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There's another article here, 'Windows Vista Capable PC Hardware Guidelines', which goes into a bit more detail (and is probably more up-to-date, the other one looks like it was written when 'Beta 1' came out).

Minimum system requirements will not be known until summer 2006 at the earliest. However, these guidelines provide useful estimates:

" 512 megabytes (MB) or more of RAM

  A dedicated graphics card with DirectX® 9.0 support

  A modern, Intel Pentium- or AMD Athlon-based PC."

So sandals and long hair are lost,
If the line of success will be crossed,
We must not forget
Success does not permit
Gifting vibrating eggs to the boss

Nevermind, i found the solution. Apparently it's outlook 2002 http://www.microsoft.com/office/previous/xp/column s/column01.asp

MS Coding4Fun - Randomly Opening CD Tray

Notice the screenshot?

For the third year in a row, Urgo's list of April Fool's Jokes on Websites contains the most complete list of April Fool's Day pranks websites have created. Featured by news.com.com.com.. and Microsoft, the site strives to list EVERY joke site, and is updated every few minutes with new verified jokes.

Here is a sample, the twenty most popular ones:
blog.outer-court.com - Google Rooms
thinkgeek.com - USB Tanning Center, RFID Blocking T-shirt, Grow Your mymsnsearch.com - fake (but hilariously accurate) search results gtachicago.com - gta chicago does not exist, (*hint check the whois info*)
tveps.net - Isaac 'Chef' Hayes not leaving southpark after all. Comes clean that it was a publicity stunt.
iwantoneofthose.com - tiny device that downloads your brain's memory to a 2GB USB Flash Drive
blizzard.com - BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT® PRESENTS BURGERCRAFT(TM)
bolloxcomics.co.uk - Myspace parody
figuiere.net - int is_computer_on(void)
wiebetech.com - 5 TB iPod
googlesystem.blogspot.com - Google Browser is finally launched. Installer 1.68MB
steampowered.com - VALVe purchased by Apple
slashdot.org - OMG!!! PONIES!!! (and pink layout)
ogrish.com - (NSFW) Bizarre Baby Born In Nepal
worldofwarcraft.com - Blizzard to put Wisps as a playable race for World of Warcraft.
gearlog.com - Laptop Lingerie: Bringing Tech & Pleasure Together
2600.com - 200600 google spoof
bungie.net - Bungie's next game, Pimps At Sea, progessing nicely for the Xbox360
forums.worldofwarcraft.com - World of Warcraft 1.11 patch notes leaked
theregister.co.uk - customise The Register to suit your needs - from blocking ads, to selecting the kind of stories you really want to read.

For the third year in a row, Urgo's list of April Fool's Jokes on Websites contains the most complete list of April Fool's Day pranks websites have created. Featured by news.com.com.com.. and Microsoft, the site strives to list EVERY joke site, and is updated every few minutes with new verified jokes.

Here is a sample, the twenty most popular ones:
mymsnsearch.com - fake (but hilariously accurate) search results
thinkgeek.com - USB Tanning Center, RFID Blocking T-shirt, Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom Kit, Caffeine Inhaler, and more
blog.outer-court.com - Google Rooms
gtachicago.com - gta chicago does not exist, (*hint check the whois info*)
tveps.net - Isaac 'Chef' Hayes not leaving southpark after all. Comes clean that it was a publicity stunt.
blizzard.com - BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT® PRESENTS BURGERCRAFT(TM)
iwantoneofthose.com - tiny device that downloads your brain's memory to a 2GB USB Flash Drive
bolloxcomics.co.uk - Myspace parody
wiebetech.com - 5 TB iPod
googlesystem.blogspot.com - Google Browser is finally launched. Installer 1.68MB
figuiere.net - int is_computer_on(void)
steampowered.com - VALVe purchased by Apple
slashdot.org - OMG!!! PONIES!!! (and pink layout)
ogrish.com - (NSFW) Bizarre Baby Born In Nepal
worldofwarcraft.com - Blizzard to put Wisps as a playable race for World of Warcraft.
gearlog.com - Laptop Lingerie: Bringing Tech & Pleasure Together
2600.com - 200600 google spoof
bungie.net - Bungie's next game, Pimps At Sea, progessing nicely for the Xbox360
forums.worldofwarcraft.com - World of Warcraft 1.11 patch notes leaked
theregister.co.uk - customise The Register to suit your needs - from blocking ads, to selecting the kind of stories you really want to read.

My proposal wasn't to encourage a new monopoly around Apple.

You might not want an Apple monopoly, but guess who does? If you think that Apple will pass up any opportunity to lock people into Macs over alternative platforms, you're deluding yourself. The only reason they can get away with it now is that Apple has as little marketshare as Linux.

Using, developing, and evangelizing for Linux right now, other than for your own personal fun, which I can't begrudge, is equivalent to voting for a third party candidate in the U.S. The best choice? Sure. But you're "throwing your vote away."

I would agree with you that Linux would be like a third party candidate if Apple had significantly more marketshare than Linux. But Macs do not represent nearly 50% of the country in the way a losing major party candidate does. They represent less than 5% of personal computers, with Linux not far behind. Furthermore, if Macs did have anything more than 20% of the market, you can be sure that many of Mac's porting problems would be solved by now, and the platforms that we'd need to encourage would be Linux and BSD. So, in reality, OS X and Linux are both "third party" candidates (should we say second?), since their marketshares are pretty similar.

I maintain my claim that people using Apple's closed office suite is a win for openness. Not directly, or immediate, but an important step. If enough people use Word Perfect, Apple's suite, or Star Office, that the general perception of a .doc as a universally readable format appropriate for exchange, archiving, etc decreases, then open standards and open source eventually fill the hole. (Initially, figuratively, in perception, and eventually, literally, in open source market share).

I can see why you're saying what you're saying, but it fails to solve the real problem. Is .doc a problem in itself? The problem is that it's closed. We need to replace that with, not another closed format, but an open one. ODF is what we ought to be pushing, not a second, equally problematic format.

> Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around

I may have misremembered that, I won't deny. But I believe the back-room politics that went on were more complex than that. (Sources welcome.)

MS stopped developing IE 5 in 2003. That is (as far as I know) all that the public knows about why it happened, so it is possible (though extremely unlikely, IMHO) that any "back-room politics" happened. Look at it from Microsoft's perspective. That browser was doing nothing for them; they weren't even actively developing IE for Windows at the time! So, they just cut the umbilical cord in 2003 and it died in 2006.

In short, the problem here is that you think OS X is far ahead of Linux both in terms of marketshare and technology. Its marketshare is within a percentage point or two of Linux's. At the moment, I will say Apple has considerably more advanced eye-candy (i.e., a hardware-accelerated windowing system (Quartz)), but beyond that, I see little more that it offers (and Xgl will be catching up with Apple soon). Nearly every problem Linux has that Apple doesn't stem from one (or both) of two things: Apple charges (lots) of money for its computers, and Apple hand-selects the hardware that it software runs on. Linux has to deal with the same problem Microsoft has to solve (running on lots of generic hardware) without the marketshare and clout that Microsoft can use to get hardware manufacturers to develop their own drivers.

As a Linux developer, I want to respect Mac users as well, since I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of software not being ported to your platform. However, the program I'm working on at the moment, while it has been ported from Linux to Windows (partially d

I just tried downloading it and installing.

It won't install unless you have the XNA thing on your computer. In fact even if you select to install the source on a non-C drive it will install 2GB of data on C anyways. I had to move a lot of data around in order to get it to even begin to install.

Then I get a cryptic error that it fails to create a DLL file. (MechCommander2Viewer.dll or something like that.) Turns out that if you don't have all the tools you're not welcome to install the program.

More info on how to resolve that on MSDN.

I found that you could begin the install, wait until it throws an error and then copy the source files in the background.

It is made with VS2005 and you can't open the files with anything less. I may be possible to use the Visual C++ Express 2005 (free) compiler to build it though. I may bring the source to work where I actually have VS2005 to take a look at it.

Hopefully someone will tire of this crap and put a de-stupified version of the source out there.

For the third year in a row, Urgo's list of April Fool's Jokes on Websites contains the most complete list of April Fool's Day pranks websites have created. Featured by news.com.com.com.. and Microsoft, the site strives to list EVERY joke site, and is updated every few minutes with new verified jokes. wikipedia also contains a sizeable list.

Sample:

tveps.net - Isaac 'Chef' Hayes not leaving southpark after all. Comes clean that it was a publicity stunt.

thinkgeek.com - USB Tanning Center, RFID Blocking T-shirt, Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom Kit, Caffeine Inhaler, and more

theregister.co.uk - customise The Register to suit your needs - from blocking ads, to selecting the kind of stories you really want to read.

worldofwarcraft.com - Blizzard to put Wisps as a playable race for World of Warcraft.

tvpredictions.com - Ready for X-ray TV? New TV picture technology even clearer than HDTV; you can actually see through people's clothing on TV.

blizzard.com - BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT® PRESENTS BURGERCRAFT(TM)

bolloxcomics.co.uk - Myspace parody

bolloxcomics.co.uk - YTMND parody

wiebetech.com - 5 TB iPod

sideshowtoy.com - Half a Darth Maul Figure Exclusive?

slashdot.org - OMG!!! PONIES!!! (and pink layout)

whirlpool.net.au - Telstra will only release 2mbit ADSL2+ in Australia.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com - World of Warcraft 1.11 patch notes leaked

mymsnsearch.com - fake (but hilariously accurate) search results

gearlog.com - Laptop Lingerie: Bringing Tech & Pleasure Together

googlesystem.blogspot.com - Google Browser is finally launched. Installer 1.68MB

sordeo.com - mirror image and the title says, 'Now optimized for those afflicted with Dyslexia'

eternal-lands.com - Free Software Foundation buys Eternal Lands

For the third year in a row, Urgo's list of April Fool's Jokes on Websites contains the most complete list of April Fool's Day pranks websites have created. Featured by news.com.com.com.. and Microsoft, the site strives to list EVERY joke site, and is updated every few minutes with new verified jokes. wikipedia also contains a sizeable list.

Sample
tveps.net - Isaac 'Chef' Hayes not leaving southpark after all. Comes clean that it was a publicity stunt.
thinkgeek.com - USB Tanning Center, RFID Blocking T-shirt, Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom Kit, Caffeine Inhaler, and more
theregister.co.uk - customise The Register to suit your needs - from blocking ads, to selecting the kind of stories you really want to read.
worldofwarcraft.com - Blizzard to put Wisps as a playable race for World of Warcraft.
tvpredictions.com - Ready for X-ray TV? New TV picture technology even clearer than HDTV; you can actually see through people's clothing on TV.
blizzard.com - BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT® PRESENTS BURGERCRAFT(TM)
bolloxcomics.co.uk - Myspace parody
bolloxcomics.co.uk - YTMND parody
wiebetech.com - 5 TB iPod
sideshowtoy.com - Half a Darth Maul Figure Exclusive?
slashdot.org - OMG!!! PONIES!!! (and pink layout)
whirlpool.net.au - Telstra will only release 2mbit ADSL2+ in Australia.
forums.worldofwarcraft.com - World of Warcraft 1.11 patch notes leaked
mymsnsearch.com - fake (but hilariously accurate) search results
gearlog.com - Laptop Lingerie: Bringing Tech & Pleasure Together
googlesystem.blogspot.com - Google Browser is finally launched. Installer 1.68MB
sordeo.com - mirror image and the title says, 'Now optimized for those afflicted with Dyslexia'
eternal-lands.com - Free Software Foundation buys Eternal Lands

I never thought I would become a Microsoft Outlook advocate, but after using Lotus Notes at work for the past two years, I bought a copy of Outlook and installed the Outlook Notes Connector just to avoid Lotus Notes.

The Lotus Notes client provides such a poor user experience. Just to name the most obvious problems: the menus are substantially different from other applications, preferences are hidden several levels deep in weird places, the toolbar buttons and the bookmarks sidebar are pointless, copy and paste doesn't work properly for things like addresses and names, the main window steals focus if you have X-Mouse/focus follows mouse enabled, HTML formatted messages aren't layed out correctly, and contact synchronization with my cell phone overwrites all numbers with the contact's work number. To make it worse IBM support doesn't want to know about any problems in the product and the online help isn't very helpful.

IBM needs to get its shit together before trying to push Notes. It would take a lot to make me consider it again.

Silly ISP to use Exchange this way. Exchange is more than capable of handling huge volumes. Microsoft runs on Exchange, duh, and they have more than 100,000 mailboxes. eBay has more than 10,000 email accounts running on Exchange with users all over the world. They run all of those accounts from three locations and cut the number of servers they needed by 70% with Exchange 2003. Look at http://download.microsoft.com/documents/customerev idence/11780_ebay_wss_case_study.doc for details. By the way, MSFT coincidentally announced an Exchange Hosted Service offering that might be more appropriate for the ISP. For more details go to: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/mar0 6/03-29EHSPR.mspx

Silly ISP to use Exchange this way. Exchange is more than capable of handling huge volumes. Microsoft runs on Exchange, duh, and they have more than 100,000 mailboxes. eBay has more than 10,000 email accounts running on Exchange with users all over the world. They run all of those accounts from three locations and cut the number of servers they needed by 70% with Exchange 2003. Look at http://download.microsoft.com/documents/customerev idence/11780_ebay_wss_case_study.doc for details. By the way, MSFT coincidentally announced an Exchange Hosted Service offering that might be more appropriate for the ISP. For more details go to: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/mar0 6/03-29EHSPR.mspx

another AC posted this: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/m ar05/03-10PatentReform.mspx

so learn more before you speak again.

Do a quick google on "Microsoft patent reform". First page you'll get is this.

You realize you can recode your sites to use JavaScript load the Flash objects from an external file, right, and thus avoid the "having to click a button" issue?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/workshop/a uthor/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp

So this is a payday for you. Your clients will pay you to recode the sites; and the recoding is pretty trivial, so it's almost like getting money for free. :-)

Well, having had a quick look at the MSDN article linked to from the eWeek article, it doesn't look like such a big deal.

If the object is instantiated by in-line code, it will still respond to scripting commands but will not respond to user commands until they click somewhere in particular. If an external "JScript" file (does it hurt that much to say "Java", M$?!?!), is used to instantiate the object, there is no change in the way the page will behave.

So, we can make minor changes to all our ActiveX control-embedding pages to keep them behaving the way they do now, or not. The world will not end.

Although doesn't Microsoft's own documentation say that you can use Javascript (in an external script file) to add the or tags to the document using document.write() (or something like that) and that the "click-to-activate" thing is circumvented by doing so? In which case, isn't the whole case pretty much a waste of time anyway?

You can find the changes Activating ActiveX Controls.

Seems like some simple work arounds for newly developed applications. Hate to retrofit all the existing stuff out there.

I spent some time reading Microsoft's 78 page PDF file from
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/legal/02-23-06R esponsetoECSO.mspx/ [microsoft.com]
It's hard to follow without the context of the original Statement of Objections to compare against. Does anyone know of a groklaw like website that is capturing all the publicly available legal documents on this case and organizing them in a coherent manner?

The message I get when reading it is that Microsoft says we're trying to comply but the commission is not cooperating and is biased against us and preventing us from bringing this to the Court of First Instance ("CFI") in Luxembourg.

Here are some of the more interesting snippets taken from Microsoft's document:

1. Hundreds of Microsoft employees and contractors have worked for more than 30,000 hours to create over 12,000 pages of detailed technical documents that are available for license today. In addition, Microsoft has offered to provide licensees with 500 hours of technical support and has made its source code related to all the relevant technologies available under a reference license.

3. The Commission continually changed its interpretation of what technical documentation was required by the vague language in the Decision, and refused to put its new interpretations in writing despite repeated requests from Microsoft [...]

4. The Commission has denied Microsoft's fundamental right of defence by prohibiting fair and full access to the file underlying the Statement of Objections, including correspondence between the Commission and the outside experts upon whose evidence the Commission relies.

9. The Commission refused to provide Microsoft a meaningful written statement, apparently because it wished to demand a broad scope of documentation, while, at the same time, preventing Microsoft from placing that fact squarely before the CFI in the appeal against the 2004 Decision (as substantiated by statements discussed in later sections of this Response). Microsoft, although dismayed by this gamesmanship, itself stated in writing that it would supply what it understood the Commission was requesting.

15. The Commission did not comment upon the 11 December 2004 draft documentation for more than six months, and then ignored the 8 August 2005 revision for several months more. Specifically, it never challenged Microsoft's description of the scope of the documentation that was being developed and supplied to the Commission.

18. With regard to the scope of Microsoft's Technical Documentation, the Statement of Objections claims that Microsoft has provided only "on-the-wire" protocol information, that is, information relating to how the protocols communicate information between computers in a Windows network, such as how data must be formatted by the sender to be read by the recipient, and how the meaning of the information transmitted can be understood. The Statement of Objections asserts that Microsoft has refused to supply a broader range of information which would help explain why the computers in a network communicate particular information and how the communicated information is used and with what results.

20. The usability problems asserted by the Statement of Objections relate to its ease of use. According to the Statement of Objections, descriptions of the proper sequencing of messages communicated between servers are not provided in a way "consistent with the kind of description commonly used in the industry" and in some instances are not provided at all.

24. The Commission has also contested the significance of Microsoft's voluntary offer to allow licensees to use the actual source code for Windows, even though the Commission itself demanded that the Trustee must be given the same code in order to determine Microsoft's compliance.

28. The Commission cannot have it both ways. If it claims that the Trustee and its consultants are merely acting as a constituent pa

Ever hear of browser detection?

if (Browser == IE) {
    ShowUltraCoolRendering
} else {
    ShowCrappyRendering
}

We're talking Exchange here. Corporate world. Where 99.9% of the browsers are IE, and the corporations have the ability to disallow anything but IE.

Other then the AntiTrust isssues :-) (which are iffy here since Exchange is a non-OS application), what's wrong with MS making their product look better on their own browser and worse on the competitors.

And remember, this is Exchange 2003, released October of 2003. Firefox 0.10 was released September *2004*.

#1) Here is a public website that explains exactly what's going on for users http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/techinfo /activexupdate.mspx. Disabling ActiveX has nothing to do with this update. This is entirely about Eolas winning a case about a stupid patent. As far as webdevs, you can code around this patent just by following the advice from Microsoft. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex .asp It's basically a three line change, unpleasant though it may be.
#2) EVERYTHING that does something similar to this is vulnerable to this patent firm. Firefox is vulnerable (and will be sued). Opera is vulnerable (and will be sued). Ditto Adobe, AOL, Apple and many many others. Plus, if they lose, major commercial companies are going to be vulnerable as well.
#3) EVERY browser has an extensibility model, and they can all be good or bad things (and frequently both). Here's a root level vulnerability in a massively popular add-on for Firefox that is cross platform http://mozdev.org/pipermail/greasemonkey/2005-July /004033.html. Blaming ActiveX is naive.
#4) I know this is slashdot, but people really seem to not even read anything about this. I highly encourage you to read up on it... especially realizing that you may ALL be vulnerable to lawsuits.

#1) Here is a public website that explains exactly what's going on for users http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/techinfo /activexupdate.mspx. Disabling ActiveX has nothing to do with this update. This is entirely about Eolas winning a case about a stupid patent. As far as webdevs, you can code around this patent just by following the advice from Microsoft. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex .asp It's basically a three line change, unpleasant though it may be.
#2) EVERYTHING that does something similar to this is vulnerable to this patent firm. Firefox is vulnerable (and will be sued). Opera is vulnerable (and will be sued). Ditto Adobe, AOL, Apple and many many others. Plus, if they lose, major commercial companies are going to be vulnerable as well.
#3) EVERY browser has an extensibility model, and they can all be good or bad things (and frequently both). Here's a root level vulnerability in a massively popular add-on for Firefox that is cross platform http://mozdev.org/pipermail/greasemonkey/2005-July /004033.html. Blaming ActiveX is naive.
#4) I know this is slashdot, but people really seem to not even read anything about this. I highly encourage you to read up on it... especially realizing that you may ALL be vulnerable to lawsuits.

Good grief folks, the sky isn't falling here. Just read http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/workshop/a uthor/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp and the changes that need to be made are trivial. Simply move the code with the OBJECT tags to an external script, make a few minor changes and reference that script. They show you a few different ways you can do it, and none of it requires a degree in quantum physics. The real issue is that the patent is stupid, and I had to laugh when I read an interview with Michael Doyle (the founder of Eolas) who kept referring to "we" and "us" -- as far as I know, Eolas has one employee, him. He's looking for a half-billion dollar plus payday for technology that the patent office should have ruled as obvious and there having being prior art. And his message to the world is "I don't give a damn if this screws up websites, Microsoft should just firehose me with buckets of cash and everyone else out there should be encouraging them to do that." Frankly, I applaud Microsoft for not writing him a check.

As another poster pointed out, they started charging for the abillity to access Hotmail accounts through OE in 2004 (you have to pay for an MSN subscription). According to to this knowledge base article, free access using OE stays possible only if the account had already been accessed through OE before the switch.

Addition: according to this knowledge base article, free access only works if you already accessed the Hotmail account using Outlook or Outlook Express before they switched to paid access. So you can't access an old account using OE for free if that account wasn't accessed throug OE before.

My account stopped working about a year ago. It was well after they made the announcement that they were not going to support hotmail accounts in Outlook, so I thought I dodged the bullet. Then I started getting the error messages. It's a shame, really, beacuse I was using Hotmail for years before Microsoft ever bought them out. This Hotmail plugin for Thunderbird intrigues me. Maybe I'll check that out.

Did they start charging for Outlook Express 6?

Microsoft's description of how to change your webpage is fairly simple. Many video sites I use already implement this kind of thing because they must be added to my NoScript whitelist to see the video. So on the surface users will see no difference, but underneath the web will be a bit more ugly since javascript will be used for no good reason. Thanks Eolas, you and your b.s. software patents have successfully made the world a worse place.

No, you should be able to code for the common denominator that both IE and Firefox support.

Sure you can. The common denominator is a subset of features on both browsers. If you have tried to develop for IE you'll see it is quite frustrating, while Firefox And Opera are on par with each other more or less. Check out the .StupidIEWidthHack on this css file from microsoft. This is a good example of basic things IE doesn't do. Anyhow, the point is not coding for the common denominator, but coding by standards and having the browsers be responsible for rendering the content right. I'm not saying you should not test your pages, but the burden today is on the developer to keep IE compatible with the content they want to display. IE is still relevant because it is tied with windows today.

Are you saying there is not a single common level of compatibility that both IE and Firefox can hit ? Because I find that difficult to believe.

Again you are missing my point. What I'm saying is that Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror are striving to stick with standards. You'll see that the common denominator for these browsers are quite a big number of features. When you throw IE in there, the number of common features/common way of writing things drops dramatically. The point was that the only reason you are bothering with IE to begin with is because 90% of people _surely_ have it.

Why?

Well, first of all the ideological reasons. What if microsoft drops support for windows or IE tomorrow, yada, yada, yada... But, aside from this, the argument is basically as above. IE is a major player because it is surely on 90% of systems, not because it is a good browser. It is quite restricting. When designing a website your goal is for any customer to be able to see it, even if he is on the net using a *nix system or a mobile browser. So in your analogy, web standards are the 'executable standard' of the net, and you are asking me why it is not ok to exclude the use of the heap. You can but you shouldn't _have_ to. :)

Or that IE provides functionality - or development abilities - that Firefox (and/or "standards") does not. If IE is either a) easier to target or b) more featureful in useful ways, then targeting IE specifically *does* make sense.

Name some features IE offers that cannot be done with, say, Java.

I've tried the "media experience" in Linux several times. "Hunting down codecs" is usually the *least* painful part of it.

Funny, everything just worked(TM) here. :)

Microsoft - as with every other vendor - have to provide a baseline level of functionality and capabilities with their OS. Both their customers and developers demand it. Shipping "every codec" is an impractical solution to this problem, since "every codec" is a fast-moving target (and that's completely ignoring any legal implications and/or additional costs).

I demand a DivX codec and a quicktime codec. Alot of people I know, know what nemo's codec pack is. Why should that be? I pay them more than enough for this cost to be integrated in my license.

It's also important to point out here, that what you appear to mean by "make it uninstallable" refers *only* to the player, and not the codecs. If you *are* referring to the codecs, then what you want to do will negatively impact the OS for basically everyone who matters.

Yes, I'm talking about the player only, just as I'm talking about the browser only. With out a browser or a player, an engine or a codec is useless. An alternate engine or codec(s) can be shipped with alternate browsers or players. I'm not against wmv or the IE engine themselves. Sure the IE engine is archaic, but wmv today is actually a good format. It's the unfair and illegal pushing microsoft does for these products I am against. If the market ultimately chooses wmv, I won't be

Take a look at Outlook Web Access. It is the web-based component to Exchange. It does pretty much everything Outlook 2003 does (If you have Exchange 2003) We use it very heavily for our remote users, but some internal prefer it to the Outlook client. It runs well in both IE and Firefox. Take a look here http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/featu res/OWA_Features.mspx

Bottom line is Microsoft will use this to "encourage" websites to move away from ActiveX and toward their next annoying proprietary technology.

Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.

Nobody here seems to acknowledge the true nature of this problem, because it has nothing to do with ActiveX being thrown away. This is simply a warm welcome to the exciting new world of software patents.

This ActiveX fiasco is a great example. The company holding the patent in dispute, Eolas, is an utter joke. They don't actually make or produce anything except patents. All they do is sit around all day thinking up stuff to patent. That's it. One of these great "products" is a patent dealing with the way embedded interactive multimedia interacts with the user. Part of the patent talks about how the media starts working and interacting. According to the patent, they own the idea behind having it start automatically or in response to page loads.

The truth is that this patent impacts open source software as well, and even though Microsoft presents a much juicier target than the Mozilla Foundation, they have equally "violated" this patent and OSS will feel the impact soon enough.

And THAT is what this is about.

Read this and tell me this whole thing doesn't stink like the deepest abyss of Hell. With more and more companies filing patents like nuts, this is the future of software development. Company X is going to spend as much as they did to develop the software just to make sure they don't get sued and have to pull it off the shelves 6 months after shipping. Then there's all the frivolous licensing fees to do stuff like make a Flash animation start when the page loads. How exciting!

There's nothing inherently wrong with ActiveX. It's based on the COM and is actually pretty nice for developing on Windows. ActiveX is just am implementation of an open standard and provides a way to more closely work with the host system. Firefox extensions are really no better, they can completely bork a system just as easily as ActiveX. In the end, when a user clicks "Install" they may have just signed their own death certificate and it doesn't matter what color the pen was.

In any case the whole thing boils down to an example of why software patents, in practice, are a terrible thing.

Have you tried the workarounds listed in the white paper?

Uh. The following update has been listed in Windows Update for about a week now:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912945

Microsoft will just recode WindowsUpdate to use Javascript to load the control from an external script file. This gets around the patent (and shows that the patent is useless and therefore idiotic).

See:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/workshop/a uthor/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp

I think it is fine. My initial concern came from here, when I saw the list of DTHML events disabled when ActiveX controls are disabled. I think they are referring to the fact that the ActiveX element itself won't generate these events. Not that these events will be unavailable in general. By the way XMLHttpRequest objects won't be affected by this change, as they are not elements that the user interacts with throught he GUI.

The patent is stupid, but so is the solution.

If you put ebmbed on the page itself it is covered by the pattent

If you write a script on the page which generates HTML embed on the page - its under the pattent

but

if you put a script in and EXTERNAL file, and call external file script which will generate html of the embed - its NOT covered by the pattent.

So the only thing will change is the way you code these activex embeds. Instead of or on the page itself you will write:

InsertMovie();

And stupid pattent has no effect on anything.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/workshop/a uthor/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp

I don't know about you but all this stuff about HT Technology and stuff is very confusing. Do I have that?

This just proves that Vista is unready for the desktop. I guess that's why they cancelled it. Har har! Har har. Har, har. *sigh*

Seriously, what exactly is DesktopBSD's website supposed to say? The thing you quote seems reasonable to me, anyone who doesn't understand it is unlikely to find any way of wording it useful anyway, unless it was worded in such a way that'd make it useless to an actual computer professional.

It's not like they'll be installing it. They'll be asking us to do it, as usual.

I don't know about you but all this stuff about HT Technology and stuff is very confusing. Do I have that?

This just proves that Vista is unready for the desktop. I guess that's why they cancelled it. Har har! Har har. Har, har. *sigh*

Seriously, what exactly is DesktopBSD's website supposed to say? The thing you quote seems reasonable to me, anyone who doesn't understand it is unlikely to find any way of wording it useful anyway, unless it was worded in such a way that'd make it useless to an actual computer professional.

It's not like they'll be installing it. They'll be asking us to do it, as usual.

Could anyone give a rundown on how it compares to Microsoft Office Live? Their beta came out earlier than Google's. :0)

You must have missed this page: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Lib rary/fcfb3f7d-b209-4bb8-a1ca-f5259b6d57191033.mspx

For x86 assembler, Intel is a good source of information: http://www.intel.com/design/Pentium4/documentation .htm#manuals. You'll want to check out volumes 2A and 2B at a minimum for reference material.

I would be surprised if Alexander used the Visual Studio debugger; more likely he used SoftICE or one of the Windows debuggers (NTSD/CDB/KD/WinDbg). SoftICE is a commercial product sold by Compuware and provides both user-mode and kernel-mode debugging. A version of the NTSD debugger comes with Windows, but is less useful than the one that comes with Debugging Tools for Windows. NTSD and CDB provide user-mode debugging, the only difference between the applications being that NTSD opens a new console window and CDB does not. KD is the kernel debugger. WinDbg provides the same functionality as NTSD/CDB/KD but with a (spartan) Windows interface.

Overrated? Tell that to my boss, who has Word 2000 and can't open the brochures I prepare in word 2003 (same office building, bad IT). So I end up downloading Portable OpenOffice because I have no administrative right to install a pdf printer, open my Word doc in OOo, fix it, export to pdf, and send that... And I get overrated. peh!

Geez, that sure seems like a lot of work when MS profides a free Word 2003 Viewer just for that exact same purpose.

Ever heard of using the Trusted Sites list in Internet Explorer? seems to work for me for per-site permissions.

Pointing them to the Free Word Viewer 2003 would maybe solve your problem somewhat easier. Or try a Word/PDF converter . Or use the default install document image writer printer driver in Word to save to TIFF file, if they haven't managed to remove it. (I'm guessing you have tried just saving the file as RTF..).

Pointing them to the Free Word Viewer 2003 would maybe solve your problem somewhat easier. Or try a Word/PDF converter . Or use the default install document image writer printer driver in Word to save to TIFF file, if they haven't managed to remove it. (I'm guessing you have tried just saving the file as RTF..).

And guess what the requirements for Vista is going to be?

There's no need to guess, the requirements have already been posted.

IIRC, the Singularity project is going to address some of these issues. Though I despise MS and have yet to see any true groundbreaking piece of code to come out of Redmond that wasn't stolen (DOS/C#) or purchased (Citrix/Visio), I think the Singularity project looks promising. I believe they will be running all machines in a virtual state, thus alleviating any current issues. http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/ Of course, you might need a Septium 24GHz quintuple-core AlienWare system with 5TB RAM to run it, but it will be faster.

what, like this? [official site]