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Pfft. If you want to bash Microsoft, this is the way to do it: empirically. Because for those of you who haven't noticed, Microsoft has been using numbers in their Get the Facts campaign, and empirically speaking, Windows appears to be more secure than Linux. It has fewer reported vulnerabilities, fewer unpatched vulnerabilities (zero), etc. Apparently, Microsoft is even better at exposing flaws in their operating system than the F/OSS community is! Get with the program. If you think it's a problem with Microsoft, you're not saying much, because Microsoft beat you to it (with a white paper, not a comment on slashdot). To really stick it to 'em, why not come up with an anti-phishing measure that does improve security and then submit it to the appropriate code base?

"Are you sure of that?"

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forp ros/Consumerelectronics/p4skit/p4s_2cdDetail.aspx.

" I doubt that Joe Bloggs could just walk up to Microsoft and say "I'd like one license to develop playsforsure devices."

Read the linked stuff. Joe Bloggs doesn't need any license to develop PlaysForSure devices -- licenses only apply when he wants to start selling them, which would presumably occur after they were developed rather than before-hand.

"So what? Nobody but Sony is allowed to make a device supporting Playstation games. What's the big deal?"

The big deal is the fact that others can and do produce and sell PlayStation-specific content, whereas only iTunes is allowed to sell iPod-specific content.

"why should it be illegal to make a closed system?"

Selling stuff to consumers who are protected by a set of laws that existed before you started doing business there, and are therefore obliged to obey just like everyone else seems like a perfectly good reason. Apple knew these laws existed before opening a store in Norway, and simply chose to ignore them because they thought they'd get away with it. They were wrong.

"Why should Apple be forced to license their technology if they don't want to?"

Who is forcing them to license their technology? It certainly isn't Norway, because licensing their technology was _one of the options_ offered to them, alongside offering music in other DRM formats alongside FairPlay, letting people by music without DRM, or simply not selling stuff through the iTunes store in Norway.

"I don't see how it's a fanboy issue, as I hate Microsoft, but support their right to do the same thing with the Zune."

That's because you're in the US where people are used to being shafted by corporations because they have immeasurably more clout with shill politicians than individuals, and have therefore bought laws that favour them at the expense of everyone else.

"If you don't like it, don't buy it. Nobody is forcing you."

And nobody is forcing Apple to sell music to people living in Norway, but if they choose to do so, then they must comply with Norwegian consumer protection laws rather than expecting things to be like the US, where those with enough wealth can do whatever they like.

Except it's nothing new; that's what the TAP programme is. I've been involved with the SQL 2005 TAP, where they supported a live rollout of the beta code for a large project; and throughout we had direct access to parts of the SQL team. TAP doesn't mean the software is thrown at you and you flounder with it, it's a carefully organised rollout and feedback process. We also did the same with BizTalk 2004, and MS ended up flying some of the BizTalk team over to help fix bugs at a customer site (of course the customer was the one who choose to use BizTalk 2004; meh, what can you do?)

While I don't agree with DRM, and don't support it (financially), why does the government need to regulate a vendor that has lock-in features, when other companies do the same thing?

--
Plays For Sure .. unless your MS and can't even get that right!

any Word document from 1 byte to 19 kb will require the same amount of storage

I doubt that. Default cluster size of NTFS is 4KiB. So, a 4096 byte large file will take the same amount on disk as the 1 byte file. The 4097 byte file, though, will use up two clusters. Linky for the unbelievers. In Windows, you can always right click on a file and it will report both usages: "Size" and "Size on Disk". I just tried with a 17KiB ODS file that I had lying around: "Size = 16771 Bytes", "Size on Disk = 20480 Bytes". Exactly as expected.

Note that the actual sector size on most harddisks is 512Bytes.

Finally: the article is talking about RAM, where each byte is individually accessible, so your whole argumentation has no point at all in this context.

Valid points. I suspect that few proprietary formats maintain high compatibility across decades, so it's more of an industry-wide problem than Microsoft alone. Heck, most software companies from that era (early 90's) don't even exist any more. BTW, you may not be aware that Microsoft has made Word 5.5 for DOS available for free. Perhaps that would've solved your problem.

If you really want longevity, though, I suppose that standardized formats such as HTML and ASCII are your best bet. I guess that's one reason that MS is trying to standardize the Word format.

More complex modeling than means and standard deviations have gone into improving online games (unless the author was simplifying things by saying means and standard deviations).

For example both Trueskill and etpub use a Bayesian form of Arpad Elo's rating system to rank and match players.

I did some work modeling kills and wins in Enemy Territory that yielded interesting insights about map- and weapon- balance in that game.

At arena.net, there is at least one employee whose sole job is to model the association between skills winning probabilities in order to balance the skills across the classes.

I'd like to see an RPG that rated players and mobs based on statistical models and made sure the game always gave a near constant level of difficulty. RPGs present, I think, more difficult problem in this area than some of your standard first-person-shooters, etc., because of the variety you have in builds.

I'm a statistician / machine learning guy, so I am all for modeling aspects of games to improve them.

BTW, AMD64 is the official arch name implemented by AMD and Intel, x86-64 has been officially abandonned

Intel64 property is defined only when it is running on an Itanium processor

Is Intel®64 the same technology used in the Itanium® 2 processor?
No. Intel®64 is an extension to Intel's processors based on the IA-32 architecture. The Itanium processor family is based on the EPIC architecture. These are two separate families of processors, based on two different architectures. The Itanium processor family is specifically designed for the most demanding mission-critical applications.

The Microsoft Campus Agreement FAQ says:

Q. Can I use my Campus Agreement Windows Upgrade licenses and media for installing Windows on a computer that does not currently have an operating system?
A. No. To install the upgrade licensed through Campus Agreement you must have a fully-licensed version of Windows already installed on the computer. For example, if you currently run Windows 2000, your Campus Agreement Windows Upgrade license entitles you to upgrade to Windows XP. To run any version of a Microsoft Windows operating system licensed through Campus Agreement, you or your users must have a valid license for a Microsoft operating system on each PC on which the software runs. Please consult the Microsoft Volume Licensing Product List for more information about qualifying operating systems.

The Microsoft Campus Agreement FAQ says:

Q. Can I use my Campus Agreement Windows Upgrade licenses and media for installing Windows on a computer that does not currently have an operating system?
A. No. To install the upgrade licensed through Campus Agreement you must have a fully-licensed version of Windows already installed on the computer. For example, if you currently run Windows 2000, your Campus Agreement Windows Upgrade license entitles you to upgrade to Windows XP. To run any version of a Microsoft Windows operating system licensed through Campus Agreement, you or your users must have a valid license for a Microsoft operating system on each PC on which the software runs. Please consult the Microsoft Volume Licensing Product List for more information about qualifying operating systems.

Similarly, I work at a university and it's looking at deploying Microsoft's Key Management Service. This has spurred some conversation about activations in the past and future. In the past, we were given a single cd key from Microsoft that was good for an unlimited number of activations. Should the key escape to wide scale piracy, Microsoft's only recourse was to make the key, and all computers using it, non-genuine. While this did not happen at our university, it apparently did happen other places. So this is one example where legitimate pcs could be flagged as non-genuine.

I've also had two pcs installed with our still legitimate/genuine XP key be initially detected as "non-genuine" on windows update until I went through the www.microsoft.com/genuine portal.

In the future, it sounds like Microsoft won't be giving out any more unlimited activation keys. Instead, they will allow so many thousand activations on a key, and they can expand the number if they choose/you ask. At least, this is one thing they are doing with us. If it escapes to wide scale piracy, they will issue you a new key and just use the limit on the old key for damage control. This way, they won't be faced with a choice of making a legitimate organization's install base non genuine as collateral for making a million unlicensed pcs in china non genuine.

Similarly, I work at a university and it's looking at deploying Microsoft's Key Management Service. This has spurred some conversation about activations in the past and future. In the past, we were given a single cd key from Microsoft that was good for an unlimited number of activations. Should the key escape to wide scale piracy, Microsoft's only recourse was to make the key, and all computers using it, non-genuine. While this did not happen at our university, it apparently did happen other places. So this is one example where legitimate pcs could be flagged as non-genuine.

I've also had two pcs installed with our still legitimate/genuine XP key be initially detected as "non-genuine" on windows update until I went through the www.microsoft.com/genuine portal.

In the future, it sounds like Microsoft won't be giving out any more unlimited activation keys. Instead, they will allow so many thousand activations on a key, and they can expand the number if they choose/you ask. At least, this is one thing they are doing with us. If it escapes to wide scale piracy, they will issue you a new key and just use the limit on the old key for damage control. This way, they won't be faced with a choice of making a legitimate organization's install base non genuine as collateral for making a million unlicensed pcs in china non genuine.

So it has to be GPL or PD dedicated? What's wrong with the license it's actually released under?

The "source available" (notice how carefully I worded that to avoid your assumption that it should be "open source" using your/RMS's definition) is mentioned on Scott Guthrie's blog

In addition to shipping the source code for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit controls, we are also releasing all of the source code for the fully supported ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release. Specifically:

We are releasing the client-side ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript library (which we also call the "Microsoft AJAX Library") under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL). This grants developers the right to freely customize/modify the library, as well as to redistribute the derivative versions of the JavaScript library for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

To help with debugging and development, we are also releasing all of the source code for the server-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 implementation (including the UpdatePanel, UpdateProgress, ScriptManager, and Network Serialization code) under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL).

Being granted "the right to freely customize/modify the library, as well as to redistribute the derivative versions of the JavaScript library for both commercial and non-commercial purposes" is pretty "open", despite not being released under the GPL. Heck it's almost a BSD license. It's certainly the least restrictive of the MS source licenses, they just haven't submitted it to the OSI for approval (and really, can you blame them?). It was written with the OSD in mind.

The "source available" (notice how carefully I worded that to avoid your assumption that it should be "open source" using your/RMS's definition) is mentioned on Scott Guthrie's blog

In addition to shipping the source code for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit controls, we are also releasing all of the source code for the fully supported ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release. Specifically:

We are releasing the client-side ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript library (which we also call the "Microsoft AJAX Library") under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL). This grants developers the right to freely customize/modify the library, as well as to redistribute the derivative versions of the JavaScript library for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

To help with debugging and development, we are also releasing all of the source code for the server-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 implementation (including the UpdatePanel, UpdateProgress, ScriptManager, and Network Serialization code) under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL).

Being granted "the right to freely customize/modify the library, as well as to redistribute the derivative versions of the JavaScript library for both commercial and non-commercial purposes" is pretty "open", despite not being released under the GPL. Heck it's almost a BSD license. It's certainly the least restrictive of the MS source licenses, they just haven't submitted it to the OSI for approval (and really, can you blame them?). It was written with the OSD in mind.

Microsoft has a product called Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.

is there a web archive somewhere of http://www.microsoft.com/OEM/nakedPC.htm ??

Volume Licensing programs: For organizations that use multiple copies of Microsoft software, Volume Licensing is a flexible and economical way to acquire from five to thousands of licenses for software. Volume Licensing agreements, including Academic Volume Licenses, do not offer the full license for Windows Client operating systems; Volume Licensing covers only Windows Client upgrades. The full operating system license must be acquired as FPP or pre-installed by an OEM or System Builder.

Emphasis mine. Correction to your post, then, in bold:

I happen to work at a university campus which has a licensing agreement with MS, so we're already paying twice for Windows.

some of you might remember back six years ago:
how PCs shipped without Windows will destroy your life: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/11/23/ms_how_pcs _shipped_without/
it's (nearly) illegal to buy PCs without Windows: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/11/28/ms_its_nea rly_illegal/

is there a web archive somewhere of http://www.microsoft.com/OEM/nakedPC.htm ??

Where did you get that from?

Ask, and ye shall receive:

Volume Licensing programs: For organizations that use multiple copies of Microsoft software, Volume Licensing is a flexible and economical way to acquire from five to thousands of licenses for software. Volume Licensing agreements, including Academic Volume Licenses, do not offer the full license for Windows Client operating systems; Volume Licensing covers only Windows Client upgrades. The full operating system license must be acquired as FPP or pre-installed by an OEM or System Builder.

Bold theirs; italics mine.

Furthermore, ye shall receive abundantly :

Note: It's important to understand that Volume License Agreements do not cover the full windows operating system; Volume Licensing provides for Windows OS upgrades only . Customers must first have a qualifying underlying operating system license before installing Volume License software on their computers.

Italics and bold mine this time. The first link also says "Published: April 23, 2002 | Updated: June 26, 2006" which doesn't help you establish a timeline much, but there you go.

These data points are corroborated by my experience at my university. Site-licensed Windows may only be installed on upgradable machines (OEM licenses, remember, stay with the machine; this is currently the source of a lost afternoon for me because a guest here wants Windows and not Linux and his box isn't licensed for Windows so I must swap hard drives around between a licensed and unlicensed machine), and the paperwork I signed when I got "my" copy of Windows XP stated that it was upgrade only as well.

Of course, you might have the leverage to wrestle Microsoft into a better deal, so YMMV. But this is what Microsoft says, not me.

Where did you get that from?

Ask, and ye shall receive:

Volume Licensing programs: For organizations that use multiple copies of Microsoft software, Volume Licensing is a flexible and economical way to acquire from five to thousands of licenses for software. Volume Licensing agreements, including Academic Volume Licenses, do not offer the full license for Windows Client operating systems; Volume Licensing covers only Windows Client upgrades. The full operating system license must be acquired as FPP or pre-installed by an OEM or System Builder.

Bold theirs; italics mine.

Furthermore, ye shall receive abundantly :

Note: It's important to understand that Volume License Agreements do not cover the full windows operating system; Volume Licensing provides for Windows OS upgrades only . Customers must first have a qualifying underlying operating system license before installing Volume License software on their computers.

Italics and bold mine this time. The first link also says "Published: April 23, 2002 | Updated: June 26, 2006" which doesn't help you establish a timeline much, but there you go.

These data points are corroborated by my experience at my university. Site-licensed Windows may only be installed on upgradable machines (OEM licenses, remember, stay with the machine; this is currently the source of a lost afternoon for me because a guest here wants Windows and not Linux and his box isn't licensed for Windows so I must swap hard drives around between a licensed and unlicensed machine), and the paperwork I signed when I got "my" copy of Windows XP stated that it was upgrade only as well.

Of course, you might have the leverage to wrestle Microsoft into a better deal, so YMMV. But this is what Microsoft says, not me.

I think the grandparent poster was slightly off target - I believe this only applies to desktop Windows, not server editions.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/4/6/f4662 425-098f-414b-8052-9f2de33f3b90/G34899_PROC_FAQ.PD F turned up first on Google, but I also did an online training course through the MS Partner program that confirmed this. They expect you to buy an OEM license with the hardware, then you can use the volume license to upgrade when new versions of Windows are released. Of course, by the time a new Windows is released, you'll probably need new hardware, so you'll have to pay for a new OEM license anyway.

The FAQ claims this has been the case for over 10 years, but like you, I was surprised - first I heard of it was two days ago.

AFAIK his only applies to end user licensing - if you are an OEM or a reseller you will get volume discounts on non-upgrade licenses that you resell to end users. I assume development/test licenses (MSDN, Action Pack, Partner benefits) are also unaffected by this.

MSIs, which more and more things rely on now that it's in pretty much every system out there, looks after dependencies for you. Take a look here for the quick-start guide.

Normal APIs don't support extra streams. Getting fopen() to work with streams is a hack, to put it mildly.

The full format for an NTFS attribute is <path>\<file>[:<stream>[:<attribute>]] (the angle brackets denote data fields, the square brackets denote optional fields and other characters are literal) If you don't name any stream, you get the default, null name stream and if you don't name any attribute you get the $DATA attribute (as oppsed to others like $EA, $SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR and $FILE_NAME; everything about a file is stored in a named attribute), i.e. <path>\<file>::$DATA.

Any function that can pass colons in the filename to the kernel can open alternate file streams, no hacks required.

The notation used on Windows is... interesting. If you are in D:\ with a file called C, does C:foo refer to a stream on D:\C or to a file called foo in the current directory of the C drive?

Whenever Win32 sees a path starting with a letter and a colon, it's always interpreted as a drive letter. This is a Win32 issue since drive letters are a Win32 (not kernel) idiom.

On a Linux or MacOS system, all characters except '/' and '\0' are valid in filenames, so we have nothing to spare. No, you can't steal the ':'.

On NTFS, : " / \ | are reserved. Note that the null character IS NOT reserved (although Win32 doesn't support it).

Today I can copy a file with the dd command. I can copy a file using the cat command and shell redirection. Multi-forked files would lose data.

There ARE some special versions of cp and related that properly support streams and extended attributes, although most Windows programs don't.

Do these extra streams get permission bits?

No. The security descriptor belongs to the file, not a specific stream. These are pieces of data that are meant to be about the file, with the same sensitivity as the main data.

Can a stream have a stream?

No. There is only one level of indirection from the file itself to a stream. An entire hierarchy of metadata would be unnecessary; a hierarchical naming convention (like the reverse-DNS scheme Apple recommends for extended attributes) would be much more useful. It wouldn't be good for extended attributes to have subordinate EAs either.

Can I move a stream from one file to another? Can I move a stream to be just a regular file? Can I move a file into another file, to become an extra stream?

No, no, no. From FILE_RENAME_OPERATION:

Special rules for renaming NTFS data streams:

• A data stream can only be renamed within a file. In other words, a rename operation cannot cause a data stream to be moved to a different file.
• A stream on a directory cannot be renamed to the default data stream.
• "Renaming" the default data stream is allowed, but this is not a true rename, because it leaves behind a zero-length default data stream.

These are attributes about a file, not files in themselves. The most they have in common with files is that you can use the standard read and write functions on their data.

Why should everything become more complex (buggy, slow, insecure, confusing, etc.) for this barely-useful feature?

I don't think they're slowing things down, and insecurity by obscurity is a high-level interface problem, not a filesystem problem. Extended attributes and alternate st

Sir, I presume you are familiar with this document that comes directly from Microsoft?

BTW, while searching info about ADS, it seems the main goal behind its implementation was to be compatible with HFS+

Compatible with HFS's data and resource forks maybe.

But to be compatible with HFS+ would be quite an accomplishment; according to its Wikipedia page, HFS+ was released in 1998. According to this page (admittedly unclearly), a comment above, and this MS document ADSs have been supported in NTFS since 1993.

I wrote this by remixing the text from this page:

http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/how.mspx

How Proprietary Software Affects You

Proprietary software hurts everyone-from software developers to businesses, and ultimately to all software users. The unnecessary restrictions placed on non-free sofware has a significant impact on the economy, costing the United States billions of dollars a year in duplicated development, license management, and by denying the benefits of software to those who cannot afford the licensing - money that would have gone back into local communities. In addition, companies facing the threat of litigation must pull resources from the development of new technology, and devote it to tracking and purchasing licenses and legal services. In the end, proprietary, non-free software is unfair to everyone.

The risks of using proprietary software

Quality - If often lacks the kinds of improvements a community could generate quickly and comes with no significant review of the methods and flaws contained in the code.

Viruses - Code that cannot be reviewed and secured may be infected with viruses that will damage your hard drive or cripple your network, without the benefit of timely community-based fixes.

At Work - developing or using proprietary software at work puts the whole company and society at risk of wasting development time reinventing the wheel. Proprietary software that is expensive, unnecessarily restricted or that contains security vulnerabilities wastes company resources and drives up IT costs.

A Search Folder is simply a search that you save. Opening a Search Folder instantly runs that saved search, displaying up-to-date results immediately.

So I browsed from TFA to the Microsoft website's piracy section. Yeah, all the misinformation about how piracy is hurting our culture, EULAs are necessary, and FOSS is bad ("Imagine if anything you thought, made, or distributed could be legally reproduced and freely given away by others") is amusing, in a worrying-that-people-will-believe-this way. But my favourite part is this: Worldwide Piracy Sites.

Microsoft posting links to "worldwide piracy sites"? Who the hell came up with the title for this page? Hilarious.

Actually, now that I browse deeper, this kind of ambiguity is rampant. Piracy basics. Software Piracy resources. Maybe they're trying to get Google hits — when someone searches for information on how to pirate things, they instead get Microsoft's 'don't do it!' spiel and decide not to!

So I browsed from TFA to the Microsoft website's piracy section. Yeah, all the misinformation about how piracy is hurting our culture, EULAs are necessary, and FOSS is bad ("Imagine if anything you thought, made, or distributed could be legally reproduced and freely given away by others") is amusing, in a worrying-that-people-will-believe-this way. But my favourite part is this: Worldwide Piracy Sites.

Microsoft posting links to "worldwide piracy sites"? Who the hell came up with the title for this page? Hilarious.

Actually, now that I browse deeper, this kind of ambiguity is rampant. Piracy basics. Software Piracy resources. Maybe they're trying to get Google hits — when someone searches for information on how to pirate things, they instead get Microsoft's 'don't do it!' spiel and decide not to!

So I browsed from TFA to the Microsoft website's piracy section. Yeah, all the misinformation about how piracy is hurting our culture, EULAs are necessary, and FOSS is bad ("Imagine if anything you thought, made, or distributed could be legally reproduced and freely given away by others") is amusing, in a worrying-that-people-will-believe-this way. But my favourite part is this: Worldwide Piracy Sites.

Microsoft posting links to "worldwide piracy sites"? Who the hell came up with the title for this page? Hilarious.

Actually, now that I browse deeper, this kind of ambiguity is rampant. Piracy basics. Software Piracy resources. Maybe they're trying to get Google hits — when someone searches for information on how to pirate things, they instead get Microsoft's 'don't do it!' spiel and decide not to!

By using comics, the company aims to make the message more accessible to a broader audience.

Most people choose a software program (if there is choice) not form their actual needed features, but a lot based on reputation. For developers this is a strange situation. the "Added Some Stuff Joe Thought Was Cool" feature might be nice for some users who choose just not to use it because Joe stuff has no reputation yet.

In the long run MS is right with their vista development recommendations. Not that i would recommend vista! It is just that their style rules make sense for 98% or the users. Users will go for the stylish look and later decide if memory consumption and stability stuff fits their needs. That does not mean you should build unstable software, it means you should spend some time polishing for dumb first time users and do some graphics.

The best thing linux ever did for this was choosing the penguin as a mascot.

"You never saw Microsoft attacking a filesharing program"...

Oh we haven't? How many times have you cursed "EventID 4226" feature? This unchangeable setting (without replacing the tcp stack file) was touted as a security fix, but came as a major hinderance against P2P apps, regarles of their legitimacy. XP's DRM is moe of the same, "features" the customer doesn't want, and can't control.

You can disable it completely in c:\boot.ini by specifying the boot parameter /noexecute=alwaysoff (by default it's /noexecute=optin).

More info here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxp pro/maintain/sp2mempr.mspx

Last year MS dropped support for all operating systems except XP SP2 and Vista. This includes security patches.

Last year MS dropped support for all operating systems except XP SP2 and Vista. This includes security patches.

Last year MS dropped support for all operating systems except XP SP2 and Vista. This includes security patches.

Oh wait, by most accounts, Tiger is still as good or better than Vista.

ok the problem is that people/people worrying about spam are not publishing callerid and DKIM in DNS

before we blame ISP's for not doing it by default we must (those people who read slashdot) ask out hosts to do it
make sure we have done it for our domains

ANTISPAM NEEDS YOU

simple

if you send mail from a domain make sure it has a callerid and if possible use DKIM

ISP's who sell domains and put a MX record in by default Without at least a callerid record are wrong... lets correct ours and then ask them to correct theirs

spamassassin can check SPF and DKIM so enable it NOW !

regards

John Jones

p.s. setup yous now

Microsoft callerID and exchange/outlook resources

    Kerio CallerID check to help chek your setup
    yahoo resources on Domain Keys and setup for various MTA's

Just to confirm for you, junctions are implemented in NTFS for Win2000 as that's what I'm using. One could probably dev a plugin for explorer to call junction or linkd and perform the magic. I don't need it that often so I just use the commandline.

I didn't find it awkward to use.

I think "linkd" (Microsoft) came with one of their "extra" resource kits you could purchase.

Juction.exe - previously supplyed by SysInternals until they were gobbled up by Microsoft

I was sick of all this crapware installing stuff to my "C:" which I have reserved for the OS so I made a junction from "C:\Program Files" to "E:\Program Files" just in case I forget to type "E:" when installing something or if they decide to drop stuff into "Common Files". It all goes to E:, wether they like it or not and it is seamless and accesssible from C:

I also did this for my Home dir to a data section of my system .

C:\>dir
Directory of C:\
...
09/25/2006 03:45p <JUNCTION> Program Files
...

...right now You do not send anything in MS Word format, Microsoft advice tells you not to open MS Word files from unkown source or when they arrive unexpected.

I worked on multiple NASA projects in the 1990s. During the mid-90s we used Rational http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/ for a short period of time (6 months) then dropped it. IME, the people who want these tools are architect that couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. Since Ive become an architect now, I prefer Visio http://www.microsoft.com/office/visio/ to most of these other tools - that's only if a pencil drawing doesn't cover everything good enough AND I need to make a presentation to someone with money.

IBM has many nice tools and the best bang for your buck hardware, but Rational ought to be buried into a deep, dark hole with a RADIOACTIVE sign outside. http://www.nmsu.edu/~safety/images/signs/sign_caut ion-rad-mat.jpg

I'm not worried about working with anyone else, just with myself. And Microsoft has released a compatibility pack that can be installed on older versions of Office so that they can work with the new format, expanding the field of people I could work with if I needed to. (See http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA10168 6761033.aspx)

People who sit on the bleeding edge can't complain about incompatibility because they are merely a small percentage.
The ramifications of being a small percentage is something Linux users need to learn. But if you will kindly re-read my post you will not find complaining but observation, as well as asking if anyone happened to know if I was wrong.

However, should the source code be open, they can do something about that compatability and try to fix it themselves.
Open source advocates really need a better rallying cry than this. (And better spelling - compatability?)

or the parent company decides to get off it's multi-billion dollar ass and make a product thats backwards compatible.
See previously mentioned compatibility pack.

a week after I wrote them complaining, they wrote me back whit this:
" Dear Joe, Thank you for contacting Acer America. I apologize for the delay in responding to your inquiry. I have forwarded this issue to the appropriate personnel and when a fix is available it will be posted in the knowledgebase on www.acerpanam.com. At this point in time, until a patch is available, the best thing would be to set the kill bit on this control - see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/240797 for more information on how to set kill bits. Online Response System... - www.acerpanam.com/... " The only thing I mentioned in the mail was "Read on slashdot by more than 10000 users". and a simple "disgusting" and a link to this story.
Did it work??

could the real plan be to nudge developers into more Xbox 360 development and off of the PC?

Actually, Microsoft seems to be working very hard to eliminate the difference between developing for the Xbox and developing for the PC. Evidence of this can be seen in their XNA Game Studio which allows homebrew developers to write games that will cross compile for both Windows and the Xbox 360. Ironically, however, I can't get the damn thing to even install on Vista.

9. MICROSOFT .NET BENCHMARK TESTING. The software includes one or more components of the .NET Framework 3.0 (".NET Components"). You may conduct internal benchmark testing of those components. You may disclose the results of any benchmark test of those components, provided that you comply with the conditions set forth at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=66406. Notwithstanding any other agreement you may have with Microsoft, if you disclose such benchmark test results, Microsoft shall have the right to disclose the results of benchmark tests it conducts of your products that compete with the applicable .NET Component, provided it complies with the same conditions set forth at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=66406.

9. MICROSOFT .NET BENCHMARK TESTING. The software includes one or more components of the .NET Framework 3.0 (".NET Components"). You may conduct internal benchmark testing of those components. You may disclose the results of any benchmark test of those components, provided that you comply with the conditions set forth at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=66406. Notwithstanding any other agreement you may have with Microsoft, if you disclose such benchmark test results, Microsoft shall have the right to disclose the results of benchmark tests it conducts of your products that compete with the applicable .NET Component, provided it complies with the same conditions set forth at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=66406.