google 'disable uac site:microsoft.com'.

The first result is this:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/libr ary/0d75f774-8514-4c9e-ac08-4c21f5c6c2d91033.mspx? mfr=true

Scenario 3 describes how to turn UAC off in its couple of modes.

Here's a link in MS technet, from the result of a google search. You can see the various usermode tools you can use for NT security administration; for example you can use showpriv.exe to see who has what privilege on your system. I also believe lots more documentation related to the APIs and constants can be easily found on MSDN.

You are right that when installing apps on windows, you will never see something like what you would see in VMS documentation regarding required priviledges for the said application. However, I must be fair and say this is hardly the fault of Windows, but more the unfortunate nature of having a consumer-oriented OS. All the third party applications on Windows will always indirectly determine your overall experience on the platform. Since they are not written by people with you and me(admin types) in mind, most of the time they just make bad assumptions and fugly shortcuts as long as they work. This is the catch-22 of any OS that attempts to be as ubitigous as Windows, unfortunately.

Consider that you don't need a special driver for a particular brand of ATAPI CD-ROM drive, or for a particular USB Mass Storage Device. Heck, Windows has USB class drivers for Bluetooth devices, smart-card devices, hubs, HIDs (keyboards, mice, CueCats and such), mass storage devices, printers, PTP-protocol scanners and cameras, audio devices, modems and video devices. Linux has a variety of supported class drivers as well. There are, of course, more classes, and that's all just for USB devices.

Sure, there are a lot of corner cases and pathological hardware--I think video cards are the best example--but it's entirely possible and indeed desirable to support all kinds of devices in the kernel. Even if sometimes we have to say goodbye to one of them, it was worth it to have them around.

Incorrect. Most programs do *not* require admin privileges to run. All the big Microsoft Office programs do not: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Outlook.

The latest version of QuickTime does (I don't think previous versions did). I think Visual Studio does. I think a lot of games do, too, but I'm not a big gamer.

I run as a non-admin all the time, and most programs that give me problems want to write to %ProgramFiles% or the HKLM section of the registry. If it's a program that I care about, I'll spend a minute with Process Monitor to figure out what's going on. I'll grant that 98% of end users could not do this, not because it's hard, but because they don't know about the tool.

Myth 9: Security Tweaks Will Stop Worms/Viruses

Because worms and viruses (hereinafter collectively referred to as "malware") are designed to cause the maximum amount of destruction possible, they try to hit the largest numbers of vulnerable systems. Thus they tend to spread through one of two mechanisms: unpatched/unmitigated vulnerabilities and unsophisticated users. Although there are some security tweaks that will stop malware (Code Red, for instance, could have been stopped by removing the indexing services extensions mappings in IIS), the vast majority of it cannot be stopped that way because it spreads through the latter vector. Given the choice of dancing pigs and security, users will choose dancing pigs, every single time. Given the choice between pictures of naked people frolicking on the beach and security, roughly half the population will choose naked people frolicking on the beach. Couple that with the fact that users do not understand our security dialogs and we have a disaster. If a dialog asking the user to make a security decision is the only thing standing between the user and the naked people frolicking on the beach, security does not stand a chance.

Windows Vista's security model: really quite similar to sudo, except that it doesn't prompt for passwords if you're already logged in as a user that has the privileges you need.

While I'm at it, why does a printer (or other non-intrusive peripheral) driver have to have unfettered access to the life blood of the OS?

UAC is so amazingly, fundamentally flawed. Has been from the beginning. As you noted, it's susceptible to user numbness. It's also susceptible to the dancing pigs phenomenon, something mentioned by Microsoft's own Steve Riley (see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns /secmgmt/sm0405.mspx, and search for the words "dancing pigs".

Mac has issued a salutation. Allow or deny? Comedy gold, and yet Apple hit the nail on the head.

My expectation is that at least 50% of Windows Vista consumers will turn UAC off entirely, and the remaining 50% will ignore it (psychologically disable it) to the point that it may as well be disabled - especially applies in the enterprise computing world where Joe won't be allowed to turn it off, but still wants to do whatever he wants. Meaning that in the default configuration of users as hobbled admins, every Vista user is then an admin. Just like they are in XP. Really validates 5 years of hard work on security.

The truth is out. Microsoft didn't kill clippy in MS Office, they just moved him upstairs to an entire operating system designed to ask unwieldy and confusing questions.

This link allegedly tells you how to turn the questions off , but unfortunately I can understand the words, even most of the sentences, but the whole thing is just dreadful, "As a result, IT departments often cannot gauge the holistic health and security of their environments." Can anyone help?

(45 seconds to get a right-click menu to come up on a desktop icon with NO programs running? Yecch!)

You'd honestly expect MSN to run on anything but x86 since their OS doesn't run on anything else?

*cough*
Itanium
*cough*

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/64bit/i pf/default.mspx :-)

It can never work because the attacker is the same person as the recipient.

var b = document.createElement("input");
b.type = "radio";
b.name = "...";
b.value = "...";
formNode.appendChild(b);

var newRadioButton = document.createElement("<INPUT TYPE='RADIO' NAME='RADIOTEST' VALUE='First Choice'>")

Dynamics (whatever that is)

Software for running a business.

MS page
Wikipedia entry

So if you're a Mac user and you (for some reason) wanted to use Walmart's music store, you're fscked.

There are two primary reasons for games not working perfectly on Vista:

1.) Crappy video drivers. (Especially nVidia drivers.)

2.) The game needs admin privs.

If you're a victim of crappy drivers, well, that's the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge, I guess. ATI's drivers are fairly good. They had WHQL certified drivers released before Vista's consumer launch. nVidia, on the other hand, is dragging their ass. They've had a long time to get these drivers done. If you want to blame somebody, blame them.

If the game doesn't run without admin privs, then blame the game manufacturer. How do you know ahead of time? Well, if it has the "Designed for Windows XP" logo on the box, you should be good to go. These games were certified by Microsoft, and as part of that certification, they couldn't do stupid crap like write to c:\Program Files. If your game doesn't have that logo, then who knows.

Luckily, games that require admin privs can still be run on Vista without too much trouble. Just right click the game icon and select "Run as Administrator". Even better, right click it, go to properties, select Compatibility, and check the "Run as Administrator" option so that it always runs as admin. This will solve 99% of most people's gaming issues.

But games that don't run on Vista have nothing to do with Vista's "complexity" (it's a freaking modern OS, of course it's complex...), and it has nothing to do with some DirectX 9 incompatibility (the Dx9 bits ship with Vista).

Not to mention the fact that other sites mention pretty good luck with running games on Vista.

As usual, compatibility issues have more to do with 3rd party incompetence than with the quality of Microsoft's OS.

Broadcasts such as NetBIOS and mdns do not cross subnet barriers

NetBIOS as a protocol in and of itself, isn't routable. NetBIOS traffic over IP is. Typical NetBIOS traffic that you would see ordinarily is broadcast and doesn't cross subnet boundaries. Resolution such as WINS and NetBIOS usage through WINS can be routed however. See example below.

How? It's a chicken or the egg scenario. How do you know that you need to resolve a name and service to an ip address unless the remote host broadcasts that the service is there and awaiting resolution? NetBIOS serves that purpose. Name resolution alone won't tell you what services are available. mdns broadcasts (ie, in a /24 x.x.x.255) presence, services, such as ssh, smb, etc, and lets you know that you might want to resolve that name to an IP address, and handily gives you that as well. mdns won't cross subnet boundaries, and pptp is a routed protocol, thus you never get that broadcast.

You have 10 workstations on subnet A, WINS server on subnet B, and remote workstations on subnet C.

If the workstations on subnet A and workstations on subnet C have a WINS server on subnet B set as part of their configuration (By whatever means, static DHCP etc) then they will all get a browse list. They will all be able to see network shares. Provided that they aren't hidden (\\servername\sharename$).

SSH and other services are not covered, you won't see these. In actual fact this is one of the biggest downfalls of Active Directory in my opinion, aside from speed, Novell eDirectory and other directory products handle other services quite well. In the old days of NT and WINS, you could use DNS for resolution of any name, including accessing the server services themselves if you knew the name. In the example above, the list you see in Network Neighborhood however couldn't be enumerated without WINS.

In the old days you relied on the elections on the local subnet for each workgroup. The workgroup is actually a workgroup or a domain, but they all had elections. This is part of the NetBIOS broadcast on the local subnet. There is an article at the microsoft site that discusses browser elections. Workstations, servers, PDC, BDC, uptime and a number of other factors weighed in as to who became the master browser. There was usually a backup browser elected as well.

If you wanted to connect into that network across subnets in the old Microsoft realm, the way to do that was WINS. The way to enumerate stuff now is all from Active Directory, you can publish SQL servers, file shares, printers in AD. By default, you can't publish something that's not Microsofts.

In your instance, given that you are connecting Macs and things, and they don't have an Active Directory client (Well by default, you can use LDAP for all sorts of things) your best option is to use WINS if it supports it (I don't support Macs so I don't know). My theory would have been that you would have had to use DNS and just know what hostnames you are going for. You can still query the server service for available resources, and this is typically how a windows workstation operates.


WINS does the job, but it is still a chicken or egg problem. It will resolve the name, but you have to know ahead of time that you want to resolve the name for some purpose. Without broadcast, there's not way to know to put that machine into network neighborhood.

You don't have to broadcast to WINS, you can route traffic to WINS. At a large company I used to work for (about 70,000 people globally) we had one local WINS server in our country, and then a regional server in another country. Each DHCP scope had it's countries WINS server, and the regional server in the settings it gave out. There were 4 or 5 regional servers that would talk to each other.

That gave you a browse list, it told you the description of the box if set, the s

All the other new bells and whistles in Vista are superficially different from the alternatives that are available or will soon be available, and your arguments have done little to convince me otherwise.


It was never my intent to convince anyone. My intent was to provide factual information that very easily gets ignored or overlooked.

I'm sorry you don't get the WDDM of Vista, and why DirectX 10 is locked to Vista because of the features that only a WDDM driver in Vista can do. Maybe this link can help people like yourself to understand what is unique and why DirectX 10 is more than just a new revision.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220. aspx

You also seem quite quick to dismiss a lot of other features inside Vista that won't be available in other OSes any time in the near future, some of them are related to the WDDM and new video subsystem, but many of them are not graphically or even search relevant.

These I will leave for you to discover as they 'do matter' and MS could easily maintain their OS marketshare because of the progression of technology that will need Vista to utilize new concepts other people in the industry doesn't even see coming. I do admit a lot of Vista is not easily seen on the surface, but I also think MS kind of likes it that way.

In a way some of Vista is like the XBox 360, when the PS3 would announce a new feature, MS would send out an update and turn the feature on, as their hardware is far more extensible than the industry or Sony anticipated. Vista has a lot of tricks up its sleeve as well, and I hope people in the OSS and even over at Apple figure it out before MS continues to leapfrog every new idea that could be competition for them.

PS As for Windows changing in comparison to OSX, you are confusing the Win32 Subsystem and NT to make such a comparison. The NT Kernel has had many optimizations, but the core features and functionality has not changed very much since it was designed in 1991, which does give a bit of kudos to the Cutler design team for the extensibility of the NT design.

While we're at WDS, I think it also has what one would call "boolean queries":
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/add resources/advanced.mspx

It still suffers from some "closed sourcedness" behavior, with e.g. how do I / who define more "kinds", what's each "kind" defined as? how is a "store" defined? and so on, but it can still do quite a bit more than what first meets the eye in Vista or XP using the WDS addon. It's a bit too heavily specialized for the wants of Microsoft though. What that application needs is a thorough, nice, API to define its behavior.

Maybe we'll finally see functional languages come to the forefront. They make it a whole lot easier for the compiler to extract parallelism automatically. For example,see Parallel Haskell. I think this is the closest I've seen to a "magical threading language".

Microsoft actually does support NFS, and provides server/client/username mapping/auth services for it via Interix (Their BSD/Posix subsystem) on win2k pro, XP pro, server 2003. and via SUA which is integrated into Vista.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/ unix/sfu/default.mspx

And for fuck sake, why doesn't Windows support NFS? It makes mixing boxes on a lan such a bitch ... oh wait ... I get it.

I'll bite.

Can you prove that with some figures? Last time I checked revenue was on the increase.