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Focusing solely on what's actually used is part of the degradation of NT that's been going on for years [...]

It's not just search. The slashdot summary is woeful in its shallowness.
Check out Microsoft's official statement:
Windows Principles: Twelve Tenets to Promote Competition

Just to follow up on my own post (though it's bad form to replay to one's self lol), you can see in Microsoft's official statement:
Windows Principles: Twelve Tenets to Promote Competition that they cite the USDOJ and the provisions of the US antitrust settlement again and again; never do they cite the European Commision's Kafka-esque kangaroo court.

The other tenets they published today handle that too (Read them here). I agree that it is done to appease the courts, but I'm worried that since it's voluntary, in 2-3 years, they can start fudging/revising these "tenets". So I'd strongly suggest someone mirror that page in a hurry, lest they pull an Animal Farm on us.

Unfortunately, this article seems to have only hit the tip of the iceberg. The full list of commitments is at an official MS site

Now, I'm as realistic as the next guy, but these look pretty nice. The big ones are 5 and 9, which make it look like MS won't hit back against any manufacturer for bundling Linux on a desktop. It also allows for OEMs to remove WMP11 and IE7 from Vista if they'd rather bundle something else, or just bundle both, at no extra cost.

Most developers use DirectX, and you can't legally distribute that on a boot disk.

Uh, you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. But nice try.

The real issue is that you can't legally distribute a bootable Windows disc, and the OSes you can distribute don't support DirectX.

Meanwhile, making a bootable linux disc is a stupid idea too, because you can't update drivers without making a new disc.

I know this will cause several people to gag...

Right now, one of the best WYSIWYG and code based CSS editors available is the new Microsoft Expression Web Designer. It is what our designers call, FrontPage, but with real standards and real power.

http://www.microsoft.com/expression

At least check out some of the demostration Videos if you have access to a Windows box. From what our tech and designers feedback, this product is not only about standards, but fully enforcing them, even if they break IE.

It can work with CSS in WYSIWYG mode with well done properly formatted coding. Also if you code by hand, the non-visual editor does the intellisense that many of us are use to in development IDEs.

From some of the demonstrations I have seen and the stuff our in house people have put out, it truly surprised the heck out of me, considering that it has a FrontPage heritage, which was about the opposite of what this product is about. Meaning that it adheres to standards and even forces developers to create well formed and compatible standards based XHTML and CSS.

So before you totally gag, it is worth taking a look at. And if you still gag, don't blame me, I don't profess it to be God's gift, but something that is free for now and quite respectible for ease of producing CSS and XHTML content without having to be a hard core standards nerd.

At the very least, MS may have some good ideas that some open source editors could learn from... :)

I really think it is time for people running those platforms to upgrade to something more modern, just for the reason of security. If they choose a windows platform (includes Intel Macs w/ bootcamp or parallels) then they can use IE7 also.

From the IE7 requirements page it seems it can run on a Pentium 233. So it may be possible to get the browser running on those old systems, even though it says it can only run on XP SP2, XP 64bit, and Win2k3 Server SP1. That or people with those older systems can upgrade to XP or maybe Server 2k3 (I read the other day about someone running it on some extremely slow hardware.) So that could be a choice if they want IE 7.

I'm not sure how well it is supported on Linux brands from the Wine side of things though.

-ed

No. This is because while it was capable of running CE, most of the machines out there didn't use it because of licensing and difficulty of use issues. They did like they always did with a console- they programmed to the bare metal. It's also worth noting that you'd
have to come up with an SH4 emulator as this is for ARM/XScale versions of CE only, along with some way of emulating the behavior of a PowerVR chip because they didn't come up with DirectX for CE (It's part of the reason they use Embedded XP in the X-Box...).


Actually, DirectX has been a part of Windows CE for years now. It was originally part of Windows CE 2.12 with the optional DirectX Pak add-on, and available built in inside of WinCE 3.0 and onwards. WinCE4 (WinCE.NET) made it more visible, and I think WinCE 5 now supports Direct3D (Mobile).

Windows *MOBILE* only acquired DirectX as of WinMo 5 (Magneto) (the reason was to support DirectShow for camera support rather than try to do a Video4Windows thing). Of course, they didn't take the CE version of DirectX, but ported DirectX from Windows XP. Big PITA when you're trying to write a driver that supports Windows CE (part of Windows Embedded) and Windows Mobile because of these differences in DirectX.

Here's a bit from the Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 documentation on say, DirectDrawCreate()

Requirements
OS Versions: Windows CE 2.12 and later. Version 2.12 requires DXPAK 1.0 or later.
Header: Ddraw.h.
Link Library: Ddraw.lib.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/wcemultimedia5/html/wce50lrfdirectd rawcreate.asp

From what I've read at the UAC blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/uac) and the IE blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie), it's somewhat different.

IE and the desktop run in the same security context - in the worst case, IE can't do anything more than the user can. Since the user isn't running in a privileged account on Vista (unlike XP, users on Vista run with admin privileges turned off), IE still can't do anything that the user can't do. That eliminates shatter attacks.

But beyond that, IE runs in a special limited mode (User Interface Privilege Isolation, or UIPI) where even things that the normal user can do are restricted - code running in IE can't send window messages to higher integrity level windows (essentially every other window on the desktop). In addition, code running in IE effectively runs in a sandbox - can't write to the filesystem or the registry except for certain certain defined areas (this is the MIC feature mentioned in the IE blog post). See this Channel 9 video, or this IE blog post for more details on how IE's protected mode works.

Shatter attacks happen when code running in a restricted security context is allowed to send window messages to code running in highly privileged security context, the UIPI feature is explicitly designed to stop that. In addition to IE, when you run an application elevated (right click, select "Run as administrator"), the elevated application is run at a "high" UIPI mode. That means that normal apps running on the desktop cannot send window messages to those applications. Apps running on the desktop are also prohibited from opening processes at a higher UIPI mode for write access, which stops a different set of attacks. You can find info about UIPI here here.

So in Vista for an ActiveX control to issue a shatter attack that would exploit the system, you would need to have:
1) A hostile ActiveX running in the browser (so the attacker first has to convince the user to execute their code).
2) a vulnerability in UIPI that allows the ActiveX control to send a window message to a higher privileged application (like every other application running on the desktop).
3) An application running on the users desktop that is running with elevated privileges (to get an application running with elevated privileges requires a special action of the user), normally no application runs with elevated privileges.
4) A vulnerability in that application that would allow an attacker to cause the application to allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code in the application.

The bottom line is that there are at least 4 levels of defense-in-depth that would have to be breached for code running in IE to be execute a shatter attack.

There may be other ways of attacking the system that don't involve shatter attacks, but from what the Microsoft guys have said, I think that shatter attacks are gone.

While your analysis of the e-mail is astute, I think you missed Zeldman's larger point, that this e-mail is just one piece of evidence in growing frustration amongst rank-and-file web developers with the W3C. Other developers have agreed.

I used to be a member of some W3C mailing lists, but got frustrated by the lack of momentum. Most of the e-mails were deflected as, "someone has already proposed that, read the archives!" or "that is not implementable." Constrast that to WHATWG, where my comment on a spec not granted me a reply from that spec's author, but also gave me a bit of enlightenment into the process.

I was a flag carrier, a proselytizer. Now I just read mozillazine and the Opera blog to see what's coming. It does seem to me that lately all the W3C is good at moving on is publishing standards other people wrote.

While your analysis of the e-mail is astute, I think you missed Zeldman's larger point, that this e-mail is just one piece of evidence in growing frustration amongst rank-and-file web developers with the W3C. Other developers have agreed.

I used to be a member of some W3C mailing lists, but got frustrated by the lack of momentum. Most of the e-mails were deflected as, "someone has already proposed that, read the archives!" or "that is not implementable." Constrast that to WHATWG, where my comment on a spec not granted me a reply from that spec's author, but also gave me a bit of enlightenment into the process.

I was a flag carrier, a proselytizer. Now I just read mozillazine and the Opera blog to see what's coming. It does seem to me that lately all the W3C is good at moving on is publishing standards other people wrote.

Barry

Duh, why not try Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 here's the link. Download it. Its free.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/othertech/eVisu alc/howtoget/default.aspx

I think MS is getting better these days. They released the .Net Framework source code (called ROTOR) under the same license (Shared Source). Though you can't use it commercially, it actually compiles on multiple platforms. Good for students and guys working on alternate implementations, though you cant lift code from it. They also started a new code sharing community called CodePlex.

Eventually they might open up a lot of platform code, maybe even Windows itself. I still remember BillG saying that way back in 2000, that they might someday. Among other things it will depend on the quality of source code, you really wouldn't want people to see all those //HACK-HACKs and //FIXME:BAD-BAD-WAAAH-WAAH code. The .Net codebase is awesome, so it was easier to open. (Not saying thats the only criteria).

Perhaps, with the new guys sitting on top, people like Ray Ozzie MS might change. Hopefully they "know" that openness is freedom, and freedom will last.

C compilers can and do store intermediate forms in "object" files such that the linker can do final inter-procedural optimization at link time or even dynamic load time. The SGI Irix compiler did this, for example.

And Microsoft's tools do this too. It's no longer an "I heard about some research that..." area anymore.

No it isn't. POSIX is a superset of UNIX. UNIX meets the requirements of POSIX, not the other way around. For that matter, Windows NT conforms to POSIX too. Does that mean Windows NT is a UNIX? I don't think so.

Probably right here.

A new TCP/IP stack might mean a whole new set of support problems as all those third party antivirus and spyware apps have to start again ironing out compatibilty problems with their LSPs. Oh what joy.

Unlike some other operating systems, the Windows NT and Windows 2000 transport protocols do not have a sockets-style interface which applications can use to talk to them directly. Instead, they implement a much more general API called the Transport Driver Interface (TDI). The generality of this API keeps the subsystems of Windows NT from being tied to a particular flavor-of-the-decade network programming interface. The Winsock kernel mode driver provides the sockets emulation (currently implemented in AFD.SYS). This driver is responsible for the connection and buffer management needed to provide a sockets-style interface to an application. AFD.SYS, in turn, uses TDI to talk to the transport protocol driver.

Unlike some other operating systems, the Windows NT and Windows 2000 transport protocols do not have a sockets-style interface which applications can use to talk to them directly. Instead, they implement a much more general API called the Transport Driver Interface (TDI). The generality of this API keeps the subsystems of Windows NT from being tied to a particular flavor-of-the-decade network programming interface. The Winsock kernel mode driver provides the sockets emulation (currently implemented in AFD.SYS). This driver is responsible for the connection and buffer management needed to provide a sockets-style interface to an application. AFD.SYS, in turn, uses TDI to talk to the transport protocol driver.

Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.

Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.

Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.

Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.

Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.

Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.

Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.

Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.

or remain as visible as Windows Defender

I'll make no objection if a distribution of any OS restricts supported, distro-funded and distro-specific, downloads to its paying customers.
It is, after all, the reason why OEM Linspire has a token presence in big-box retail.

Nor will I object to demanding a show of proof. You are not entitled to a free ride on my dime.

I mean, after all didn't performance monitor and disk defrag and other utilities also come from companies that MS assimilated?

Performance Monitor has been in NT since day 1 ... and Defrag is a cutdown version of Diskeeper.

I honestly don't see why people are so worried -- I really doubt this stuff will be integrated into Windows proper. Instead, most likely the sysinternal tools will be bundled into the free Resource Kit along with all the other random utilities that MS doesn't want to provide full support for.

BTW, here's the 2003/XP resource kit -- many of the tools are similar to Sysinternals.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD

the Mac version of iTunes has generally been fairly robust in its unwillingness to cater to copy-protection technologies.

No, Vienna is the codename for the ultimate successor to Vista with a release called Fiji in between the two; Longhorn Server is the server version of Vista that will be released well after Vista.

Does no one remember how to get to Google any more?

Windows also has problems entering hibernation mode on workstations using more than 1Gb of memory. To diminish our electric bills, we have taken to hibernating our workstations when leaving for the evening. On workstations with over 1Gb of memory this no longer possible once any serious work has taken place and the memory has become fragmented. When running windows inside Vmware under Linux this isn't a problem.

...or alternatively just in specified file types:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309173
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_bad_search.htm

I provide this merely as useful information, I'm not trying to defend Microsoft.

Maybe they shouldn't have given those liquid assets away (clicky).

So much for claiming that their legal problems were largely in the past.

simple download all updates make a fire throw hdd in fire and you have succsessfully destroyed your windows updates! and you desroyed the curse on the harrdrive as well its called windows http://www.microsoft.com/windows

It's sad that the parent got insightful.

Indexing Service had a bug which once caused it to use excess CPU time. Those of you with basic readong comprehension skills may have noticed that the bug has been fixed.

Have you used Indexing Service before or set it up? It does not eat up CPU time on my server since the original index was created, and it could be used to provide a Google-like indexing service, similar to Google's Desktop Search or their enterprise products, with configuration, as I previously stated. The search/indexing capabilities can be expanded to support more filetypes, and it can be queried by many different programs.

Without spending much time, it effectively indexes filenames and text file contents on my server. With the right plugins, I could add in metadata for different file types (like filenames in archives, mp3 tags, etc).

No, findstr has nothing to do with Napster. It is a standard command line tool in Windows XP. See here It searches files for text (like find) but understands regular expressions.

Actually, there was very little direction in the demands the EU made. Microsoft provided a mountain of documentation, but the EU had unspoken, but very specific, ideas about formatting and details that weren't given to Microsoft until April of this year, which forced them to pull hundreds of engineers off their projects to go back and change things. I know the /. crowd doesn't cheer very hard for Bill and his microserfs, but in this particular case it's the other side who isn't playing fair. Maybe they're just bitter that no one wants the Windows Media free edition. /shrug

"I must say that I find it difficult to imagine that a company like Microsoft does not understand the principles of how to document protocols in order to achieve interoperability."

Given that Neelie Kroes is a career politician and business woman, not an engineer who has ever written technical documentation for third parties, I'm not sure her opinion counts for a lot in this matter (besides, you know, the hundreds of millions of dollars). Commentary by Professor Barrett, who is currently guiding the documentation efforts would be much more relevant.

Microsoft's July 12 statement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul0 6/07-12EUFinesPR.mspx

VMWare has the lead in the enterprise arena for Virtual Infrastructure. Comparing Microsoft's Virtual Server to ESX Starter, the features are pretty much one for one. Past those features though is where the enterprise is interested, and are willing to pay for those features. But like you said, hopefully management just doesn't look at the dollar figure, but at the big picture with what works best for their business practices.

Looking at Microsoft's features page:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Lib rary/aace7325-ef73-46b3-929b-d1e6dbd0df691033.mspx

And VMWare's features page:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/#_tabfeature s

Currently VMware has these edges in the virtual machine features:
*SMP support (looks though like Microsoft may offer this in the next beta after the current beta)
*Clustering of the hosts, not just the virtual machines
*Backup consolidation - imagine being able to backup 40+ windows boxes with only one backup client at the file level (not just the virtual machine images), even if the windows virtual machines are powered off. This saves on having to load backup agents on each virtual, and saves a load of cpu horsepower.
*64 bit support
*Multiple virtual machine clustering with a shared disk
*Live migration between physical hosts - imagine moving a SQL virtual server, as it is being used, to another physical box. Doing a hardware upgrade on the prior physical box, then migrating back. Users don't notice a thing.
*Direct SAN support
*Multipathing for network traffic or to the shared storage

There are probably other ones that I didn't mention, but those are the ones that count for me. VMware knows Microsoft isn't going to sit idle and will probably be adding more on top of that. Same goes for Microsoft, but they have a lot of catching up to do.

avi is spported by WMP and in fact avi is defined by MS, however you may not have the correct codec for the video or audio files in the *.avi. Check out the MS support page for further info.

avi is spported by WMP and in fact avi is defined by MS, however you may not have the correct codec for the video or audio files in the *.avi. Check out the MS support page for further info.

Most of what you wrote I answered in another response, but as to these:

"you don't mind using a piece of software which no-one will have audited,"

What makes you think office was audited?
Gee, I don't know, maybe the fact that is a discussion on a vulnerability which was found in PowerPoint? That vulnerability didn't find itself.

"you can't wait for Office 2007 for ODF,"

The ODF support in 2007 will be read only. It will also be crippled from the looks of it.
https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul 06/07-06OpenSourceProjectPR.mspx "bidirectional translation support"

"and you don't need a rich macro API."

You have no idea what you are talking about. None at all. Every part of OO is scriptable.
Even if OOo was as richly scriptable as Office (which it simply isn't), it's multiplatform and thus can't have the same integration with other parts of the OS.

"Disclaimer: I'm not an MS fanboy, "

Yes you are. If you weren't you would not have lied so much.
"Yes you are."? I hate replying to a post only to realise I'm responding to someone with a mental age of a schoolboy.. You have yet to point out where I have said something which isn't true, but you have said Office isn't audited and will only have read only support for ODF; both false.

It depends how they update windows. If they've switched from windowsupdate to microsoftupdate then Office updates will be included (as well as updates for some server software like SQL 2005). The switch also changes the automatic update software.

It depends how they update windows. If they've switched from windowsupdate to microsoftupdate then Office updates will be included (as well as updates for some server software like SQL 2005). The switch also changes the automatic update software.

You need to check out AxCrypt. It's available on my freeware site in my sig. Also, the MS download is still actually available here - http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/offers/Details.as px?displaylang=en&countrycode=USA&offerid=441c2998 -248b-49cf-b084-f3a237b58f71

It's not poorly documented, you fuckwits and others like you are just incapable of reading any fucking documentation. EFS is implemented via standards. Encryption is handled through x509 certificates which are readily available from the personal certificates store on the system. The EFS documentation plainly recommends that you back these certificates up.

Google + "Windows EFS" = first link

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxp pro/deploy/cryptfs.mspx

If it's not in man format, translated poorly like furniture directions from Ikea, apparently it doesn't exist.

Download it direct: click here.

Or maybe, this is a false-flag operation by the government encourage windows users to use easily breakable encryption? What kind of encryption does this use, anyway?

Microsoft offers his security updates by iso files in their website... so once a month, you downoad the file, burn it on cd as a saved project... and you use it on all your computers...

simple, safe (as much as a microsoft service could be) and pretty much foolproof

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913086