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Now that Windows Update and certain Windows downloads require you to validate your copy of Windows before accessing the services (the Windows Genuine program), people have of course started having troubles with invalid product keys, etc.

To help people sort out their Windows license problems, Microsoft have put online the Windows Genuine Advantage Talkback bulletin board, where Microsoft offers advice for people with license troubles.

An interesting utility that I found mentioned there on the bulletin board is Microsoft Genuine Advantage Diagnostic Tool, that shows lots of information about the license / product key of the current Windows installation.

Now that Windows Update and certain Windows downloads require you to validate your copy of Windows before accessing the services (the Windows Genuine program), people have of course started having troubles with invalid product keys, etc.

To help people sort out their Windows license problems, Microsoft have put online the Windows Genuine Advantage Talkback bulletin board, where Microsoft offers advice for people with license troubles.

An interesting utility that I found mentioned there on the bulletin board is Microsoft Genuine Advantage Diagnostic Tool, that shows lots of information about the license / product key of the current Windows installation.

That's a great idea, except for one thing. It's not any more legal than running the pirate version.

OEM copies may only be sold with a new PC. If they're not buying a new PC, installing an OEM copy is against the license agreement. Of course, most folks don't pay attention to that, but poster did say they were trying to be legal, not aiming for "almost, but not quite" legal.

You can't even transfer your OEM license from one machine to another. Again, nobody pays attention to that, but that doesn't change the fact that if you play by Microsoft's rules and you want to be legal and buy an add on version of XP, you'll be paying just about $300 for a full retail copy. If you paid much less than that, it's either a pirate, or an OEM, and you're still not legal.

Yes, the rules suck. If you don't like it, don't support microsoft.

You can change your product key.

and just use this tool

http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/9/c/e9c73 b60-bff1-4f03-b06f-d3cbe8f8d9f4/KeyUpdateTool.exe

enter in your new key, reboot and you are legit

I thought that Vista was going to ship with a system called Windows Filtering Platform, which, to my understanding, would let the firewalls filter packets without using ring 0 hacks.

Has this been scrapped along with WFS?

"Tenet 6. APIs. ...Going forward, Microsoft will ensure that all the interfaces within Windows called by any other Microsoft product, such as the Microsoft Office system or Windows Live(TM), will be disclosed for use by the developer community generally."
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/ windowsprinciples.mspx

I was bitten too. Got it fixed pretty quickly, but I'm still a bit angry about it. Try reinstalling the WGA notifications update, revalidating, and rebooting. Seems to work for a lot of people. If it doesn't, download and install the MGA diagnostics tool and see if it reports "Genuine". If it does, and you're getting the notifications, post the output to Microsoft's WGA forum. In my case I just had to revalidate and reboot.

I was bitten too. Got it fixed pretty quickly, but I'm still a bit angry about it. Try reinstalling the WGA notifications update, revalidating, and rebooting. Seems to work for a lot of people. If it doesn't, download and install the MGA diagnostics tool and see if it reports "Genuine". If it does, and you're getting the notifications, post the output to Microsoft's WGA forum. In my case I just had to revalidate and reboot.

I was bitten too. Got it fixed pretty quickly, but I'm still a bit angry about it. Try reinstalling the WGA notifications update, revalidating, and rebooting. Seems to work for a lot of people. If it doesn't, download and install the MGA diagnostics tool and see if it reports "Genuine". If it does, and you're getting the notifications, post the output to Microsoft's WGA forum. In my case I just had to revalidate and reboot.

A free (WGA retina scan needed) tool from Microsoft that can help with a family computer is Microsoft's Shared Computer Toolkit.

URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sharedaccess/de fault.mspx

This has similar functionality like DeepFreeze, is free, has a good amount of features like rollback-ing if the machine gets spyware infected (Note: you will need to repartition to be able to use this functionality.)

It also has a great number of tools for locking down users. It may not be all what you need, but its a start, and the price is right.

With the WGA program, Microsoft says a user who unknowingly purchases a counterfit version of Windows will receive a free copy of Windows XP, if they report the seller.

Details

Perhaps Mr. Thurrott should persue his copy.

They're mostly retarded though.

Anyway, Aaron Margosis has some informative comments on fixing non-admin bugs in this month's TechNet magazine. This was originally 3 entries in his "non-admin" blog but has been taken up to get it to a wider audience.

And yes, I hate to link to the great Satan, but sometimes some of those are actually useful (at least to those of us who do occasionally have to deal with Windoze crap)...

They're mostly retarded though.

Anyway, Aaron Margosis has some informative comments on fixing non-admin bugs in this month's TechNet magazine. This was originally 3 entries in his "non-admin" blog but has been taken up to get it to a wider audience.

And yes, I hate to link to the great Satan, but sometimes some of those are actually useful (at least to those of us who do occasionally have to deal with Windoze crap)...

Being largely self taught isn't going to work in your favour. I can deploy Exchange 2003 to a corporate network, but not in the most efficient way. A decent deployment can be painfully complicated.

This goes for all software, knowing how to do it from picking around on tutorials on the internet is going to get the job done, but not in the same way as somebody who has got the Exchange certification. My advice to you is to go to your local Microsoft certifier and get some basic sysadmin certification at the very least, and then move on to *nix.

Meh. Zango isn't that bad... if you're clever enough to only install it on a Virtual PC. There's some nice pr0nz viewable that way....

Microsoft should be the one contacting the main antivirus companies around to make sure that their products work without problems with the new version of Windows as soon as it hits the stores.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/kernel/64bitp atch_FAQ.mspx

From the FAQ:

[snip]
Q. Patch protection prevents my application or driver from running. What are my options?
A. Modify your application or driver to use only Microsoft-documented interfaces. If the functionality you want to enable is not supported with Microsoft-documented interfaces, then you cannot safely enable that functionality. There is no mechanism to selectively disable patch protection or "special-case" a given application to work around patch protection. If an application or driver patches the kernel, it generates a bug check and shuts down the system. Note that patch protection in the operating system might be extended in future releases or service packs, so using any undocumented mechanisms in your application or driver (even if they seem to work on released versions of Windows that support patch protection) might result in further incompatibilities in the future.

If your application or driver must perform a task that you believe cannot be accomplished without patching the kernel, contact Microsoft Customer Support Services or your Microsoft representative for help in finding a documented alternative.

If no documented alternative exists for the functionality that you want to implement, then the functionality will not be supported on any Windows operating system that includes patch protection support.
[/snip]

I wonder what percent of the BSOD minidumps that come back to Microsoft are caused by somebody patching something they didn't understand or because some internal API changed?

It is called "Designed for Windows" program. Yes, applications have to be signed. And yes, you have to send a copy to MS so they can verify if you follow guidelines when they get 1000s of core dumps from your application. Or complaints about spyware and crap.

http://www.microsoft.com/winlogo/default.mspx

Yes, it costs money because you have to buy a digical certificate from Verisign. And send the software on a CD to MS, so a postage stamp there too.

And yes, MS will probably start treating software from unknown vendors differently than those that have registered. But afterall, how can you blame them with all the spyware screensavers and other crap.

We already see digital signatures in Linux like Debian. Untrusted repositories get flagged as "WARNING!! Untrusted source. WARNING!!". Microsoft should be doing the same to protect its user base.

So how does this fit with Microsoft's 12 Windows Principles?

Oh hang on, nowhere in those principles does it mention anything about giving competitors open access to Windows systems. Maybe this one:

"Microsoft is committed to designing and licensing Windows (and all the parts of the Windows platform) on terms that create and preserve opportunities for application developers and Web site creators to build innovative products on the Windows platform -- including products that directly compete with Microsoft's own products."

Translation: We love products that compete with us, so long as they run on Windows, because it just means you're doing the R&D work for us. Hey, that's how we got to be so large, by taking ideas from other people, so why stop now?

Wake up from your dream. Here are some speech recognition papers from MS.

Typically has more papers in SIGGRAPH each year than any university.

MS Research is one of the only institutions investing serious effort into developing an operating system in a safe language. MS Research is also a very big player in the field of programming language research, and the maintainers of the GHC Haskell compiler. I'm a particular fan of their work on Software Transactional Memory.

I could go on, but any short list I could make of cool stuff MS Research has done wouldn't do justice to the amount of great stuff they've done. They are as involved in computer science research as any of the major CS-strong universities.

apparently the rock i'm under has more light than yours. Have you never heard of Micosoft Research? http://research.microsoft.com/ There is a lot of technology that comes from there, asshole.

That EC case is specifically about (formerly) private Windows network protocols, particularly ActiveDirectory, which were never intended to be a public API in the first place.

The real Windows API (Win32, .NET, COM, DirectX, etc) documentation is packaged as the MSDN Library, which is available for all to see. And the local version of the MSDN Library is now available for free download as well (it was formerly only available with Visual Studio, MSDN subscriptions, etc).

Microsoft dislikes BitTorrent. But MS has an avalanche.

Hey, that sounds like a cunning plan. In half a year increase beta download cost to $5. And say "Pay $5 to download now or upgrade to Vista and use Avalanche do download for free".

posted by ninjaz (1202) <====<

>>> This is actually a legit error.
>>> See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;321626
>>> I remember it from installing Linux on a DOS system some years back and markting the Linux partition active without having installed LILO on the boot block.

>> It may be a legit error, but the site in question does not do technical support. The help form is specifically for problems with the company's website.

>Thanks for the tip!

Seriously, how much did you pay on eBay for that four-digit UID? Be honest...

See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;321626

I remember it from installing Linux on a DOS system some years back and markting the Linux partition active without having installed LILO on the boot block.

I tell you, Bill is "retiring" from Microsoft but not from growing them larger. While is wife is off saving the worlds children, Bill will be brainwashing them with Windows and other Microsoft Software crack.

There was that deal with AMD the brought about that little anti-Linux box( forget the name ).

But then, then there was Flexgo ( http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/flexgo/default.mspx ) at WinHec and THAT should have been obvious to the press what was going on there.

He may not call it One Windows Laptop Per Child, it might not be called One Flexgo Per Child either but rest assured, Bill Gates is NOT RETIRING. Windows is being threatend by Linux and OSS and there's not way he or Balmer will rest until their job is done and there nothing but Windows. IMO.

LoB

Yes, but you have VisualStudio. That investment is a significant barrier to many...
No you don't, M$ does give away Visual Studio tools in fully functional and free Express versions like C# Express

Granted, that would not help you with connecting VB6 access applications to mySql ODBC source, but that kind of interoperability is a tall order on any platform.

BASF Research
Batelle
BBC Research & Development
General Electric Global Research

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Motorola Labs
Microsoft Research
HP Labs
IBM Research
Intel Research
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Philips Research
Corporate Research
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Toshiba Research Europa
Toyota Central R&D Labs
Viewpoints Research Institute

Nor is it the only "Changing the way that Mac features look" site out there.

Microsoft has tried to do this multiple times. Ever hear of Windows System File Protection?

Not that they've ever entirely succeeded, but the idea has been run through its paces a few times.

But new licensing is needed.

Nope. The GPL lets me use as many CPUs as I need. Or did you mean proprietary software?

Do they even make a quad-processor license for windows xp?

Microsoft software is licensed per socket.

Nonsense! There is nothing wrong linking linking as often as Wikipedia does

So when do we get the press release from Microsoft saying there goes the "Network Neighborhood"?

The press release was back in October 2005:

Vista... includes Network Center, the hub for managing networking in Windows Vista, Computers and Devices, which replaces My Network Places and Network Neighborhood from Windows XP

I must call BS on this. "When you run the tool from the Web site http://www.microsoft.com/ , the tool always displays a user interface (UI)." This method does not install anything like you stated but every other method does. Except where noted, the information in this section applies to all the ways that you can download and run the Malicious Software Removal Tool: Microsoft Update Windows Update Automatic Updates The Microsoft Download Center

• Both removing and restoring IE is risky and difficult. IE is complex with extensive hooks built into Windows, for efficiency and functionality. Thus unplugging it from your system may impact Internet connectivity, Windows functionality, and break functionality in Microsoft Office and non-MS products.
  
• IE is more than a browser, it is the foundation for Internet functionality in Windows.
  

Internet Explorer 7 hasn't got any support for XHTML whatsoever. You are still stuck having to pretend that your XHTML is actually HTML for Internet Explorer to do anything with it.

The CSS improvements are marginal. They've fixed a lot of bugs, but the new functionality is very sparse, it's just selectors I think. The rest of CSS 2 remains unimplemented.


Wow, you must be using a different version that our developers.

'Pretend XHTML'? You are kidding right? MS is one of the companies that wrote XHTML and sure IE6 support sucked, but IE7? Um.... I don't think so. I won't argue it has the best standards implementations, as it tends to support older tags, but that does not mean they ahve left off adding in the new standards 'tags'.

Here go to: http://www.microsoft.com/expression

Watch the Video on Expression Web Designer. It is the new FrontPage so to speak, and is designed to work with IE7 in the long run, and it pushes VERY HARD - XHTML and CSS standards, to the point it will break IE6 if you tell it to comply 100% with standards. They also wouldn't be making such a 'standards' based site development tool if it was going to break IE7. MS isn't stupid.

That isn't why it won't pass the Acid2 test. It won't pass the Acid2 test because that is far too much work for a single major revision. It would require implementing a lot of the CSS that is currently unsupported

This has 'little' to do with WHAT CSS is implemented, but more over what 'foreign and non-standard' CSS and IE specific goofs are allowed. IE7 does a good job of support CSS features, the DRAWBACK is that is STILL supports NON-STANDARD CSS and MS IE standards that when put to the ACID2 test fail.

Microsoft would have to RIP all old tag and old IE6 type CSS support to pass the ACID2 test completely, but that does NOT MEAN that if you write the site with new CSS tags and don't interject things you 'purposely' know will make IE7 behave like IE6 CSS (Bad tag that IE6 would use for example) then the site will not have to have separate CSS coding for IE7 and other browsers.

In the next year!? I wish!

Most sites can only start using them once there aren't many Internet Explorer 7 users left. Bear in mind that work I'm doing today needs Internet Explorer 5.5 compatibility because lots of people still use it, and that a lot of people aren't going to even have the opportunity to upgrade to version 7 because it doesn't run on Windows 2000 or earlier.

I fully expect there to be enough Internet Explorer 6 users hanging around to make life difficult in the year 2010.


Well people shouldn't be running a 'build' so to speak of Windows that is 7 - 10 years old. PERIOD. If you found customers running 1995 Linux or 1998 BSD you would freak and get them up to the newest build for their distribution. PERIOD.

WindowsXP is 5 years old, it is about time people moved to it. It is FASTER than Win2k and FASTER than Win98, plus it is a LOT MORE secure than Win2k or Win98. Leaving your customers on anything prior to WinXP is doinga great disservice to them or leading them to belive that Win2k is Faster or 'good enough' is also hurting them.

If people are 'stuck' on a version of Windows that is pre WinXP, then we need to encourage them to move to FireFox or Opera. PERIOD. This will help the NON-IE market as well for people that refuse to move to XP.

So YES we can start moving to real XHTML and CSS based sites in the next year, and if they come to our site with IE6 or older, we can provide them with older basic functionality or a page FORCING them to get FireFox or make sure they have upgraded to IE7. It really is that simple.

As bigger sites require this, it will move the consumer side market. And if you don't believe that can happen, look at what happened with IE adoption in the 90s or even Flash adoption now, almost every consumer has been through this, and it won't be a hard to get them through it ag

Well the good news is, they fixed most CSS2.1 bugs in IE7. They killed almost every bug mentioned at positioniseverything.net. They also added support for CSS2 selectors.

The bad news is they didn't add ":after" support..
If you used this to clear floats without structural markup, you need to find another way.

And worth mentioning:

• the new bugfixes are not applied in quirks-mode. Shouldn't be a problem, quirks mode is ment for backwards compatibility anyways.
• most of my pages rendered exactly like Firefox and Safari already did. In fact, if I left a "bug" there because it was only visible in Safari, it will likely be visible in IE7 too due their better support for standards.
• If you coded your pages for standards, and only used "* html" for IE5/6, most pages still look fine in IE7
• they removed the "* html" bug because it broke web sites since they also support of the child-selector (html>body) in IE7.
  Note that pages render fine now without this hack!
• they appear to have left a new hack, *>html, but they recommend conditional-comments instead

i highly doubt the laptop supports all of India's 33-odd "recognized languages", disregarding others commonly taught in schools (Arabic, Farsi, etc). The vernacular lobbies would have a field day claiming that the government is deliberately excluding their languages. Which is a valid point. People would sue the government and the education boards.

it is extremely hard, but it can be repaired. there was one scay reboot, but everything panned out for me. there are .zips out there that contain the directory you need. this may get you started. i cant recall if those where the only steps i took or not. i remember forcing an install of ie6 via the command prompt and doing a couple regedits - not sure if those where dead-ends or not. if you search the forums enough you can fix it. i did after the guy who doesnt know what he doesnt know ran cleanup utility and deleted a bunch of information he didnt think he needed.

Just so you know, the Malicious Software Removal Tool doesn't actually install anything on your machine. All it does is look around for some common types of malware, remove them if they're present, and then exit and leave no trace of itself.

More information here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890830

Hello All,

    Calm down. It is easy to succumb to media hype and not look deeper. But if you do, you'll find that administrators have options available to them and so do users.

1) IE7 Blocker Toolkit - non-expiring toolkit will assist admistrators through Group Policy or script to set registry to prevent automatic update to IE7:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=4516A6F7-5D44-482B-9DBD-869B4A90159C&displa ylang=en

2) Admins who have Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) deployed already has control over what is pushed to the corporate desktop

3) Users individually have the ability to decline the install

I have also heard that users can uninstall IE7 from add/remove programs, this will revert the user back to IE6.

to get the new update, simply remove this:
msi http://microsoft.com/xp ie6 main

and replace it with this:
msi http://microsoft.com/xp ie7 main

in your c:/etc/apt/sources.list file. then do:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

to get the new update, simply remove this:
msi http://microsoft.com/xp ie6 main

and replace it with this:
msi http://microsoft.com/xp ie7 main

in your c:/etc/apt/sources.list file. then do:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Only IE7 bug I noticed is that IE7 REFUSES to remove borders on iframes (or maybe it's the body tag inside the iframe). Using CSS or deprecated HTML attributes have no effect. IE6 does not have this problem.

It should be possible, as Live.com does just that (every non-certified gadget runs in an iframe for security purposes). However beta 3 does have an issue with resizing those iframes vertically. If a gadget needs more or less space than the default, it'll resize on IE6. Not so on IE7. It won't resize on Firefox either, but live.com puts scrollbars on the iframes for Firefox to somewhat mitigate the issue. No scrollbars for IE7 makes many gadgets unusable.

Well in that case the parents should be, you know, do actual parenting and supervise their children? Oh personal responsibility, wherefore art thou in this millennium? We miss you personal responsibility, please come back.

Or, the parents could, uh, oh, I don't know, use various filters to limit young children to G-rated web sites, or choose an Internet provider or proxy service which guarantees all content they provide access to is child-friendly?

The fact that some porn star might be named "Barbara," or "Barbie" for short, and there is a doll with the name Barbie should not make using the word "Barbie" to promote the site a felony, or any kind of criminal or civil infraction. Heck, even if some porn site were spoofing Barbie with real live models, it should be protected by the law as parody.

A law I WOULD agree with is requiring porn sites to include the meta tags which declare the rating of a site - the browser which has by far the majority share of the market and comes preinstalled on more than 85% of all computers shipped (or is it still >90%?) supports content filtering out of the box. This feature should be extended and should be offered by all serious browsers. Then, adults can choose to turn it on or off as they please, and they can choose to keep their kids protected. Sure, the kids could find a way around it, but if the kids are that determined to see porn, they're not going to search Google for "Barbie" but are going to search for "clit" or "cum shot" or "boobies" or "tits" and not for some kid's cartoon or toy name. To require porn sites (er, "adult entertainment") to implement such tags is not unreasonable, and does not abridge their freedom of expression in any way, shape, or form.

A friend from college serverd in a support capacity for Microsoft Research (it's called Microsoft Research, BTW not "Microsoft Labs") for over 4 years. His take: smart people get let loose to investigate stupid things. It's a place people go to hide and play academic while getting industry rock star pay.

I'd like to call B.S. on your comparison to Bell Labs on another level: With software, people with good ideas just stand up and do them. It's not like you need massive R&D experiment or new materials development to explore different computational processes and concepts like you do in the physical world (i.e. try to create a transistor from scratch in 195X in your garage).

There's no need for them to do away with the HAL to achieve this. All you need is a slightly smarter bootloader that can work out which HAL is approprate and load that at boot time - there basically is only six in XP (ACPI or not, UP or not, APIC or not) - and tidy up the hardware arbitration so that it can cope with ACPI interrupts or non-ACPI ones. (Currently, you have to reinstall if you swich from or to ACPI.) I suspect all that requires is updating the HALs to present the same interrupts irrespective of ACPI status - not affecting the rest of the OS

(In the Linux world, you could easily have GRUB enhanced to automatically detect UP or MP and load an approprate kernel image, for example.)

Now try adding conformant XForms to http://www.microsoft.com/ and load the page in IE.

I completely disagree!!!
While it is true that MS Research does some very retarded work, there is a LOT OF REVOLUTIONARY WORK there aswell. For example check this out http://research.microsoft.com/Farsite/
FARSITE is one the first completely serverless filesystems, around and it has advanced byzantine fault tolerance, not available with other systems.This is great work by MS.

Yes, you're right, we build on existing standards: XML, CSS, XPath, XML Schema data types...

As for your point about breaking existing content, it perplexes me that you keep making it.

But, let's try a test.

1. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/ in FireFox and note the results.
2. Install the XForms XPI from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms and restart Firefox.
3. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/ again and see if adding XForms support to the browser breaks existing content.

Thanks!