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There is no obvious way to shrink the image data itself - file sizes grow huge with just a few small 1" square images. Powerpoint is an even bigger offender here.

Wow, that is plain bullshit. Easy image resizing and cropping is something that has turned me down about OpenOffice. for Which Microsoft Office has convenient toolbar icons.

Those are part of the "small details" that still make OpenOffice unconfortable for me. And as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

There is no obvious way to shrink the image data itself - file sizes grow huge with just a few small 1" square images. Powerpoint is an even bigger offender here.

Wow, that is plain bullshit. Easy image resizing and cropping is something that has turned me down about OpenOffice. for Which Microsoft Office has convenient toolbar icons.

Those are part of the "small details" that still make OpenOffice unconfortable for me. And as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

The amount of dependencies that would need to be ported before porting office itself would be prohibitive.

Exactly. That's also the reason why there will never be a port to Mac OSX either.

I can't remember the name of the competing technology, but this has been around for /years/: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/ weft3/ - Adobe has something similar, too.

Java and C# will never be suitable for production, real-time 3D games because of their asynchronous garbage collection and runtime argument verification.

Microsoft thinks different and provides XNA. Now I don't expect the next Doom or Halo3 to use Java or C#, but for a lot of games its really a non-issue these days, computers are fast enough and the most grunt work is done by the GPU anyway, which doesn't care if the rest of the programm is written in Java or C# or hand optimized assembler. There is of course still a speed benefit of C++, but its getting smaller and smaller and its certainly at a point where the success of a game will no longer depend on it.

Impi - Diplomatic Corp, South Africa

The ongoing war against PHP by the GNAA has finally produced results that are a step in the right direction. GNAA have been aggressively involved in a campaign to educate the public at large about the tremendous control that MOSSAD has over the development of PHP and the subsequent clandestine information gathering technology that has been implemented by Jewish developers.

The co-founders of Zend, the PHP Company, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans are known Israeli MOSSAD agents; they were recruited by MOSSAD during their formative years at the Israel Institute of Technology.

On Friday, 28 July 2006, Jani Taskinen, aka _sniper_ resigned from the PHP development team. FYI: I don't care at all what anybody thinks about me. I'm going to be openly anti-Israel from now on. This was the last straw for me. Fuck you Jews. I will also quit this project. As long as it's backed by some Israel company, I don't want to have anything to do with it. Good bye.

This was a direct result of the ongoing war against Hezbollah which has been backed by the USA and primarily been driven by the information gathering technologies embedded in PHP by Zend.

Several GNAA members who were also part of the PHP development team have also resigned in solidarity with Jani Taskinen.

timecop, the glorious president of the GNAA has reacted in the wake of these events by extending an invitation of honorary lifetime GNAA membership to _sniper_, for having courage in his convictions.

GNAA official website, located at http://www.gnaa.us/ is powered by Microsoft Internet Information Services and ASP.NET, running on INTEL hardware.

About Zend

Zend is an Israeli funded body that is controlled by MOSSAD.

About PHP

Crap.

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowledge of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE.

Well if LCD are so great then why do you need clear type? http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tune r/Step1.aspx

I have both plasma, LCD both are 32 inchs both are sony. The plasma TV has been repaired twice. Cold solder joints each time. Personally I think my plasma has much better performance. It's hard to really explain why I like my plasma even though its reliability sucks. As for CRTs there true resolution is much better than any LCD (non military). Plus black is black with a CRT and they can change colors/images almost instantly at all temperatures. Most LCD lag just a little another thing that difficult to explain unless you have two very fast moving images. LCDs also tend to make color contrast higher than they where originally intended.

So for best performance PLASMA clearly win

So for best reliability CRTs clearly Win

So for best overall performance maybe its LCD or maybe its Plasma but saying their going to be a clear winner is simply wrong. Both can win

Impi - Diplomatic Corp, South Africa

The ongoing war against PHP by the GNAA has finally produced results that are a step in the right direction. GNAA have been aggressively involved in a campaign to educate the public at large about the tremendous control that MOSSAD has over the development of PHP and the subsequent clandestine information gathering technology that has been implemented by Jewish developers.

The co-founders of Zend, the PHP Company, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans are known Israeli MOSSAD agents; they were recruited by MOSSAD during their formative years at the Israel Institute of Technology.

On Friday, 28 July 2006, Jani Taskinen, aka _sniper_ resigned from the PHP development team. FYI: I don't care at all what anybody thinks about me. I'm going to be openly anti-Israel from now on. This was the last straw for me. Fuck you Jews. I will also quit this project. As long as it's backed by some Israel company, I don't want to have anything to do with it. Good bye.

This was a direct result of the ongoing war against Hezbollah which has been backed by the USA and primarily been driven by the information gathering technologies embedded in PHP by Zend.

Several GNAA members who were also part of the PHP development team have also resigned in solidarity with Jani Taskinen.

timecop, the glorious president of the GNAA has reacted in the wake of these events by extending an invitation of honorary lifetime GNAA membership to _sniper_, for having courage in his convictions.

GNAA official website, located at http://www.gnaa.us/ is powered by Microsoft Internet Information Services and ASP.NET, running on INTEL hardware.

About Zend

Zend is an Israeli funded body that is controlled by MOSSAD.

About PHP

Crap.

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your know

check the blog's title for a laugh from the author's mental age by the way

Does Gmail support my browser? Gmail is accessible at http://mail.google.com/ wherever you have access to the Internet via a PC, Linux, or Macintosh (Mac) computer with one of the following fully supported browsers:

• IE 5.5+ (download: Windows)
• Netscape 7.1+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
• Mozilla 1.4+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
• Firefox 0.8+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
• Safari 1.3+ (download: Mac)

If you access Gmail with a browser different from those listed above, you'll be automatically directed to the http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answe r=15046">basic HTML view of Gmail. Basic HTML view works with the following browsers, as well as many others:

• IE 4.0+
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• Opera 6.03+

Well, I believe that Microsoft's Share Point initiative is something similar to what Google might be about to unleash. The only difference would be that Microsoft's costs more.

Actually, Sharepoint Sevices costs nothing, apart from the base Server2003 licensing. Sharepoint Portal, OTOH, does dig into your pocket. But I imagine most small/medium companies could get by using just the Services portion.

Now shipping as part of Windows Server 2003 R2 or available for download at no additional charge, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology in Windows Server 2003 is an integrated portfolio of blah de blah And Sharepoint/Office2003/2007 is FAR more integrated than what Google has produced so far. Doc managemnent, collaboration, customization.

It only has tilt functionality, which is just half of the Wiimote's back of tricks. It's much more like the PSWiiStyle Pro controller for PS3 than the Wii's remote controller.

For the record the product you are referring to is the Microsoft Sidewinder Freestyle Pro.

Perhaps the GP is talking about the Microsoft XWand, though I don't know that they were showing any of that stuff off as far back as 2000 or 2001. It also doesn't really work like the Wiimote, but does have some motion sensing capabilities.

The real problem with flash drives is that you need to unmount them before you unplug them. Many, many people don't. And sometimes their data gets corrupted.

Thats not technically true. It's entirely possible to mount the drives as synchronous, so that writes are not buffered. Generally removing drives before requesting a buffer flush shouldn't be a problem unless you're copying a lot of information onto the drive. I suspect the same is true of your campus computer systems. In contrast most Linux distros I've seen prefer to mount drives async (turn on buffering) for the performance benefits on large writes. I've never seen data loss from surprise removal on Windows XP, and in fact the only time I've lost data is attempting to use the drive on a Mac OS 9's USB port that couldn't source the nessecary milliamps. The likelyhood of losing data from surprise removal in Windows seems pretty low unless your administrators have done something silly to the configurations.

MICROSOFT OR ANY OF ITS EMPLOYEES DO NOT ACCEPT OR CONSIDER UNSOLICITED IDEAS, INCLUDING IDEAS FOR NEW ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS, NEW PROMOTIONS, NEW PRODUCTS OR TECHNOLOGIES, PROCESSES, MATERIALS, MARKETING PLANS OR NEW PRODUCT NAMES. ... PLEASE DO NOT SEND YOUR UNSOLICITED IDEAS TO MICROSOFT OR ANYONE AT MICROSOFT.

I'm sure Microsoft has received a lot of sudden inspiration over the years..

Computer scientists should just do things right the first time instead of producing crap (see this site for an example).

Its MS util included with kernel toys.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/downloads/conte nts/WUToys/W95KernelToy/Default.asp See key remap

Each version of the VM needs to be licensed as well... so you're basically adding at least the cost of an XP Pro license for each VM ... for each version of QuickBooks... plus you still need the license for quick books for each of the VM's. I don't think you can just say that you just need 5 seats, because in essence you are installing it on all the machines still...

If you wanted to make it only 5 seats... you would probably set up a terminal server with the software installed, but only allow 5 people at a time to log in (restrict it by seat). That way you can be sure that only 5 people are using the application at a time. You can even set up an RDP Session to just open up that specific program by setting the "Program" portion of the RDP session.

If you wanted to go really crazy you could even setup one server with multiple Virtual Server 2005 VM's... that were each Terminal Servers... each hosting one application =) And the cool part about using Virtual Server is that you can license your OS by Processor and then virtualize as many servers you want and still be in the legal right.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluat ion/news/bulletins/datacenterhighavail.mspx

So in essence you can have as many virtual servers as you want and only have to pay one time for the OS! (Unlike virtualizing Windows XP Pro where you'll have to pay for each VM)

So one server... multiple Virtual Servers... each hosting one version of your quickbooks... and able to limit to 5 seats per version of the software automatically... and using Terminal Server...

It is still using virtualization I guess... but it's at least not on the desktop level... and instead on the server level where you can centralize it.

Though I'm still wondering why your clients need so many versions of Quickbooks? Can they not standardize on one version? Should they start thinking about switching to something more enterprise like? (Perhaps AccPac?) Just a thought.

We use Terminal Server on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition... 3 Servers Network load balanced... handles over 100 users... We've also locked down the terminal server following these guidelines from Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinf o/overview/lockdown.mspx

Haven't had many problems at all... I definitely recommend it for users that only need stuff like Basic Office Suite... Email, Internet Browsing, and a few standard apps. (I work for a gov't agency so most of our employees just require MS Word, Excel and Outlook... on top of certain proprietary apps)

I still think from what was given in the summary a thin client solution is what he's describing... for the most part anyways... unless we hear something different.

Each version of the VM needs to be licensed as well... so you're basically adding at least the cost of an XP Pro license for each VM ... for each version of QuickBooks... plus you still need the license for quick books for each of the VM's. I don't think you can just say that you just need 5 seats, because in essence you are installing it on all the machines still...

If you wanted to make it only 5 seats... you would probably set up a terminal server with the software installed, but only allow 5 people at a time to log in (restrict it by seat). That way you can be sure that only 5 people are using the application at a time. You can even set up an RDP Session to just open up that specific program by setting the "Program" portion of the RDP session.

If you wanted to go really crazy you could even setup one server with multiple Virtual Server 2005 VM's... that were each Terminal Servers... each hosting one application =) And the cool part about using Virtual Server is that you can license your OS by Processor and then virtualize as many servers you want and still be in the legal right.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluat ion/news/bulletins/datacenterhighavail.mspx

So in essence you can have as many virtual servers as you want and only have to pay one time for the OS! (Unlike virtualizing Windows XP Pro where you'll have to pay for each VM)

So one server... multiple Virtual Servers... each hosting one version of your quickbooks... and able to limit to 5 seats per version of the software automatically... and using Terminal Server...

It is still using virtualization I guess... but it's at least not on the desktop level... and instead on the server level where you can centralize it.

Though I'm still wondering why your clients need so many versions of Quickbooks? Can they not standardize on one version? Should they start thinking about switching to something more enterprise like? (Perhaps AccPac?) Just a thought.

We use Terminal Server on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition... 3 Servers Network load balanced... handles over 100 users... We've also locked down the terminal server following these guidelines from Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinf o/overview/lockdown.mspx

Haven't had many problems at all... I definitely recommend it for users that only need stuff like Basic Office Suite... Email, Internet Browsing, and a few standard apps. (I work for a gov't agency so most of our employees just require MS Word, Excel and Outlook... on top of certain proprietary apps)

I still think from what was given in the summary a thin client solution is what he's describing... for the most part anyways... unless we hear something different.

I personally think your existing setup is was not well thought out and planned and you are now looking for a bandaid.

I guess your HAL problems are the major issue. You CAN overcome over 95% of those issues with the MS deployment configuration tools and ghosting (here and here is a start). It takes some engineering commitment to get that up and going but once the framewrok is on place, the minisetup should not be a problem across different hardware. I realy do think it is worth the inital time and effort for something like this.

Considering my above statements..
I have worked at many places and the ones with good backend engineering are much better off in the long run. I am not trying to knock anyone down here but honestly, if your facility is run by tier technicians, you get what you have now. Imagine going through an upgrade or service pack release? Some companies can perfrom those on 500 PCs in a single night without ever actually visting a PC. Some speand weeks doing one at a time. Unfortunatly, the later of the two is the nature of the business when "support" is contracted out. Someone doing engineering is no where to be found. The tools are freely available from MS and third parties to make all of your various PCs pretty much act as one.

I personally think your existing setup is was not well thought out and planned and you are now looking for a bandaid.

I guess your HAL problems are the major issue. You CAN overcome over 95% of those issues with the MS deployment configuration tools and ghosting (here and here is a start). It takes some engineering commitment to get that up and going but once the framewrok is on place, the minisetup should not be a problem across different hardware. I realy do think it is worth the inital time and effort for something like this.

Considering my above statements..
I have worked at many places and the ones with good backend engineering are much better off in the long run. I am not trying to knock anyone down here but honestly, if your facility is run by tier technicians, you get what you have now. Imagine going through an upgrade or service pack release? Some companies can perfrom those on 500 PCs in a single night without ever actually visting a PC. Some speand weeks doing one at a time. Unfortunatly, the later of the two is the nature of the business when "support" is contracted out. Someone doing engineering is no where to be found. The tools are freely available from MS and third parties to make all of your various PCs pretty much act as one.

Maybe not. Rather than having several huge servers with a ton of RAM back in the server room, you could offload this work to the clients hardware.

VMWare offers a solution for this already, but I'm not sure I would jump into it just yet. In case you didn't know, Vista will handle the HAL issue with no problems (According to MS).

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/depl oy/depenhnc.mspx

you can get a few of them from this page:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/down load/AllDownloads.aspx?displang=en&qstechnology=

or the windows media player package also includes many/all of the codecs. altho you may need windows to extract the dlls from the setup.exe

So remap the key and quit whining.

In Linux under X:
http://www.columbia.edu/~djv/docs/keyremap.html

In windows:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.msp x
or http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/

Or, you could start jousting at windmills and try to change the entire industry. Whatever is easier for you...

Any major browser besides IE offers bookmark import right at the installation, and as an option inside the browser program as well.

Even IE offers this functionality. I just started it up and imported my Firefox shortcuts, no problem. Of course the only thing I use IE for is the MSDN Library since it uses ActiveX, and the non-ActiveX (Firefox-compatible) version sucks.

Apparently you didn't read the license agreement either.

"There is no "licensing agreement" regarding games you create. It's your source code, you own it. Microsoft will not (and cannot) claim rights to your code. Don't be so paranoid. We're not evil. Really. I promise :-)
Also, the proper forums are here (you linked to "XNA Build" which is part of the XNA Family, but not what this topic is about):

XNA Framework http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?Fo rumID=846&SiteID=1 [microsoft.com]
XNA Game Studio Express http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?Fo rumID=882&SiteID=1 [microsoft.com]
note: as of this posting, they're not live yet. they will be in about an hour

David "http://letskilldave.com/ [letskilldave.com]" Weller"

Apparently you didn't read the license agreement either.

"There is no "licensing agreement" regarding games you create. It's your source code, you own it. Microsoft will not (and cannot) claim rights to your code. Don't be so paranoid. We're not evil. Really. I promise :-)
Also, the proper forums are here (you linked to "XNA Build" which is part of the XNA Family, but not what this topic is about):

XNA Framework http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?Fo rumID=846&SiteID=1 [microsoft.com]
XNA Game Studio Express http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?Fo rumID=882&SiteID=1 [microsoft.com]
note: as of this posting, they're not live yet. they will be in about an hour

David "http://letskilldave.com/ [letskilldave.com]" Weller"

Actually, it does exactly this on my system. I used Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to remap this and some other buttons.

"Is this "open source" as in Microsoft's "shared source" projects, where it's totally not open source at all except in a PR sense?"

Microsoft also has REAL open source licenses that are free as in free-issimo.

because it actually isn't random ... all games use a common match making system to match you against players of equal caliber.

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx? id=1361

Yeah, you're right. Licensing an operating system is a losing business model. It'd never work.

This shouldn't really matter to Apple anyway. This will increase speculation about the OS on sites like /. and any publicity is good publicity. The mainstream media will probably not even care about this whatsoever. A quick glance at Google News shows that very few non-geeky news sources have picked up the story.

Yes I mean, even Microsoft is offering XNA for free (they even offer the sourcecode for a major game as example, MechCommander 2 that is, go figure) which hopefully will allow some homebrew.(And yes it needs Windows+Visual Studio hehe)
Rumours say it will be costing $US100 later on. (Individuals should be getting this for free...)
So for Sony why not following the move ?
It would be nice to try out some stuff from people like gaming and demoscene.
Wonder if it would be possible to output some impressive 4KB stuff like this intro on a PS3. Prolly not.
They should find a solution to allow homebrew but still being able to protect game companies.
The PSP example is quite amazing, hundreds of homebrew applications/games/whatsoever and Sony keep protecting it on each update instead thinking about a method as above.
TBH I think PS3 will be a flop, late release, high-priced, let's wait and see.

Sorry, but what you say is simply not true.

    The product IS faulty. As evidence, I present Microsoft's own "List of Bugs That Are Fixed in Windows 2000 Service Pack 4", at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327194/EN-US/

    The product /was/ defective, and after four separate repairs, it is almost certainly still defective. Consumer law entitles us to all those repairs under the original terms of purchase.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/

On the surface this looks like a great idea.. releasing the SDK so you can make your favorite single-player game on the XBox is great. But this seems overly restrictive... the dev tools are free, sure, but you can't do anything on an XBox 360 with them unless you pay $100.00 (which truthfully isn't that bad). The catch is that nobody *else* can do anything with your game unless they are also a subscriber. You can't distribute your game to anybody else any other way than through the developer subscriber network.

This is an interesting thing for Microsoft to do but by keeping it developer-only they're not making it compelling enough. First you have to pay a hundred bucks, second you don't have access to everything that makes XBox awesome, third barely anyone will be able to play it.

It's a good strategy to try and win people over to the XBox before the Wii comes along but I don't think they've gone quite far enough. But it's a step in the right direction!

Digging around a Windows hard disk for text files? You haven't grokked the Windows mindset. (Some might consider that a plus.) There's a GUI Event Viewer that lets you browse the logs. See How to view and manage event logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP. A similar viewer is available in all varieties of Windows NT and W2K.

In general, randomly browsing around a Windows filesystem won't tell you much, because most system file formats are binary, and system files are treated more like central repositories than documents, which means that they don't have file associations. You're better off randomly clicking around the GUI, if you insist on the trial and error approach, but you'll still miss a lot.

BTW, the only way I know about Windows is from a misspent pre-Linux youth. I'm posting this from a Debian box, honest.

According to http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?Pos tID=633584&SiteID=1, you're forced to use .NET, no C/C++ allowed. Now they're forcing the amateurs to use .NET, since the pros don't do it.

You mean like forcing you to code completely in C#? Ah well... maybe next time eh
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/

It will be an extended version of Visual C# 2005 express. That's right, it's all C#... sigh, ah well, guess I'll stick to my pc and visual c++
Here's the FAQ: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/

Also, the proper forums are here (you linked to "XNA Build" which is part of the XNA Family, but not what this topic is about):

• XNA Framework http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?Fo rumID=846&SiteID=1
• XNA Game Studio Express http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?Fo rumID=882&SiteID=1

note: as of this posting, they're not live yet. they will be in about an hour

David "http://letskilldave.com/" Weller

Also, the proper forums are here (you linked to "XNA Build" which is part of the XNA Family, but not what this topic is about):

• XNA Framework http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?Fo rumID=846&SiteID=1
• XNA Game Studio Express http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?Fo rumID=882&SiteID=1

note: as of this posting, they're not live yet. they will be in about an hour

David "http://letskilldave.com/" Weller

The XNA site they have a FAQ that doesn't really address my big question: If you create a game using XNA and distribute it to the community, who owns it? Are you forced into a licensing agreement? If so, is it one closer to the GPL or Microsoft's? This is very interesting because Microsoft may be claiming publishing rights to these games in the TOS for XNA.

So it could be a standard American Idol style:
1) trick contestants into signing away all rights they have to their work
2) let the community decide who is the best
3) publish their work and profit!

If you have preliminary questions about the XBox 360, you can find it on their forums.

The XNA site they have a FAQ that doesn't really address my big question: If you create a game using XNA and distribute it to the community, who owns it? Are you forced into a licensing agreement? If so, is it one closer to the GPL or Microsoft's? This is very interesting because Microsoft may be claiming publishing rights to these games in the TOS for XNA.

So it could be a standard American Idol style:
1) trick contestants into signing away all rights they have to their work
2) let the community decide who is the best
3) publish their work and profit!

If you have preliminary questions about the XBox 360, you can find it on their forums.

The XNA site they have a FAQ that doesn't really address my big question: If you create a game using XNA and distribute it to the community, who owns it? Are you forced into a licensing agreement? If so, is it one closer to the GPL or Microsoft's? This is very interesting because Microsoft may be claiming publishing rights to these games in the TOS for XNA.

So it could be a standard American Idol style:
1) trick contestants into signing away all rights they have to their work
2) let the community decide who is the best
3) publish their work and profit!

If you have preliminary questions about the XBox 360, you can find it on their forums.

What about the features for the OS they're planning to release in 2020 ?

Sure. Here: microsoft.com/windowsvista/features

A good way to check your computer or your Windows machines on your local network for basic security problems and patches is with the MS Baseline Security Analyzer. The download is free.

It's interesting to note that the Microsoft Security Bulletin does not disclose the component of the "Server Service" that is subject to the vulnerability. In particular, one cannot simply disable the relevant service. Actually, I don't even know whether their software is built to make such things possible. The reason I'm suspicious is because they recommend blocking certaing ports with a firewall rather than disabling the relevant component.

I'm completely unfamiliar with MS server software, but there seems to be a sharp contrast this bulletin with standard Unix practice where one can either edit inetd.conf and restrat the daemon (kill -HUP) or use rc.d start/stop scripts depending on the setup.

> The Windows 1.0 on both the TFA and your link show the desktop in COLOR!!!
> Windows 1.0 displayed 640 Pixels by 200(?) pixels in B&W on CGA and had no other modes.

Oh, so I guess Microsoft faked their color too, huh? Take a look at that product box with the PC color screen on it.

This is just not true at all. VC-1 is not on the level of MPEG-4 in the upcoming HD market, and most content providers are using H.264 (since it beats VC-1's quality and space). And H.264 has been on the rise over the web, catching up to WMV and Real.


In your context, I assume you believe you are correct.

However you should check out both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Codec requirements for High Definition. VC-1 is a REQUIREMENT, and VC-1 is WMV...

Also WMV/VC-1 has been doing full 1080p HD for SEVERAL years now, even before other formats were supporting it. Especially when you add in the 5.1/7.1 Audio that WMV/VC-1 can do.

Here are a couple of links to help your quest for information. Also remember T2-extreme edition released 'several' years ago, was HD content on a DVD, and it was only in WMV format, because that is the only 'standard' codec of the time that fully supported HD resolution and 7.1 Audio.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musi candvideo/hddvd/default.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musi candvideo/hdvideo/hdvideo.aspx

I don't care what 'movie studios' release their 'low quality - as in they are no HD' trailers in. This is as much 'marketing hype' and deals with Apple and Sony than any 'superior' format quality being offered.

WMV is designed to do 1080p and has been doing it before the MPEG4 standard was finalized. You can even watch 1080p content from the MS site that is 'several' years old if your computer is 'capable'.

Get it?

So now we can get back to the original topic, that WMV is VERY relevant in the upcoming HD markets, even if Mac zealots don't realize their new HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player is using WMV(VC-1) to play their HD Discs....