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IF MS doesn't allow Samba and interoperability then they aren't opening their APIs.

What if they allow it, but only if you pay a licensing fee? The EU decision requires only "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms", and explicitly speaks of "any remuneration that Microsoft might charge for supply"; perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see anything there that requires Microsoft to allow you to give away SMB server software for free. (See section "6.1.1 Remedy concerning refusal to supply", and its two subsections "6.1.1.1 Order to disclose interoperability information for the development of interoperable products" and "6.1.1.2 Reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, timeliness of the disclosures".)

Perhaps Microsoft's strategy can be summed up here as "Don't forget to pay your $32 to $760 licensing fee you cock-smoking teabaggers." :-)

1) Get rid of XP. If you're going to run Windows, then run Server 2003. Try to get your company to pay for it if you can.

Use RegMon and FileMon in SysInternals to determine what the application is trying to access and give your user (or the Users group) the appropriate permissions on those files/registry keys.

To be fair to MS, they have had a research group publishing in this area since around 2001 http://research.microsoft.com/mesh/

No, he's suggesting that if Linux had these before Windows, then Linux can't be violating any MS IP (at least W.R.T. the things he mentioned).

That parenthetical note is key here. Linux didn't have an SMB server before Microsoft did; no, Samba isn't part of the Linux kernel, but it is part of a lot of Linux distributions (as well as being used on other UN*X OSes), and Microsoft do have a licensing process for SMB and various protocols that run atop it, so that might be what Ballmer was referring to.

No, it is not. Closed source is like painting the Sistine Chapel but locking the building and selling tiny postcards with photographs of it. No one ever gets to see it as you really intended it to be appreciated.

Okay, we're really stretching this analogy quite thin. However, you're wrong on this point. How many places now sell you software but don't let you try it out? Microsoft will give you a 180 day trial on Windows Server 2003 as well as trials of just about any of their products -- Office or Visual Studio and SQL Server or many others. Microsoft effectively gives you the full, real postcard for six months. If you like it, buy the postcard. If you don't, return (uninstall) it. Any decent company lets you have a thorough evaluation before you purchase. If they don't, take your business elsewhere.

Some companies offer fully functional demos, some offer demos with functionality disabled (try out the postcard, write on it, only you just can't send it through the mail) -- there's really no end to options as far as trial and demo versions. Like I said, if you're looking at some software which doesn't have a demo/trial available, you can probably ask for one from the company and, if they refuse, you won't have to look too far for another company which does. Every major PC videogame out there has a demo for download. If there isn't one, odds are the game sucks I wouldn't buy it without a demo either. Hell, you can even get a demo of AutoCAD... something that would have been unheard of years ago.

Your assertion that closed source is like looking at a tiny postcard of what you'd eventually get is like arguing that you only get to look at brochures before buying a new car. Haven't you heard? The auto manufacturers now allow you to take them out for a test drive even though they don't hand out the car's "source code". Granted, it's a fairly limited test drive (imperfect car analogy again) but if vehicles weren't subject to wear and tear, I'm sure they'd love to have you drive it for a month or more and get you hooked on the features of their vehicle so that you're more likely to end up buying it.

By the way, I personally see it as just a bit unethical that you can make a fortune off of copies.

Tell that to any commercial Linux vendor. Also, Slashdot makes money by serving up copies of other peoples content and throwing ads on top of it all. Yet here you are, participating in dubious ethics. :)

No, it is not. Closed source is like painting the Sistine Chapel but locking the building and selling tiny postcards with photographs of it. No one ever gets to see it as you really intended it to be appreciated.

Okay, we're really stretching this analogy quite thin. However, you're wrong on this point. How many places now sell you software but don't let you try it out? Microsoft will give you a 180 day trial on Windows Server 2003 as well as trials of just about any of their products -- Office or Visual Studio and SQL Server or many others. Microsoft effectively gives you the full, real postcard for six months. If you like it, buy the postcard. If you don't, return (uninstall) it. Any decent company lets you have a thorough evaluation before you purchase. If they don't, take your business elsewhere.

Some companies offer fully functional demos, some offer demos with functionality disabled (try out the postcard, write on it, only you just can't send it through the mail) -- there's really no end to options as far as trial and demo versions. Like I said, if you're looking at some software which doesn't have a demo/trial available, you can probably ask for one from the company and, if they refuse, you won't have to look too far for another company which does. Every major PC videogame out there has a demo for download. If there isn't one, odds are the game sucks I wouldn't buy it without a demo either. Hell, you can even get a demo of AutoCAD... something that would have been unheard of years ago.

Your assertion that closed source is like looking at a tiny postcard of what you'd eventually get is like arguing that you only get to look at brochures before buying a new car. Haven't you heard? The auto manufacturers now allow you to take them out for a test drive even though they don't hand out the car's "source code". Granted, it's a fairly limited test drive (imperfect car analogy again) but if vehicles weren't subject to wear and tear, I'm sure they'd love to have you drive it for a month or more and get you hooked on the features of their vehicle so that you're more likely to end up buying it.

By the way, I personally see it as just a bit unethical that you can make a fortune off of copies.

Tell that to any commercial Linux vendor. Also, Slashdot makes money by serving up copies of other peoples content and throwing ads on top of it all. Yet here you are, participating in dubious ethics. :)

No, it is not. Closed source is like painting the Sistine Chapel but locking the building and selling tiny postcards with photographs of it. No one ever gets to see it as you really intended it to be appreciated.

Okay, we're really stretching this analogy quite thin. However, you're wrong on this point. How many places now sell you software but don't let you try it out? Microsoft will give you a 180 day trial on Windows Server 2003 as well as trials of just about any of their products -- Office or Visual Studio and SQL Server or many others. Microsoft effectively gives you the full, real postcard for six months. If you like it, buy the postcard. If you don't, return (uninstall) it. Any decent company lets you have a thorough evaluation before you purchase. If they don't, take your business elsewhere.

Some companies offer fully functional demos, some offer demos with functionality disabled (try out the postcard, write on it, only you just can't send it through the mail) -- there's really no end to options as far as trial and demo versions. Like I said, if you're looking at some software which doesn't have a demo/trial available, you can probably ask for one from the company and, if they refuse, you won't have to look too far for another company which does. Every major PC videogame out there has a demo for download. If there isn't one, odds are the game sucks I wouldn't buy it without a demo either. Hell, you can even get a demo of AutoCAD... something that would have been unheard of years ago.

Your assertion that closed source is like looking at a tiny postcard of what you'd eventually get is like arguing that you only get to look at brochures before buying a new car. Haven't you heard? The auto manufacturers now allow you to take them out for a test drive even though they don't hand out the car's "source code". Granted, it's a fairly limited test drive (imperfect car analogy again) but if vehicles weren't subject to wear and tear, I'm sure they'd love to have you drive it for a month or more and get you hooked on the features of their vehicle so that you're more likely to end up buying it.

By the way, I personally see it as just a bit unethical that you can make a fortune off of copies.

Tell that to any commercial Linux vendor. Also, Slashdot makes money by serving up copies of other peoples content and throwing ads on top of it all. Yet here you are, participating in dubious ethics. :)

Yeah, And I'm still waiting for the promised "paperless society".

Unlike Red Hat's kick start or Debian's APT, the third party apps have to wait until they can be installed manually.

The "re-format and re-install" mantra has the effect of reducing competition because of the difficulty in auto-installing third-party software on MS-Windows.

Unlike Red Hat's kick start or Debian's APT, the third party apps have to wait until they can be installed manually.

The "re-format and re-install" mantra has the effect of reducing competition because of the difficulty in auto-installing third-party software on MS-Windows.

Unlike Red Hat's kick start or Debian's APT, the third party apps have to wait until they can be installed manually.

The "re-format and re-install" mantra has the effect of reducing competition because of the difficulty in auto-installing third-party software on MS-Windows.

So what do we actually care about what he has to say about it? Bill doesn't work for or at MS any more and hasn't really had his head in the company for years. I know because I am a shareholder who is greatly disappointed at their miserable performance.

So, 90 minute movie = 5GB, right?

90 mins = 5,400 secs
5GB = 5120 MB = 40,960 Mb

Therefore your bitrate is 7.6Mb/s. That's in the realm of MPEG2 rates for DVD. AVC and VC-1 codecs should use half that. However, that's at standard def, not 1080p. NTSC 480p has 337,920 pixels. 1080p has 2,073,600. That's 6 times the amount. I suspect your 5GB download isn't quite up to the same quality as HD or BD discs. It certainly won't offer anything else secondary video, alternative language audio, etc. BTW, MSFT's Windows Media Player HD examples are about 60MB/min - that's 5GB per 90 mins (about the range you're saying).

In theory, SDelete, or any other deletion utility that meets DOD standards These work by overwriting data with crap that's suppose to make the data very hard to recover. Maybe not impossible — but certainly requiring more resources than your average identity thief or muckracking journalist has.

Do yourself a favor and look through these

There are many key combinations that save time and make you look snazzy.

So I don't want to make that unclear, but we also said, look, we care enough about this issue and we care enough about the fact that our patents have value, and we need to build this IT bridge, we'll actually go help you sell some of these subscriptions, because we're going to make clear to the market that interoperability is a good thing, and we're going to make clear that IP, the patent bridge, the IP bridge is an important thing.

You would be totally right, if Vista actually required a dual core 2.8ghz processor or anything close. Judging by the system requirements, that mini-ITX would do quite nicely.

I know Microsoft's promises aren't worth much, but just for the record, they've said that they "will not use activation as a tool to force people to upgrade" their OS, and that they "will likely provide an update that turns activation off at the end of [Windows XP]'s lifecycle". See http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/activation_faq.msp x.

Neither is Visual Studio 2005. You get a warning and everything when installing it. Nero and TortoiseSVN cause service crashes. Oh, and doing anything slightly unusual (say, using CrossCrypt to mount an image) is completely fucked up because the admin-class users...aren't really administrators. We now have this shiny new UAC "technology", which needs to be explicitly invoked to get privileges that were normal in XP, so any older apps that aren't specifically written for Vista will just fail with "access denied" or a similar error. You'd think that the API would be smart enough to put up the UAC prompt in a situation like that, but nah, they really wanted to screw developers and users as much as possible.

As far as I can recall, MS did endeavor to document a bunch of their interfaces. The response was that it was insufficient. MS tried to find out how it was insufficient, and was told that it was MS's responsibility to figure that out.

Bullshit. MS was given clear instructions. They need sufficient documentation so that competitors can re-implement these protocols in their own servers. It is simple and clearly defined and instead of complying MS published a bunch of lies and tried to both sway public opinion and provide the least possible info to satisfy the EU in the hopes that they could get away with something that was insufficient for their competitors in the server space.

MS does produce technical documentation for a whole slew of its products. Look at the API-level documentation that is on http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/. It's just not the most obvious documentation. Is it usable? For the most part. Does it cover every single idiosyncracy? No.

They do not publish reasonable documentation on the protocols as they themselves have admitted and the US courts have also judged them in noncompliance (although due to their lobbying we don't punish them). If they're going to use secret broken versions of existing standards, they can't use them in both their client and server. This is simple and obvious if you read the law. MS knew it. They still know it. They're just delaying the fines as long as possible.

Providing MS with an EIGHT DAY deadline is just absurd.

Again I call bullshit. This is how long they have to stop breaking the law in this one way. They knew the law in the first place. Zero days before a fine is levied is sufficient in my opinion. Listen Mr. Murderer, I know 8 days isn't a lot of time, but we need you to stop killing people within that time frame. I know it's hard to change, but that's just the way it is. Besides, they have 8 days till the fines kick in. They've had two years since they were officially convicted of the crime already. That is way, way, way too long. Every day weakens competition and hurts both consumers and the industry.

Anyone who has ever written technical API documentation will probably be inclined to agree that trying to compress even a three month timeline into 8 days will be well nigh impossible.

APIs? They have had 2 years to document communication protocols, not APIs. The protocols were mostly copied from existing open standards in the first place. Either you've bought into their propaganda beyond all reason or you're being paid to spread this FUD.

The commissioner's demand is effectively a demand for money, not for documentation; I can't see any way ANY company, no matter their motives, would be able to meet the deadline.

Good. Hopefully it will go beyond that. MS has built their business plan around breaking the law and paying off politicians and lawsuits. This is unacceptable. They should be progressively fined higher and higher amounts until breaking the law is no longer profitable for them and then they should be fined even more so that other companies understand such practices are not acceptable. If the US was not run by corrupt scumbags MS would have been broken up long ago and this would not be a problem. For political reasons the EU cannot order MS to break up, but they sure as hell should be fining them into oblivion until they obey they law.

Unfortunately implementing EFI requires you to license Microsoft's FAT filesystem patent which was upheld at the beginning of this year by the PTO.

I added a dispassionate (NPV) comment about this to the EFI page in the Wikipedia but had it deleted. A pity.

SMB/CIFS, MAPI, Microsoft DNS, RPC over HTTP, Office APIs, and so on... The list is here.

As far as I can recall, MS did endeavor to document a bunch of their interfaces. The response was that it was insufficient. MS tried to find out how it was insufficient, and was told that it was MS's responsibility to figure that out.

MS does produce technical documentation for a whole slew of its products. Look at the API-level documentation that is on http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/. It's just not the most obvious documentation. Is it usable? For the most part. Does it cover every single idiosyncracy? No.

MS did make a good faith effort previously, and the only response they got was a thumbs down with no guidance on what to do differently. I don't really think such a risky prospect as actually having SECRET APIs would have been permitted by the company's legal department after the antitrust mess. Rather, I just don't think the documentation is that good. An uncommented header file would be documentation; it just wouldn't meet the needs of the EU regulators.

Providing MS with an EIGHT DAY deadline is just absurd. Even if everyone qualified as a technical writer was thrown at the problem, there still needs to an information flow, probably from some people who are on vacation for a month now that Vista has shipped. There's only so much that can be written at a time, and only so much that can be documented in any period of time. Add in the time for editing, and legal review, and to verify completion... eight days? It's just an excuse to charge Microsoft with more money. Even a month would be more of an indication that they expected Microsoft to be able to comply. Given that up until this point Microsoft was working at having it done next July, the scheduling cannot be compressed by 8 months.

Had the commissioner provided a more reasonable deadline, Microsoft could be cast into a harsh light by this ruling, as the request already existed, and the Commissioner just disagreed with the amount of time they were claiming to need. Microsoft has tried to provide documentation before, and was told it was insufficient -- doubtless this time they wanted to avoid this charge.

Anyone who has ever written technical API documentation will probably be inclined to agree that trying to compress even a three month timeline into 8 days will be well nigh impossible. The commissioner's demand is effectively a demand for money, not for documentation; I can't see any way ANY company, no matter their motives, would be able to meet the deadline.

Just know that while your 16 bit apps will run under Vista, but this is only true for the 32bit version of Vista, as your programs will always fail to run in the 64bit version...

Their Virtual PC home page says: "Microsoft will also offer the free download of Virtual PC 2007, with support for Windows Vista, available in 2007." Their Vista Team Blog page about Virtual PC 2007 Beta says: "For those not familiar with Virtual PC, it also works the other way around--you can run Windows XP or an earlier OS on Windows Vista. This can be helpful if you have an older application that does not work well in Windows Vista."

So... Is the quad core considered 4 processors? or just one?
I ask because the Vista EULA says:

2. INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device (physical hardware system). That device is the "licensed device." A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.

a. Licensed Device. You may install one copy of the software on the licensed device. You may use the software on up to two processors on that device at one time.

That page's primary purpose is to clarify their policy for server software (probably in response to Oracle defining a "processor" as a core), but they also mention Windows XP:

Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor.

If Microsoft changed their definition of "a processor" for Windows Vista, believe me, we would have heard all about it by now. Slashdot would have been slashdotted by all the comments.

Vista will solve that little "problem"

So... Is the quad core considered 4 processors? or just one?
I ask because the Vista EULA says:

2. INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device (physical hardware system). That device is the "licensed device." A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.

a. Licensed Device. You may install one copy of the software on the licensed device. You may use the software on up to two processors on that device at one time. Except as provided in the Storage and Network Use (Ultimate edition) sections below, you may not use the software on any other device.

From http://download.microsoft.com/documents/useterms/W indows%20Vista_Ultimate_English_36d0fe99-75e4-4875 -8153-889cf5105718.pdf
(Emphasis added by me.)

Watch a certain Redmond, WA company go out and purchase about fifty of these for their corporate HQ.

If you're strolling the campus and your RFID tag goes on the blink... well, let's say your tenure is up.

EM-BRACE... EX-TEND... EX-TAAH-MIII-NAAAAAAAAAATE!

I do not take credit for this tag; it was one someone else's sig and I forget who. Brilliant!

So I'll have no problem with my legacy 64-bit applications, then?

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/winntas/t ips/winntmag/dukalph1.mspx?mfr=true

Remember, SUN makes money on hardware.
Novell and Microsoft do not.

Remember, SUN makes money on hardware.
Novell and Microsoft do not.

whatever MS's "Photoshop Killer" is

Wait wait, lemme guess. Is it Paint?

What is amusing is that in answering the question, he refuses to use the word 'free' or anything close to it.

Patents and Intellectual Property: The parties have agreed to a broad covenant not to sue with respect to all past patent infringement claims they may have against each other. The agreement also provides for potential future extensions of this type of covenant. The two companies have also agreed to embark on negotiations for a patent cross-license agreement between them.

I win!

You are right, but 95 had 1.0 available for it (was not included in distribution) until IE3.0 came out. Version 2 was for Apple. And yes I know it was a joke, as I hope you regard my post(s)

If you really want more: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryIE.mspx

Planned obsolescence.

XP will be supported fully for 2 years after the release of Vista, and will get extended support for 5 years after that. Companies can get XP security updates until 2014.

You're right. Windows XP will be available for more than a few months afterward.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default .mspx

XP will be available for 12 months following Vista's "general availability." That date is currently set as 30 January 2007, so XP will be available for shipment until at least 30 January 2008.

Considering applications, I would say both systems are pretty much equivalent these days, I can't think of any application in either Linux or Windows that doesn't have an equivalent in the other system.

Except perhaps the thousands of industry-specific programs that are written for Win32 because "that's what everyone has". Tool and mold shops have automation and cutter-path software that's virtually guaranteed to be Win32 as Irix and Sun have fallen out of popularity due to cost. Insurance companies have quoting and client-management packages that are written for Win32. Banks. Manufacturing. Accounting. Damned-near every industry seems to have at least one must-have application that's Win32 only. Business runs on Win32.

Try to automate any task in Windows, it's a real PITA. Programmers often end doing things through kludges like Excel macros for the lack of a good text-based interface. For instance, let's say you were sent a project that has dozens of directories with thousands of files in it. Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows? In VMS that would be a piece of cake, in a Unix system it's more complicated, for i in *.jpeg; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/jpeg$/jpg/ - ` ; done or something like that would do it, but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.

Sadly, the "for" operator has existed in the Win32 shell since WinNT 4.0 which was released July 29th, 1996 according to this cute Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT Further, it's time to mention that part of the massive staying power of Win32 is that availability of free/cheap utilities to fill pretty much every gap in the as-shipped OS is stunning. Not happy with the Win32 shell? Fine. Throw Kixtart into the mix. http://www.kixtart.org/ Don't like Kixtart? Okay, try 4NT which has a massive scripting language built in. http://www.jpsoft.com/ Want to automate GUI functions? Okay. AutoIT. http://www.autoitscript.com/
But again there are two points here: first, your experience with Win32 seems to be a decade misinformed and two, almost without fail where there's a lack in the Win32 product, there's a cheap or free way to satisfy it. Or, more likely, three or four ways.

Ironically, ease of installation, which is often cited by XP users as an advantage of Windows over Linux, seems to be one of the areas where Linux shines. I have created a standard system configuration script with twenty or so functions, one for each type of application.

Once again a member of the pro-Linux crowd misses the point. Joe Average doesn't even remotely WANT to know how to "create a standard system configuration script". They don't want to know about apt-get or package files. The OS install is the OS install, and Win32's installer only asks a couple of questions, which almost always work if the user accepts defaults. Applications? Virtually always "insert the CD and accept defaults". Grandma can manage that, and she's had two strokes and is suffering from Alzheimer's as well as too much LSD in her earlier years. It doesn't matter at all that us geeks can write install scripts and create pre-built images. Home users and business users don't care. IT managers may, but IT managers have access to deployment packages and desktop management packages such as MOM http://www.microsoft.com/mom/default.mspx.
If Linux wants the desktop, Linux has absolutely got to do things automatically for the user. "Ooops, found a new printer you plugged in... want me to search the Internet for a driver? Okay, found one. Hey lady, you can just print now."

I think being an open and free system is an advantage in that people make it evolve towards what the users prefer, rather than

This story is overflowing with FUD and misrepresentation. A routine fact-check will demonstrate this. Let's pull this apart:

According to Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president of the Taiwan-based company, the issue is simply that the basic home edition of Vista, Home Basic, which is available for preorder on Amazon.co.uk for 154.99 pounds ($293), is so basic that users will be forced to move to Vista Home Premium, at 189.99 pounds ($359).

First of all, they got the prices of Vista wrong: Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is 185 GBP; Vista Home Premium is 224 GBP.

Second, price-conversion. Everybody knows that you don't take the street price of a product in British pounds, run it through xe.com, and come out with the street price in USD. Microsoft's MSRP on Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is $199 USD, -not- $293 as given in the article. Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $239 USD. Note that the MSRP on XP Home Edition is $199 USD, the same as Vista Home Basic.

Third, Microsoft has never sold an edition of Windows with the Media Center included on the retail market, so in a way there isn't really any good point of comparison.... of -course- it's going to be more expensive than XP Home.

"The new (Vista) experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won't feel it at all," Wong told PC Pro magazine. "There's no (Aero) graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."

Yeah well, guess what? some people just don't want or need that stuff. Actually, I'd hazard a guess and say that the vast majority of users don't want or need Media Center functionality or a remote control. That's not what's worth harping on about. Home Premium does have a lot of neat things in it, especially for mobile users, media centers, tablet PC owners, etc., but it's useless for a lot of people who just use their computer to get stuff done.

Wong also said that the manufacturer's license for Vista Home Premium is 10 percent more expensive than for XP Home.

It's also got far more functionality (Media Center, new mobility features, XBox 360 connectivity, Tablet PC features) than XP Home Edition or Vista Home Basic Edition, the latter of which Acer is refusing to sell to its customers.

"We have to pay more but users are not going to pay more," Wong said. This would mean an increase in the cost to PC manufacturers of 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Wong, in a business where the profit margin is around 5 percent or less.

Quit your bitching, Mr. Wong. If the price of Windows is going up by 10% because you are choosing to force a higher edition on your customers, you pass that price increase on to users... it's not your job as a company to absorb price increases from Microsoft.

At the top of the Vista lineup is the Ultimate Edition, which can be preordered for 325 pounds ($614) and, again, is significantly more expensive than the XP operating system it replaces.

Ultimate Edition is covers a lot more ground than XP Professional. The thing comes with Media Center, twice as many games (good ones, too, like Chess and Majongg), backup software that doesn't suck, a bunch of extra software and add-ons analogous to the XP Plus! Pack, and even a friggin' UNIX stack to boot -- and that's not even going into

This story is overflowing with FUD and misrepresentation. A routine fact-check will demonstrate this. Let's pull this apart:

According to Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president of the Taiwan-based company, the issue is simply that the basic home edition of Vista, Home Basic, which is available for preorder on Amazon.co.uk for 154.99 pounds ($293), is so basic that users will be forced to move to Vista Home Premium, at 189.99 pounds ($359).

First of all, they got the prices of Vista wrong: Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is 185 GBP; Vista Home Premium is 224 GBP.

Second, price-conversion. Everybody knows that you don't take the street price of a product in British pounds, run it through xe.com, and come out with the street price in USD. Microsoft's MSRP on Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is $199 USD, -not- $293 as given in the article. Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $239 USD. Note that the MSRP on XP Home Edition is $199 USD, the same as Vista Home Basic.

Third, Microsoft has never sold an edition of Windows with the Media Center included on the retail market, so in a way there isn't really any good point of comparison.... of -course- it's going to be more expensive than XP Home.

"The new (Vista) experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won't feel it at all," Wong told PC Pro magazine. "There's no (Aero) graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."

Yeah well, guess what? some people just don't want or need that stuff. Actually, I'd hazard a guess and say that the vast majority of users don't want or need Media Center functionality or a remote control. That's not what's worth harping on about. Home Premium does have a lot of neat things in it, especially for mobile users, media centers, tablet PC owners, etc., but it's useless for a lot of people who just use their computer to get stuff done.

Wong also said that the manufacturer's license for Vista Home Premium is 10 percent more expensive than for XP Home.

It's also got far more functionality (Media Center, new mobility features, XBox 360 connectivity, Tablet PC features) than XP Home Edition or Vista Home Basic Edition, the latter of which Acer is refusing to sell to its customers.

"We have to pay more but users are not going to pay more," Wong said. This would mean an increase in the cost to PC manufacturers of 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Wong, in a business where the profit margin is around 5 percent or less.

Quit your bitching, Mr. Wong. If the price of Windows is going up by 10% because you are choosing to force a higher edition on your customers, you pass that price increase on to users... it's not your job as a company to absorb price increases from Microsoft.

At the top of the Vista lineup is the Ultimate Edition, which can be preordered for 325 pounds ($614) and, again, is significantly more expensive than the XP operating system it replaces.

Ultimate Edition is covers a lot more ground than XP Professional. The thing comes with Media Center, twice as many games (good ones, too, like Chess and Majongg), backup software that doesn't suck, a bunch of extra software and add-ons analogous to the XP Plus! Pack, and even a friggin' UNIX stack to boot -- and that's not even going into

Fingerprint Reader should not be used for protecting sensitive data such as financial information or for accessing corporate networks.

This is only a device of convenience, and Microsoft markets Digital Persona technology as nothing more than something to help you forget passwords.

Most things in Vista are not really worth it with a couple of exceptions.

1) Security. Vista has improved security, and Micro$oft will not update XP to the same level as Vista to ensure that people have a reason to switch. IMHO that's what happened with the upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP.

2) Group Profiles. If you are a M$ shop you will be using Group Profiles to control XP. Vista has new setting you can play with including the Power Settings, blocking Device Installations (including USB drives) and a vastly improved "Network Location Awareness" which takes into account VPN clients. See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/libr ary/gpol/a8366c42-6373-48cd-9d11-2510580e4817.mspx ?mfr=true for more.

If you don't use GPO's, or you really care don't about the security improvements, then I don't think it's worth upgrading.

No, I'm not an M$ fanboy... I just make my money supporting their mess-ups!

• A unified online profile that contains all of your stats and setting across all of your games
• The ability to access and modify that profile online bringing your console presence to the PC
• An online feedback system that links to your unified profile that allows you to avoid or prefer players allowing you to keep playing others you enjoy playing with and avoid others you don't enjoy playing with
• The ability to access a set of controls with the touch of a button at any time allowing you to adjust various console and profile settings, adjust custom soundtracks, send and receive messages, view information about your profile and the profiles of the gamers you're playing against, etc.
• The ability to set your preferred controls... axis inversion etc. and have it be used for every game
• The "TrueSkill" skill raking algorithm for match making online with people at your skill level
• "Custom Soundtracks" that allow you to easily replace the in-game music with music from from a storage device, an iPod, or a networked computer
• Achievements which add replay value to games by suggesting goals and setting challenges that a gamer might not otherwise attempt
• Gamerscore derived from achievement that creates a sort of Meta-game that encompasses all games on their console
• The Xbox Live Arcade (which was started with the Xbox 1) for downloadable games and content delivery directly to the console

Novell agreed 2 years ago to drop anti-trust claims against MS related to Netware: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/nov0 4/11-08novellpr.mspx

Note, however, that WordPerfect was not included in that agreement. And it's not part of this new deal either. So, yes, it's still on.

One thing that MS gets out of the current deal is a percentage of the revenue from sales of Suse Linux: http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/061102/microsoft_novell_ba llmer.html?.v=3
"Novell will also make royalty payments to Microsoft based on a percentage of its revenue from open-source products. Neither company disclosed any financial figures."

Yes, that's right. When you buy Suse Linux, part of your money will go to Microsoft. How much? Novell ain't saying.

I wasn't talking about HD-DVD players, I was talking about WMVHD-DVD players... which are completely different. They use normal DVDs and play these discs. It's essentially a derivative of the same codec being used on both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs, considering Sony and Toshiba have argued the price is due to the processors required for decoding I'm calling BS because the players that can decode that same content but on a regular DVD are less then half the price of the cheapest blue laster player... Blue Diodes aren't that expensive.

Way superior image quality and way easier to controll.

Basically you take a existing texture and generate as much new texture as you like. On the GPU. With 80 fps. http://research.microsoft.com/~hoppe/apptexsyn.pdf

We used new source automation tools that removes any potential buffer overflow attacks.

News articles detailing Windows XP buffer overflow attacks are abundant.

Pardon me if I'm wrong, but there are some costs of fiber that should be considered.

You have to dig holes to put it in.

You have to have people look after the bits around it.

You have to have electronics and opto-electronics associated with it to use it.

You have to pump signals down it (which means power).

I wonder, have other people thought if the pipes are going to be a bigger obstacle to distributed computing than the processors. I know that Jim Grey seems to have thought this way in the past. http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/papers/Petasca le%20computational%20systems.doc

He seems to be a smart fellow, perhaps he has a point?

NB: posting as AC to prevent whoring

I've been working in the small shop/repair business for over 5 years, and its a weekly experience to get a machine in with thousands of trojans, viruses and spy apps. In cases where a re-install may not be desirable or feasable, here's a list of the tools we use to find, isolate and eradicate hostile software.

Disclaimer: I do not work for any of these companies, nor am I been paid anything by them. I just find that these tools work. Your mileage may vary.

1: Antivirus

As most of our customers are home users, we can recomend Grisoft's AVG as the most capable and reasonably priced ':)' antivirus out there. It does a pretty good job, and the installers are kept up to date so you don't have to fudge around with d'loading on a broken box.

AVG Free

2: Anti-Spyware

No-brainer. The best two in the business. Spybot and Ad-Aware. They don't get everything, but they both do a darn good job, and can even set themselves up to run on reboot before some of the uglies get going. We leave them on the system so we can attempt to train the user towards a safer future.

Ad-Aware Personal
SpyBot S&D

3: Process Viewers

Now this gets a little harder. Neither of these tools will do the job automatically, but with care, can show you the files and processes that are the center of these little problems. Personally, I like MS/Sysinternals Process Explorer, my boss prefers PrcView. As an interesting note: You'll occasionally find a hostile that can stop certain known process viewers from starting up. Get the old 95/98 version of PrcView. They always seem to miss that one. Recording the file name of the app, rebooting to the recovery console, and going in to hand delete the app works 98% of the time.

PrcView
Process Explorer

Now, the easy route....

Get yourself one of these. USB HDD Adapter Kit from your favourite retailer, and just hook the offending HDD up to a good machine with a up to date anti-virus scanner. You will have some broken startup and registry entries left over, but they're pretty simple in comparision.

I'd normally say, Enjoy! at this juncture. But you probably won't.

Best of Luck

kgs

There's still raging debate about the effectiveness of SPF in the war on SPAM.

While I agree that it will help prevent forgery of your own domain, it doesn't really prevent the spammers from setting up SPF records for their domains with really loose rules, thus circumventing the "I know who sent this" part of SPF.

And, not to be too negative, SPF still doesn't have a good solution for secondary delivery (BackupMX, email forwarders, etc).

If you're still positive on the technology, you might want to consider adopting Sender ID. Despite being a Microsoft-pushed tech, it does a "little bit more" in verifying both the "envelope from" and the "friendly from" are from a permitted domain. And, for waht it is worth, Microsoft recently put it under the Open Specification Promise.

One thing we can certainly all agree on: we'd like to see a permanent solution for the spam menace. >8(