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So much money - for what? Where are the "innovations" they claim? What is Microsoft Research doing all day?

Their homepage is slow and not very expressive. There's a lot of blabla that reads like your average university summary, and then there's these huuuugly innovative ideas, like in the hardware section:

We're working on devices which will allow you to use novel forms of input, such as a gesture, a wink, a voice command, or a pen.
Did someone forgot to update the page after, say, 1980 or so?

We're also exploring new ways to use the keyboard, for instance, sliders set between the keypads of a split keyboard that will give you the ability to scroll or move around the document without lifting your hands to grab your mouse.
Which actually is a nice idea. Where's the prototype? Can't take more than a year to get it done.

Their crypto research looks cool at first glance, but when you dig deeper into the papers, you'll see that there's very little that wasn't already part of "Applied Cryptography" - the bible of crypto-for-geeks, published 10 years ago.

There's tons of stuff there. But 90% of it are straight trashcan material. Every research institute has its share of failures, but MS Research has brought us, well, what exactly? MS fanboys, here's your chance, please list the ten greatest inventions that have come out of MS Research.

So much money - for what? Where are the "innovations" they claim? What is Microsoft Research doing all day?

Their homepage is slow and not very expressive. There's a lot of blabla that reads like your average university summary, and then there's these huuuugly innovative ideas, like in the hardware section:

We're working on devices which will allow you to use novel forms of input, such as a gesture, a wink, a voice command, or a pen.
Did someone forgot to update the page after, say, 1980 or so?

We're also exploring new ways to use the keyboard, for instance, sliders set between the keypads of a split keyboard that will give you the ability to scroll or move around the document without lifting your hands to grab your mouse.
Which actually is a nice idea. Where's the prototype? Can't take more than a year to get it done.

Their crypto research looks cool at first glance, but when you dig deeper into the papers, you'll see that there's very little that wasn't already part of "Applied Cryptography" - the bible of crypto-for-geeks, published 10 years ago.

There's tons of stuff there. But 90% of it are straight trashcan material. Every research institute has its share of failures, but MS Research has brought us, well, what exactly? MS fanboys, here's your chance, please list the ten greatest inventions that have come out of MS Research.

It would be better if software companies would break out Research from Development.

That's probably where this comes in.

Then I got these fake-ass niggaz I first drew with
Claimin that they non-violent, talkin like they *He's not how he used to be*
Spit venom in interviews, speakin on reunions
Move units, then talk shit and we can do this
Until then - I ain't even speakin your name
Just keep my name outta yo' mouth and we can keep it the same
Nigga, it ain't that I'm too big to listen to the rumors
It's just that I'm too damn big to pay attention to 'em
That's the difference

Then I got these fake-ass niggaz I first drew with
Claimin that they non-violent, talkin like they *He's not how he used to be*
Spit venom in interviews, speakin on reunions
Move units, then talk shit and we can do this
Until then - I ain't even speakin your name
Just keep my name outta yo' mouth and we can keep it the same
Nigga, it ain't that I'm too big to listen to the rumors
It's just that I'm too damn big to pay attention to 'em
That's the difference

Then I got these fake-ass niggaz I first drew with
Claimin that they non-violent, talkin like they *He's not how he used to be*
Spit venom in interviews, speakin on reunions
Move units, then talk shit and we can do this
Until then - I ain't even speakin your name
Just keep my name outta yo' mouth and we can keep it the same
Nigga, it ain't that I'm too big to listen to the rumors
It's just that I'm too damn big to pay attention to 'em
That's the difference

is barely mentioned in TFA. What they're referring to is BlackBerry Enterprise Server v4.1 Express.

Only a 1-User licence is provided for free, however.

RIM is obviously worried about Microsoft giving away push technology in Exchange Server 2003 SP2.

Surprise! Games certified to run on Windows XP don't either:
http://www.microsoft.com/winlogo/software/swovervi ew.mspx

They have never enforced the certifications. Does anyone bother to certify anymore.

It's "People-Ready", but some people are more ready for it than others.

How about Office XP which runs on w98? It isn't the newest version, but I'm sure it's good enough for state/non-profit agencies. Or, in any case, I don't think there are people crying themselves to sleep wishing they had office 2003 file format compatibility.

A window station contains a clipboard, an atom table, and one or more desktop objects. Each window station object is a securable object. When a window station is created, it is associated with the calling process and assigned to the current session.

The interactive window station, Winsta0, is the only window station that can display a user interface or receive user input. It is assigned to the logon session of the interactive user, and contains the keyboard, mouse, and display device. All other window stations are noninteractive, which means they cannot display a user interface or receive user input.

Surprise! Games certified to run on Windows XP don't either:
http://www.microsoft.com/winlogo/software/swovervi ew.mspx

They have never enforced the certifications. Does anyone bother to certify anymore. Is Vista going to refuse to run non-certified applications?

Most games still save their save files into C:\Program Files.

Games certified to run on Windows Vista don't. Instead, they'd use SHGetFolderPath() to look up the current user's My Documents folder and end up saving to e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\Pinocchio Poppins\My Documents\GTA Hot Coffee\ or something like that.

You can gain access to the "Security" tab in XP Home by installing NT Security Configuration Manager:

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/ tools/scm/SCESP4I.EXE

Run the executable and extract it to a folder, then open the folder. Right-click on "setup.inf," click Install, and restart once it's done. Works with all service pack levels of Home.

If you have XP Home, read up on cacls. Alas, in XP Home it is hard to configure access control on folders.
For example:
C:\> cacls C:\MyFolder\ /T /E /G Users:F

I suggest that before everyone continues yelling about closed binary formats, patent litigation, compatibility, or really anything else to do with this subject, that you understand what MS is actually doing

I know that MS has done similar things in the past (DR-DOS comes to mind), but usually that's only when a) they have a technically plausible reason for it and b) they think they can get away with it. This issue is too much in the public eye.

You mean like this?

Covenant not to sue
The same deal goes for the 2007 open formats, afaik. So...what patent threats are you talking about?

Being a paranoid type, I tend to overreact to things, but consider the following-
Given the US Governments current plans to consolidate all the data they hold about you into ginormous centralized multi-agency databases-
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/c-6-9-ioi.html
They then intend to secure this data with biometric-containing RFID equipped tokens-
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/b-1-information .html#is
But they intend to use Microsoft MIIS as the security engine-
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues /2005/11/PostMortem/default.aspx
And to save cost they are going to let BANKS issue the RFIDs (the same places that routinely send pre-approved credit cards to your dog)
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/cc/20040420a1.asp
http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf209806.tip.html
Put all this together and it becomes frighteningly plausible that the government has little interest in securing citizen data, and a lot of interest in assembling data it can use to control its citizens.
http://www.rense.com/general15/happy.htm
But nobody will complain, becuase totalitarian control of our lives will be, like having a chip implanted, *just so convenient*.
However, for those who are still conscientious, it is possible to comment on the government's plans. But please be restrained and responsible in doing so, ranting and raving will just discredit opposing viewpoints.
http://www.estrategy.gov/lineofbusiness/docs/ioi_r fi.doc

But when M$ comes knocking and tries to sell them an upgrade to Office200x, the answer will be "if we have to upgrade anyways, as you have just elaborately shown, then we'll upgrade to OpenOffice, thank you". Especially if the new Office they release with Vista changes the interface considerably, and requires re-training anyways.

On the topic of Office 2007's user interface, the recent promotional movie published on the Microsoft web site seems like they're trying especially hard in this next release to be different for the sake of being different. So hard that some of their innovative ideas may prove better in concept than implementation. Here were some of my thoughts on this 12 minute video.

• They've done away with cross-application familiarity by doing away with the menu bar. With one exception, they put everything in tab like toolbars at the top of the window called the "ribbon". The one exception is the Microsoft Office logo icon in the upper left corner of the screen that, when discovered you can click on, opens a menu with unimportant options like "Save" and "Open".
• The "ribbon" has some sets of checkbox buttons (for settings like applying bold and italic styles) but mostly it's littered with icon popup buttons where your choice causes an action to happen. There's text labels on some buttons but text is minimized as much as possible including removing keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps they've been placed in the "tooltips".
• Speaking of tooltips, the video touted that Microsoft has revolutionized tool tip technology by making them larger providing fuller explanations of what you're looking at. The demo looked suspiciously like Apple's horrible Balloon Help feature from System 7.1. This was useful for about the first five minutes of using an application but quickly became obtrusive and annoying. Unlike balloon help though, they they showed no way to turn these new "wordy" tool tips off.
• Can't find which button you're looking for in the ribbon? That's probably because it's contextual. If you drop a photo into word, a special toolbar appears that gives you options you can only see if the photo is selected. Or rather, you must see if the photo is selected. Now we're looking at the days of 1998 with OpenDoc that promised to give you custom options for your web browser embedded in your MacDraw document: any accidental context selection or de-selection will drive you crazy looking for options that don't apply. Additionally you have duplicate options that would apply to all contexts, but in different places of the ribbon.
• Big features like Footer, Header, and Cell Format have been reduced to action popup buttons with about a dozen Microsoft designed templates in each. There's an option for you to customize your header/footer/cell format, but that was apparently not demonstrated. Like the Microsoft clip art that came with Word For Windows I think you'll get pretty sick of seeing many of these templates pretty fast. Hopefully there's a way to add 3rd party templates instead of the Microsoft defaults, but the size of those popup menus just won't show more than a dozen or so options in a comprehensible way.
• Changes from those popup action buttons happen automatically. You don't even have to select the option, just hover over it in the menu and the change happens automatically. The demonstration of previewing changes to typeface and typestyle just seems easy. Apart from performance issues. Apart from making concepts like style sheets even more abstract. Apart from accidental selection issues. But you can't see your whole document at once so your hip red and grey Microsoft excel template may look fine on the selection you can see, but look awful on a part you can't see. This isn't a new problem with the new office, but it easier than ever to do now.
• They claim these new popup action icon buttons in the ribbon does away with the need for "Undo".

O RLY?

And considering how well the ODF documents I'm sent tend to work in KOffice, I'm not sure how much of it is a standard and how much is "do what openoffice does" (The bugs are mostly documented as places where the spec is ambiguous). Finally, for me at least, a grepable format counts for a lot.

and has extremely little support for any useful formatting or metadata that you would want in an office format.

Huh? The formatting is there, and styles would appear to be kept. I've done thirty-page reports with graphics, styles, automatic TOC etc., and I don't remember losing anything saving them in RTF.

one luser who creates every one of his spreadsheets using M$ specific formatting that throws the OO conversion tool for a loop. I would switch the rest of us but we all have to be able to access his documents as he is the shop manager and he gets cranky when people don't read his crap.

If you just have to read his crap, you can always download the free Excel 2003 Viewer.

Of course, if you need to edit, you might be SOL.

Most likely Windows Automotive 5.0, but could be very likely that what controls the engine/powertrain and what tells the doors to unlock is completely different software, just as it is very likely that the door locks tell the Microsoft PCU software to disable when the car is at a certain angle, as someone mentioned before.

~o1

Since IE4, MSN search has been the default search engine in IE. It was released in 1997 and included in every OS since Windows 98. Explain how this has hurt Google at any point during it's entire history let alone today. Heck. Show me where this button has given MSN search a majority share in search engine hits.

Just noticed something. I Installed IE7 on another machine and went to Google. In the Upper right Corner, there's a box saying "Make Google your Default Search Engine! Click Here!" The link pointing to a program that will set it for you. Heck. Google didn't even have to make a program to change it since IE7 supports OpenSearch, Which works great since I went to This page and installed Google (and set it as my default when I installed it by checkmarking the default box) and wikipedia from there. It's actually easier to change search engines in IE7 than it ever was in IE4-6.

Google has so much brand recognition at this point that if anyone does use the IE7 search regularly, they'll probably switch to Google as their main provider since Google points it out and IE7 makes the switch stupid easy. The only way this would ever change is that Google royally screws up, or MSN search creates a search engine that is undeniably better than Google.

"They also dropped Monad"

Actually "Monad" is alive and well, now renamed to PowerShell.

You can download RC1 here.

"They also dropped Monad"

Actually "Monad" is alive and well, now renamed to PowerShell.

You can download RC1 here.

...sheesh, addicts...go figure.

For all we know, Microsoft or Google might have lost a billion in some bad internet investment and buried it somewhere in their P&L where nobody is looking.

Avanade probably comes close. Microsoft donated $500M in cash, and Anderson Consulting donated $500M in assets.

See: Andersen Consulting and Microsoft in US$1 Billion Pact To Form Joint Venture and Expand Global Alliance

They don't seem to have $1B anymore (filings). I interviewed with them in 2000 for a research position (creating best-practices for designing mobile applications), but they restructured the job away before the hiring decision (they decided the field devs should write whitepapers based on their experiences).

Disclosure: I now work for Microsoft, and opinions stated here are my own.

They are. Except for IMDB and Encarta. When you hit "Add search providers" it takes you to this page. If IMDB and Encarta supported OpenSearch, they could be there too.

Try here.. I believe #1, "Set Internet Explorer security level to High" is the recommendation that disables JavaScript.

Use the power of the market. Browse without ActiveX, use ffox's javascript restrictions, refuse to take cookies for anything but shopping-cart sites, use flashblock. That makes it profitable to build better websites, and helps run the crappy websites that require bad security on the user PC go out of business. You can be part of the solution, and all you have to do is ignore shitty sites!

Dunno if I buy that. See:

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/200 5/10/microsoft_will_.html
"QDOS became MS-DOS, ForeThought became Powerpoint, SoftDesign became Microsoft Project, Vermeer became FrontPage, PlaceWare became Live Meeting, Vicinity became a key part of MapPoint, nCompass Labs became Content Management Server, Bungie Studios became Halo, HotMail, Visio, Great Plains, Groove Networks"

Or...
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/win dows/story/0,10801,78739,00.html
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/m ar05/03-10GrooveQA.mspx
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/021405-micro soft-sybari.html

Follow these directions should you be afflicted with the Yahoo! Toolbar.

That toolbar is probably the portal for this Spyware and crap. You know, it comes with applications and installs itself (seemingly) sometimes. I've had to remove it countless times, the battle rages on.

Or you can just switch to Firefox. A new version is out, now's as good a time as ever!

But microsoft do not include google, or anything other than msn, in the default list...

We know that Google's in Firefox's default list because they were paid to include them. The Firefox drivers have stated as much. Do we know that that isn't the case for the remainder of the engines?

We also don't know if Microsoft is willing to take search engines given enough money or not. We do know that there's a "Get Engines" option in IE that links here, so it's not like they've completely shunned Google.

My question for these people is: what will this new OS do for you that isn't true right now?

Apply this question to any OS release, be it from Microsoft, Linux, Apple, or someone else. Generally there are things that people come to expect in the new release. Sometimes it's better security. Sometimes it's better stability. Sometimes it's improved networking, better utilization of CPU resources, or something else.

For a long time now, Microsoft has been billing Vista as The Next Big Thing. As they promised in their March 21 road map update, "Windows Vista will deliver great value to businesses by seamlessly connecting people to information, enabling increased mobile and remote productivity, significantly reducing deployment and support costs, and providing a more secure and compliant desktop platform. For consumers, Windows Vista will bring clarity to the world of personal computing, enabling people to more safely and easily accomplish everyday tasks, instantly find what they want, enjoy the latest in entertainment, and stay connected at home or on the go."

Microsoft's credibility has been sliding for years now. Regular everyday people are starting to realize that Microsoft isn't the only game in town. Apple is coming on strong and getting increasingly aggressive in its marketing of the Mac. The Linux user base continues to grow.

Microsoft advocates used to be able to claim that no matter what the technical limitations of the company's products, it was always run very well. Products shipped on time. You could usually figure that even if it was mediocre now, whatever Microsoft product you were using would probably be better in a year, and markedly improved in two or three years. That's certainly not the case now, and continued inability to deliver makes Microsoft a less reliable vendor.

If you always figured Vista wouldn't amount to much, the delay obviously won't matter to you personally. You could probably measure the slide in Microsoft's influence by the increase in lack of concern over Vista delays.

As for analysts, it sure would be great to get paid to engage in the same sort of random speculation we all do on Slashdot anyway. Hell, for reliable predictions about the technology market, I'd pick any ten Slashdot readers over any ten analysts any day.

My understanding was that Microsoft's party line is that the enterprise version would be ready in November, but that the consumer version wouldn't be ready until January, anyhow. I wouldn't expect that many businesses worry about Christmas gifts.

Am I the only one that thought the article summary was talking about this Bill?

That is 3.2 million consoles shipped worldwide. There is a claim of 1.5-1.7 million or so of those being sold in America, but there has yet to be any confirmation. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2005, the sales numbers for the 360 were 900,000 in America, 500,000 in Europe, and 100,000. Due to shortages in Europe and lack of interest in Japan, I personally don't think those numbers have not moved very much since the end of the fiscal quarter. MS Financial Report

For argument's sake, we could aproximately double all of those numbers just to get an idea for what may theoretically have been sold since then. We get that often touted 1.5-1.7 million in America (possible), 1.0 million in Europe (I find it a bit unlikely that they've got distribution enough to double sales there.), and 200,000 in Japan (Last I checked, they hated the system). That gives a total of 2.6-2.8 million world wide out of 3.2 million shipped. Which leaves us with anywhere from 400,000-600,000 unsold 360s. And I personally think the numbers are closer to around 2.2-2.4 million with about 800,000-1,000,000 unsold units. At least in America, it's a regional distribution issue. I live in southern California and it's not hard to find the systems but where my parents live in Ohio, it's near impossible. And in Japan, they are collecting dust. With all of that said, I don't think it's necessary incorrect to say sales figures are subpar. Miserable may be a bit sensational, but they are in fact subpar at best.

Microsoft did release Outlook 2001 for MacOS 9, but either renamed it Entourage or replaced it with Entourage for OS X (maybe part of the reason for the new name was to leave some of the Outlook stigma behind).

1. The title is actually "The Bad In Email (or Why We Need Collaboration Software)"
   
2. Steve Ballmer is not Microsoft's CTO...Ray Ozzie is (Steve Ballmer is the CEO).
   

1. The title is actually "The Bad In Email (or Why We Need Collaboration Software)"
   
2. Steve Ballmer is not Microsoft's CTO...Ray Ozzie is (Steve Ballmer is the CEO).
   

And yes, an MCSA / MCSE is still worth something. People say you can just glance at a book and pass it, but the thing takes 9 tests, some of which are so anal that you do actually have to study, and it helps to have seen it in practice.

It takes only seven tests, not nine: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcse/windows 2003/

Being MCSE on NT4, it took me only two tests to become MCSE2000 and two more for MCSE2003.

How many people do you actually know with an up to date MCSE?
About twenty people, (but i work freelance for different Microsoft training centers).

I know 1. I'm sure on slashdot a lot of people actually have one, or work with a lot of people that have one, but when someone says "Oh, MCSE is a breeze, 10 minutes of studying and I could take it", take them up on it, offer to pay the $100 if they can pass "Exam 70-294: Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure" or "Exam 70-285: Implementing and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003". I bet you 95 out of 100 can't do it without studying.

Yes you can, it takes at most an hour to study a braindump. I took 15 Microsoft exams, and never failed ( http://www.cobbaut.be/cobbaut.php?blad=cv ).

On the other hand, I am glad I'm back to being a Linux admin, where things make sense.
Same here! At least with Linux and Solaris stuff just works!

cheers,
paul

Sorry, forgot to add link.

Assuming you want to do it on PCs running Windows 2000 or later, have a look at this Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Protocol Security (IPSec).

For (Net)BSD, there's the IPSec FAQ

So what exactly is the problem?

I don't have the Sun JDK on my Fedora system by default because of the Sun license.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been adopting ocaml as the next big language. For once, Microsoft is technically ahead of its competitors -- ocaml (which Microsoft did not produce) is very fast and safe, and from a technical standpoint is much more impressive than C# and Java.

Plus, ocaml can be used as a pure functional language -- such languages eliminate almost all the reason to use (error-prone, difficult to guarantee correctness with) threads. Pure functional code is inherently parallelizable any time the compiler can say "hey, no data dependency here".

Ocaml is picking up quite a bit of steam -- there are a slew of open-source libraries for it out there, it's the only safe language that I'm aware of that provides performance comparable to C and C++, yadda yadda yadda. The INRIA ocaml compiler is open source (though, annoyingly, QPL instead of GPL). The runtimes and the stuff that you stuff into your code is LGPL. I didn't realize that Microsoft was backing it and integrating ocaml support into Visual Studio until quite recently, though. There have been gtk+ bindings for ocaml for a while, but MS may actually be ahead of the OSS world in providing complete ocaml bindings.

If you've never used ocaml before, wait until the first time you break in the debugger at a problem...and then step *backwards* to watch the problem occurring. It's simply delightful. :-) Plus, it's even more concise than C (which is saying quite a bit), is safe and garbage-collected, has very strict typing (I've heard one ML fan say "If your code compiles, it's correct" in only half-jest)...ah.

What's particularly satisfying is that C was well-designed -- for a specific set of systems and circumstances that don't apply to most application software development today. Ocaml is the first language in a long time that I've seen where I can say not just that the language has good ideas, but that it is really well-designed. It's also a lot better-suited to application development than C is.

Gah...sorry. Ocaml gives me the warm fuzzies.

1) Yeah, it's really so hard to download Java, I mean, where do I start? http://www.microsoft.com/java maybe? oh fuck, it worked. http://www.java.com/ maybe? Oh shit, it did. Hey, even http://java.sun.com/ worked, what is this?

2) Says who? It is a virtual machine afterall, and if you run more Java apps all of them won't use as much memory as the first one did. Also memory are cheap and who cares. It's a good and safe language and you probably ends up with less bugs.

It is very reasonable to run Java in Linux. It's harder/more painful/whatever in the BSDs but it works.

I think by "built into the OS" they mean it will be like a library usable by apps like iTunes.

Similar to, say, Avalanche?

http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/

"Find more providers" (drop down option in the search box) loads http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/de fault_new.mspx where you can find a whole bunch of search providers, including Google. When you click one it will pop up a dialog asking if you want to add it, which includes the option to make it the default right there.

Alternatively, if you go to google.com using IE 7 you have a not so subtle banner in the top right corner with an arrow that says "Make Google your search engine in Internet Explorer", click it and Google becomes the default.

Up-to-date security - If you're running Windows 95, 98, ME, or 2000 there are unpatched security holes on your machine. If you're running Windows XP, you may or may not be up to date depending upon your security update policy and what application you need and whether or not they work with specific security patches. If you are running any version of OS X you still get security fixes as they are rolled out. If you are running OS 9, well, there just isn't much pout there and isn't likely to ever be for a plethora of reasons.

As far as I know, Apple does not have a "lifecycle" policy for their OS. However, their unspoken policy seems to be to provide security updates only for the current version (10.4) and previous version (10.3) of OS X. According to Apple's "Apple security updates" web page, the last security update (or any OS update) for OS X 10.2 (released August 2002) was over 14 months ago. Since then, OS X 10.3 and 10.4 have gotten many updates.

Are users of OS X 10.2 still getting security updates like you claim?

Up-to-date security - If you're running Windows 95, 98, ME, or 2000 there are unpatched security holes on your machine. If you're running Windows XP, you may or may not be up to date depending upon your security update policy and what application you need and whether or not they work with specific security patches. If you are running any version of OS X you still get security fixes as they are rolled out. If you are running OS 9, well, there just isn't much pout there and isn't likely to ever be for a plethora of reasons.

As far as I know, Apple does not have a "lifecycle" policy for their OS. However, their unspoken policy seems to be to provide security updates only for the current version (10.4) and previous version (10.3) of OS X. According to Apple's "Apple security updates" web page, the last security update (or any OS update) for OS X 10.2 (released August 2002) was over 14 months ago. Since then, OS X 10.3 and 10.4 have gotten many updates.

Are users of OS X 10.2 still getting security updates like you claim?