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Actually, MS is pushing pretty hard into the small business arena.

They have retail management and point of sale software for small businesses. Plus many offerings for business accounting, like SBA. They actually have some pretty cool offerings in this area, compared to the competition anyway.

Actually, MS is pushing pretty hard into the small business arena.

They have retail management and point of sale software for small businesses. Plus many offerings for business accounting, like SBA. They actually have some pretty cool offerings in this area, compared to the competition anyway.

Actually, MS is pushing pretty hard into the small business arena.

They have retail management and point of sale software for small businesses. Plus many offerings for business accounting, like SBA. They actually have some pretty cool offerings in this area, compared to the competition anyway.

Visual Studio Express and all components will remain free. Visual Studio Express

This is becoming a very large and very rich site for the hobbyist programmer, including many starter kits and tutorials.

Microsoft Frontpage

Need I say more?

The beauty of e-mails generated by Word, the strict adherence to HTML standards demonstrated by Frontpage and IE....

And of course the literary values beloved by blogger everywhere...

EFS is your Friend and can be configured by group policies.

NFS is poop. You actually get better transfer rates using samba between two Unix systems than you do using NFS. Besides, if you use Windows Services for Unix, Microsoft does support NFS. But it still sucks.

If an application needs to access any critical areas of the OS, the running threads, the registry, or anything else deemed critical or potentially harmful, it should prompt for password.

Ask, and it shall be granted.

However, the password-prompting behavior isn't the panacea you describe it to be. It works well for people who understand the underlying system including permissions and concepts like user vs. administrator. It doesn't work well for people who just want to get their work done, or download the latest music video. I believe it was Bruce Schneier who said "Given the choice between dancing pigs and security, users will choose dancing pigs every time."

Imagine this scenario:
ITAdmin: "OK, here's your new Vista machine. It has this great new thing that will prompt you for your password for anything potentially affecting the system. When you see the password prompt, make an informed decision about whether you trust the application before typing your password. That way, you'll stay safe against viruses and spyware."
LUser: "Uhh, OK"
(1 month goes by)
LUser: "My machine is running slow and it's got a lot of popups."
ITAdmin: (Examines machine, discovers massive spyware infestation) "Have you been typing your password in the dialogs that come up?"
LUser: "Maybe once or twice, I needed to when I was downloading stuff."
ITAdmin: "@*$%!"

The problem will never be solved by asking users to put in a password (or click an extra confirmation) to run something potentially dangerous, because they'll ALWAYS say yes (dancing pigs every time...). By giving users administrative rights to their own machines, you are saying "I trust you as an all-powerful administrator of this machine. Please make an informed security decision about every piece of software you download before you run it." This is a fundamentally flawed principle, because end users are NOT security professionals, and we shouldn't expect them to be. That is the job of the ITAdmin: he should be taking away administrative rights from end users so that they can't make system-wide changes.

For home users, the problem is much harder. Imagine the conversation above, but replace "ITAdmin" with "SalesGuy". Oh, and by the way, SalesGuy doesn't have a vested interest in the machine once you've handed over your money, so your spyware infection results in just another profit opportunity (replace the last line with "$$$$!").

Svchost is the program in charge of managing Windows services that run at startup, kind of like the main init scripts in Linux and BSD. Csrss is in charge of the user space - managing user processes, console windows, threading, etc.

svchost.exe

csrss.exe

Svchost is the program in charge of managing Windows services that run at startup, kind of like the main init scripts in Linux and BSD. Csrss is in charge of the user space - managing user processes, console windows, threading, etc.

svchost.exe

csrss.exe

Try upgrading your RAM to 2Gb & then trying to hibernate. XP SP2 currently has an unresolved bug that prevents it from entering hibernation. I'd been procrastinating for years. I was using Windows as my main OS & running Linux under VMWare. Once MS made it impossible for me to only reboot when updates made it neccesary, I finally jumped to Linux as my main OS.

This works on XP and Server.
Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP

...and may do again if "MS Singularity" really takes shape.

Did you really think that the "Linux Labs" at Microsoft was just for 'interoperability' studies?

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory /912840.mspx

The microsoft windows defender reported the win32/wmfap 'trojan'. Looks like it detects any sort of WMF as such.

So ask for Linux versions. If you don't get them, you'll take your business somewhere else. If you need the software *that* badly you can probably pay someone to write it for less than the cost of all those Microsoft licence fees.

Bull. In some industries, there are few if any choices, and a lot of those are Windows only. And no, it wouldn't be cheaper to pay someone to recreate off the shelf software for linux. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobu y/licensing/pricing.mspx

$15,000 for 105 licenses, $1000 for the standard 2003 R2 server, $42,000 for XP pro. Note this is all pricing according to MS; you'll likely get volume discounts when you actually perchase. Now, $58,000 is less than I make a year, and that doesn't include benefits. Do you really think you can hire a TEAM of programmers to build software that ALREADY available off the shelf for less?

You don't need to have separate address spaces for your objects. You can solve this problem with language-based technologies and get better performance too.

Most operating systems enforce process isolation through hardware protection mechanisms such as memory segmentation, page mapping, and differentiated user and kernel instructions. Singularity is a new operating system that uses software mechanisms to enforce process isolation. A software isolated process (SIP) is a process whose boundaries are established by language safety rules and enforced by static type checking. With proper system support, SIPs can provide a low cost isolation mechanism that provides failure isolation and fast inter-process communication. To compare the performance of Singularity's approach against more conventional systems, we implemented an optional hardware isolation mechanism. Protect domains are hardware-enforced address spaces, which can contain one or more SIPs. Domains can either run at the kernel's privilege levels and share an exchange heap or be fully isolated from the kernel and run at the normal application privilege level. These domains can construct Singularity configurations that are similar to micro-kernel and monolithic kernel systems.

The paper concludes that hardware-based isolation incurs performance costs of up to 25-33%, while the lower cost of SIPs permits them to provide protection and failure isolation at a finer granularity than conventional processes.

"Windows CE is a hard real-time operating system."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/usewinemb/ce/te chno/realtme/default.aspx

The code avaiability is best explained here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/usewinemb/ce/sh aredsrccode/default.aspx

The bottom line is that the core CE code is made available, but many of the appliactions, services, and drivers are not.

"Windows CE is a hard real-time operating system."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/usewinemb/ce/te chno/realtme/default.aspx

The code avaiability is best explained here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/usewinemb/ce/sh aredsrccode/default.aspx

The bottom line is that the core CE code is made available, but many of the appliactions, services, and drivers are not.

Someone mentioned automatically opening up a shell in the directory that you're looking at in the browser. (I REALLY have wanted that on windows occasionally -- does it exist there?)

Given that there was hardly ground breaking research in OS design unveiled in the last few years

I don't know, Singularity seems pretty ground-breaking to me. Far more interesting than anything I've heard about since Plan 9, anyway.

Some shared source licenses are also open source licenses. Certainly there's nothing wrong with the Microsoft Permissive License or the Microsoft Community License from an opensource perspective. The microsoft reference license, on the other hand, is not quite so free or useful (you can use it to understand, but cant modify it or redistribute it).

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/li censingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx

This is the most insightful post I've seen (of course, I say that because I agree with you). Check out Singularity OS for a VM-based OS. By adding some mild restrictions (e.g. no dynamic loading of code into a "process" once it's started) it can optimize more aggressively than a conventional JIT compiler. And, as you say, you get the benefits of memory protection for free. Their papers are worth a read.

Or at least that I meant to link to the NT 4.0 diagrams:

http://www.microsoft.com/library/media/1033/techne t/images/archive/ntwrkstn/evaluate/featfunc/f3af_b ig.gif

Perhaps you'll get more out of this instead: The Win32 Subsystem (what makes it Windows) is clearly running in user mode.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/w indowsnt/4/workstation/reskit/en-us/archi.mspx?mfr =true

Also, Microsoft admits that microkernels are more dependable and show their research here:

http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.a spx?type=technical+report&id=989

If you decide to look at the PDF, you can go straight to page 7 for the kernel architecture.

Perhaps you'll get more out of this instead: The Win32 Subsystem (what makes it Windows) is clearly running in user mode.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/w indowsnt/4/workstation/reskit/en-us/archi.mspx?mfr =true

Also, Microsoft admits that microkernels are more dependable and show their research here:

http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.a spx?type=technical+report&id=989

If you decide to look at the PDF, you can go straight to page 7 for the kernel architecture.

http://www.microsoft.com/library/media/1033/techne t/images/archive/ntwrkstn/evaluate/featfunc/f0af_b ig.gif

That's funny. Microsoft has one of it's layers labeled "Microkernel." I guess it's a hybrid OS after all.

First off, blindness isn't the only kind of disability out there. Secondly, you don't seem to have any clue as to what kind of accessibility features are included with Word. Just because you have never had to use these features, and thus have never looked for them, does not mean that they don't exist. Also, our society's general failure to take into account the needs of the disabled is not justification for the continuance of this problem.

Right now there are tons of features that make Word more usable for people with all sorts of disbilities. A lot of these features are used by people without handicaps as well. We don't realize that they provide vital accessibility improvements for the handicapped because they seem to accomplish tasks that are trivial for us. But for people with disabilities, these features indispensible. If you want to get a better idea of the kind of features that Microsoft offers for the disabled, then visit the Microsoft Accessibility website. Please educate yourself before spouting off ignorant uninformed nonsense.

Lastly, if you can't see the vendor lock-in (and other problems) created by the situations you described then you really need to think a bit harder (Hint: Imagine if you were handicapped). Your inability to empathize with others in a different situation from yours is really quite sad.

How about medical devices? Or manufactoring control systems?

How about medical devices? Or manufactoring control systems?

here's the official press release from Microsoft regarding the Honda/Alpine/Microsoft partnership..

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jan0 6/01-05InfotainmentExperiencesPR.mspx

Actually, what microsoft calls it, is a solution. A set of packaged technologies that are supposedly designed to work together for a better business experience or some other crap like that.
.NET VM is one of their present technologies that's designed to knock off java, but far from the only thing present. Including a lot of things that people already pay for, such as visual studio.
If you go to the .NET homepage, you'll not see any sort of runtime environment mentioned.

I guess if you're counting ocean waves you could call it realtime.

While I'm certainly no fan of the Windows family of operating systems on desktops or servers (or PDAs, for that matter), I've recently found myself appreciating a Windows Embedded product. When I bought a new Honda in November, I fell in love with the navigation system - so much so that when I sought to purchase another new vehicle last month, the nav system was a requirement.

After some research and discussion, I was dishearted to find that the navigation systems I had grown to love so much were actually powered by Windows Automotive Edition - based on Windows Embedded, which is a flavor of Windows CE. While I cannot actually tell (by any means) that the system is Windows-based, it is very stable, responsive, fast, and user friendly - most of which is probably of function of the application and not the operating system.

All that said, I'm still psyched about CE 6 if it provides further media access features, hardware drivers, and other niceitys.

I have real pain saying I'm psyched about a Windows product as a Linux and Mac OS geek! :) But, if it helps me get a better navigation system, I'll sell my soul to Redmond.

When you say that Windows doesn't support assistive technologies, which version of Windows are you talking about?

If you are a developer, go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/at/ to see all about APIs that allow you to interface with things like screen readers and other assistive technologies.

dom

Ask and ye shall receive:
http://www.microsoft.com/
No, I'm not kidding. MS illustrates the point beautifully. Think about it.

Next on slashdot: Microsoft announces it is releasing source code for independent security audits!

Umm... old news? I assume this would fall under the "MVP" option if a security audit counts as a "support service".

We all know that Microsoft invented the first smiley.

If I'd meant Service Pack 4 I would have said it

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/re commended/NT4OptPk/

Naaah, this one is waaay better:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/w indows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/edlin.mspx?mfr=true

The absolutely worst editor is edlin, which is still shipped with MS Windows XP:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/w indows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/edlin.mspx?mfr=true
http://tinyurl.com/hm9uc

Compared to that, using vi is a breath of fresh air...

so no special driver should be required.

But it does. To activate additional buttons on the Intellimouse Explorer. ...and it consistently caused OS X kernel panics.

Here is your solution.

Oh wait a minute, I was supposed to save this type of witty response for a Windows story and link to Debian. My bad.

It's certainly possible, and not too difficult, to write your own performance monitors on Windows that plug into the standard perfmon architecture.

Note to open-source advocates: before posing "I can't do X on Windows because it is closed", search MSDN and you'll discover that you're wrong most of the time.

Why, pray tell, would you judge the Linux desktop using a fringe Linux distro like Ubuntu? That's like me saying Windows sucks because I use the Windows XP Starter Edition and it won't let me run more than 3 programs at once, therefore, Windows is shite. Use a distro that's not closed to binary modules or licensing like SuSE Linux or (ugh) Lindows and most of that nonsense you mentioned becomes moot. Anyhow, you can buy a closed driver from Paragone to r/w NTFS partitions from Linux, just like you have to buy software under Windows. Beyond that, if you don't mind security issues, the ever expanding registry file, complete data loss when the NTFS partition gets corrupted, not understanding what's happening "under the hood" or are satisfied enough, then, just please friggen stick with Windows. The world NEEDS end users so that IT people have a reason to remain employed.

'd have just one menu bar, which would contain at minimum the four essential applications that I mentioned. There would probably also be a couple of popup menus for less frequently used programs (less commonly used office apps, games). Programs would be sorted by function, and the guys writing installers would absolutely not get to create a new submenu [...] Most any program will require all the screen real-estate to be useful, so it makes sense to just let them have it.

I agree with most of what you just wrote, and it feels like "windows starter edition" might be a good example of how N00bs should find their workstation when they first plug it in.

In the last months I've been experimenting more and more with OS X and Ubuntu Linux and that has given me a better understanding of how I should set up my Windowx XP box, instead of the usual defaults and running everything as a superuser.

I've prepared my PC to be shared with my mother so she can use it for some of those basic things you mentioned. We're talking about someone who recently retired from work, from a specific job that existed before PCs were introduced, and which did not gain relevant efficiency after PCs were forced in the office.

the way I set it up, there's extra large fonts, extra large icons with all required apps on the desktop, aiming to have zero-use of the "start" menu. To have things work out smoothly, I moved the "my photos" and the mp3 collection to the "\all users\my documents" area, so I think that a limited user account can be just right for this kind of user and it's working so far. I understand that XP Home edition lacks "Access Control - restrict access to selected files, applications, and other resources.". I wonder if this would work if my PC didn't have the Professional edition.

Some completely offtopicness:

XP by default will reboot when it encounters a bugcheck (or BSOD as people call it). However typically a mini dump or a full memory dump is created in your %windows% directory. This is pretty much like a core file on unix, with the stack information necessary for debugging.

So, if you ever feel brave enough to do some windoze hacking, you can grab this file by booting into a safeOS on the system or a linux live CD, and then head to http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/i nstallx86.mspx to grab the MS debugger. Once inside the debugger, usually only 1 or 2 steps are needed to figure out who the culprit is that caused the bugcheck. (by seeing what's on the stack at the crash for example). The other thing you can do, if you can boot into safemode, is to open up the event log viewer and typically there are messages that explain who caused the last bugcheck.

If we really want to get newbies interested in Linux, we need more video tutorial. A picture might be a thousand words, but a video gives a lot more confidence to people who wants try new things.

I really like the new ASP.Net HOWTO video series. I found it to be very effective to give new web developers head start with the IDE.

Want to know what's wrong with it? Turn on Operating System Error Reporting in System properties Advanced tab > Error Reporting.

Next time the crash occurs, visit http://oca.microsoft.com/

They'll tell you exactly what program is causing it, and exactly which procedure it's occuring in.

But I imagine you'll just reinstall Windows and end up reinstalling whatever driver is causing this behavior, or using whatever faulty hardware is installed, and you'll continue blaming it on the OS.

They have a researcher who came up with Quicksort. But then again, I don't think he was working for them at the time. And it's only slightly faster than merge sort. OK, your point is taken.

This isn't about money, this is about politics and getting votes for Toback. It's an election year.

Although, on a deeper level, there might be money involved. I wonder if there are any rivals to Google that might have been funneling money into the campaign coffers of Toback. Are there any rivals that have a previous history of litigation by proxy?