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>> Microsoft has had a POSIX subsystem for ages. It's called Windows Services for UNIX, and it works quite nicely. It's not a new thing.

Just to drive the point home;

Where is fork() ?

Oh, and is fork() POSIX ? Yes, it is. CreateProcess doesn't really change that.

For students like me in engineering, computing and mathematics fields, where your university or college has signed up, Windows XP *is free* (as in money) via Microsoft's Academic Alliance programme along with a load of other MS products (SQL Server, Vistual Studio .NET etc). And yes, you can keep using the software after you leave your course.

Also, you forget it is differcult for the Linux community to 'innovate' when hardware manufacturers only really cater to Window's users. Afterall, software is only as useful as the hardware it runs on allows.

All said and done i'm a XP x64 and Gentoo dual booter :)

MS has had a site for Unix migration for a long time. Resources for UNIX Professionals provides various takes on migration. Plus, as has been noted, Posix has been part of NT at least since version 4 and perhaps even 3.51 although I'm too lazy to look it up.

Why do article submitters assume us UNIX guys know all the latest buzzwords and upstart companies in computing? For the uninitiated, Microsoft are a software publisher who sell a toy operating system called Windows.

Why do article submitters assume us UNIX guys know all the latest buzzwords and upstart companies in computing? For the uninitiated, Microsoft are a software publisher who sell a toy operating system called Windows.

eally, I don't know how Mac and Windows people work efficiently with many applications and no virtual desktops...

windows, mac.

But I find it interesting that (1) MS "abandoned" NetMeeting for the "new, improved" prodcut, and (2) our shop still uses NetMeeting--I guess they don't want to shell out more bucks for something that they have every expectation will "work just as well" as the old brand.

FWIW, the problems we have with NetMeeting is mostly with regard to frequent dropping signals, having to restart clients--and once, even having to restart the SERVER.

I did "attend" a presentation for which we paid to do some training, using Live Meeting, and the presenter had to restart their server twice.

They actually agreed to refund part of our cost for the presentation as a result.

Anecdotal, yes, but that's my experience.

Try it - you can only log in as administrator in safe mode. You can't "run as" administrator either.

Don't believe me?

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/get started/configure.mspx#EUB

You're welcome for the link to ClamAV. It started as a tool for people running Unix mailservers to have a useful tool for scanning for Windows malware like viruses and worms, and has since evolved to also do a good job of identifying phishing scams and other email frame-based exploits. ClamAV isn't perfect-- no anti-virus software is, apropos-- but it's worthwhile and certainly the price is right.

I wouldn't go so far to describe McAfee or Symantec as "crappy", but their track record has encountered far more than just one bad update. There have been other fairly significant problems with various anti-virus software over the years which seem to crop up every six months or so, you can hunt down some amusing articles on the Register for example, if you don't want to research the tech articles and knowledge base items in MSDN:

Search Results 1-10 of 1,153 containing Norton AntiVirus problem (0.14 seconds):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb% 3Ben-us%3B295824
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;265824
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;276504 ...etc, etc.

You're welcome for the link to ClamAV. It started as a tool for people running Unix mailservers to have a useful tool for scanning for Windows malware like viruses and worms, and has since evolved to also do a good job of identifying phishing scams and other email frame-based exploits. ClamAV isn't perfect-- no anti-virus software is, apropos-- but it's worthwhile and certainly the price is right.

I wouldn't go so far to describe McAfee or Symantec as "crappy", but their track record has encountered far more than just one bad update. There have been other fairly significant problems with various anti-virus software over the years which seem to crop up every six months or so, you can hunt down some amusing articles on the Register for example, if you don't want to research the tech articles and knowledge base items in MSDN:

Search Results 1-10 of 1,153 containing Norton AntiVirus problem (0.14 seconds):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb% 3Ben-us%3B295824
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;265824
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;276504 ...etc, etc.

You're welcome for the link to ClamAV. It started as a tool for people running Unix mailservers to have a useful tool for scanning for Windows malware like viruses and worms, and has since evolved to also do a good job of identifying phishing scams and other email frame-based exploits. ClamAV isn't perfect-- no anti-virus software is, apropos-- but it's worthwhile and certainly the price is right.

I wouldn't go so far to describe McAfee or Symantec as "crappy", but their track record has encountered far more than just one bad update. There have been other fairly significant problems with various anti-virus software over the years which seem to crop up every six months or so, you can hunt down some amusing articles on the Register for example, if you don't want to research the tech articles and knowledge base items in MSDN:

Search Results 1-10 of 1,153 containing Norton AntiVirus problem (0.14 seconds):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb% 3Ben-us%3B295824
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;265824
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;276504 ...etc, etc.

For all of you complaining about focus stealing, you should check out the MS powertoys, specifically TweakUI

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/power toys/xppowertoys.mspx

This is for XP, you can find your own version if you need something different, but Focus is one of the first sections for custimization and it's per-user. Or you could always do it the manly way and find the registry key yourself, but I know you're all lazy ;).

Now if only I could get my web browsers to stop moving my focus from the address bar to the form of whatever just loaded, google/yahoo/etc. I like having Google as my home page, but sometimes I just know where I want to go, but it moves me down to the search bar about half-way through typing in an address, and yes this happens for me on all 3 browsers that I've tried (IE, FF, Opera).

Enjoy Tweak, it's kinda nice sometimes.

TDV Vision v800xpt, though I'm not sure if they can be found for sale anywhere anymore.
http://www.advueu.com/003/productitem.php?id=36

You might get lucky and find one of the updated versions - if so, I highly recommend one with at least 512MB of ram.
Also, the speed (or lack thereof) of 800MHz Transmeta CPU really showed on the one I had. Even with all of the WinXP "graphical enhancements" disabled, it is slow responding at times, even drawing with the pen in MS Paint felt a bit labored.
As for the pen, I'm now much more in favor of the Wacom digitizers (which this model does NOT have), simply for the fact that the Wacoms don't require a battery in the pen itself.
I don't know about you, but I've never seen a rechargeable AAAA battery, and the non-rechargeable ones aren't terribly common or inexpensive, either.

Nowadays, there are some newer TabletPC's with similar sized screens, though you'll have to check the prices to see if they are in your budget (the v800xpt was about $900 when I bought it, far cheaper than anything else at that time, over 2 years ago)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/evalua tion/products.mspx
It looks like Fujitsu, Motion Computing, and Itronix all have TabletPC's in the 8.4" to 8.9" screen-size range now.

MacOS - OphoneX
Windows - Netmeeting

As for solaris, I believe it will run Ekiga/Gnomemeeting itself anyways (guessing but very probable)

"Hey guys, lets get a lot of photos of people pretending to paint, then copy and paste and rotate them a lot so it looks like a kaleidoscope!"

Looks more like they're bending over to me...

How else do you explain his Expression?

It seems the product do not even aim at being a photoshop-like application. Maybe this has changed since the beta, but the main purpose was vectorial graphism.

Microsoft is not even talking on its website about anything that could position it against Photoshop.
Just see by yourself

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/gr aphic_designer/gd_features.aspx
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/overview.h tml

When you tried to 'kill' another product, you generally start to match its features, in this case, both feature list have almost nothing in common.

For me that doesn't make more sense that saying Adobe Illustrator is a Photoshop killer.

BTW, this has already been discussed:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/11/185123 1

Nevertheless, AC is right. If it was relvealed that the local Administrator account or the domain Administrator account was stored anywhere as plain text in Windows 2000, XP, or 2003, then MS would be reamed endlessly and very harshly here.

Interestingly enough Microsoft did make pretty much the same mistake, with Microsoft SQL 7, both servicepack 1 & 2. They wrote the SQL administrator password to the installation log file, which would give you full access to any SQL database on the server. Written to a logfile in the TEMP folder, which by default has full read/write access for any user on the system.

Security bulletin: https://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulleti n/MS00-035.mspx

(The 'non-recommended' mode mentioned is using SQL authentication instead of windows NTLM authentication, which much more common then they try to make it sound)

IE does support event handling, it just doesn't work the official way.

It doesn't support event handling as defined by the DOM specifications. My comment is perfectly clear when you don't cut the quote off prematurely.

Referring to Internet Explorer's proprietary DHTML interface as a "DOM", while technically accurate, is misleading as in common use, the term "DOM" refers to the W3C specifications.

boohoo.

How about a little maturity?

As for memory leaks, FF DOM has the same kinds of issues.

a) No it doesn't, many Internet Explorer memory leaks are an artifact of the JScript engine being unable to refcount properly.

b) You implied that Internet Explorer had a "solid" DOM. That is not true regardless of the quality of Firefox's DOM. Internet Explorer's DOM doesn't get more "solid" if you distract people by talking about other browsers.

Clearly you were never forced to program anything to the Win32 API.

There's a common subset of functions available on both 9x and NT flavors of Windows. (With different bugs and sometimes different supported flags, different restrictions on use, etc). Then there's a bunch of functions that only work on NT-based flavors of Windows, not 9x-based. And the opposite is also true. Then XP came along, then Server 2003, each adding a bunch of new stuff to the API that Microsoft (unfortunately) did not go back and also add to the earlier versions of Windows.

There really are at least 3 distinct flavors of the Win32 API, and you have to be careful what functions you use if you want your program to run on all three of them.

For an example, check out the documentation for the CreateWindowEx function.

If you scroll to the bottom, they describe several of the differences in the behaviour of this function on different versions of Windows ranging from 95 to XP.

This situation could have been avoided if Microsoft had had the foresight to separate the Win32 API implementation from the rest of the OS so it could be upgraded independently.

I find it hard to believe that blogs have influenced the signal-to-noise ratio in a positive way, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have influenced negatively. Blogs simply provide more information to sift through; you do find gems, but you can do an awful lot of work to find them.

I'm going to make up numbers here, but the idea holds: 90% of people think they're good at something when in reality, only 10% are. (I believe there is a statistic in Code Complete about how many programmers think they can get away with flowcharts when few actually can.) Therefore, when I'm searching the web, I get results of the 90% when I only want the 10%. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are closer to 99% and 1%...

The bottom line is that blogs aren't going to help a whole lot until it's quite easy to sift the pearls from the sand, and current "popularity search engines" don't cut it. More information isn't very useful unless you can actually find it!

Microsoft bought the internet, remember? You can visit their new site at http://http/

LOL. And this is different how from what's published by the real deal MS Press? It's never ceased to amaze me how, at their most technical, most all publications read like advertising copy. As to the article, Bill describe his place in the era of live software with

Make no mistake, Windows Live is our strategic bet to change the game and win, while we grow and drive revenue with MSN.com

But on a somewhat related note, a Goldman Sachs analyst discussing Google's acquisition of Writely says:

We disagree with Microsoft's approach of ignoring the consumer market for a hosted solution and leaving the door wide open for Google to come in and establish a presence in the consumer or potentially the small business market... Strategically, it seems like Microsoft should have been more proactive in leveraging its strengths ..."

"You have a monopoly in one area and are trying to become a monopoly in other areas by not providing sufficient information about your APIs etc. to enable other companies to fairly compete with you in these additional areas."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/

Pure research like this and MS just do not go together.

Ummmm ... I'm as fanatical as the next /.er, but come on. Microsoft has plenty of legitimate theoretical research projects going on, just look at research.microsoft.com. And an issue like this one is obviously relevant to them, if they want to get their act together and improve security (or at least the appearence thereof).

No, the worst part is that they're right and we have a strong possibility of losing the freedom to use our own property in the ways we wish to. This research is a direct response to this TPM (formerly Palladium) initiative, and is intended to force TPM into future hardware;

Our first delivery on the vision is a hardware based security feature in Longhorn called Secure Startup. Secure Startup utilizes a Trusted Platform Module (TPM 1.2) to improve PC security http://www.microsoft.com/resources/ngscb/default.m spx

They even have a public research website

Apple has come out with 64-bit machines -- they're called G5s -- as you allude to in the last sentence quoted.

Yes, and people are running out in droves to buy a system that is essentially at the end of its life, while Apple markets the hell out of the faster the Intel chips! Come on, you know full well that it was implied that when I said "comes out with 64-bit systems" I meant 64-bit Intel systems. It is called context, and it is a basic part of the English language. I'm sure you have come across it before.

Apple released 32-bit computers because ... they had no choice. Intel's available chip lines were 32-bit and given that Intel can't supply Apple with enough parts to meet MacBook demand, it seems unlikely that AMD would have been a viable alternative.

Well this is just bad logic. Intel is supplying Core Duos to Dell, Gateway, Sony, HP, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and every other major manufacturer on the market, as well as Apple. AMD is supplying chips to several smaller vendors like Sun, Alienware, Boxx, and a few big guys like HP and Fujitsu. There is just really no clear reasoning that says that the company supplying a number of smaller vendors would not have been able to handle the capacity of yet another small vendor, just because the company supplying all the large vendors can't keep up with demand. Yes, AMD has a smaller production capacity that Intel, but then it isn't like Apple is selling tens of millions of systems a year. In fact, it could be argued that had Apple gone with AMD, they would have been one of AMD's largest contracts, so would have had a better pick of the production yield, whereas with Intel, Apple is one of their smallest customers, so has to wait behind the big boys. Also where do you people keep getting this idea that Intel only makes 32-bit chips? They have several 64-bit chips shipping right now.

Is supporting EFI in Vista such a difficult thing to do, or is Microsoft nervous about the impact on marketshare of dual-booting Macs?

Once again, this makes no logical sense. Allowing people to install Vista on Macs wouldn't hurt Windows marketshare, because it would mean people were installing Vista on Macs! Right now, people buy Macs, and MS doesn't get any money, unless they buy Office or something. If more people buy Macs, so that they can dual-boot Vista and OSX, they are still buying a copy of Vista! MS is getting MORE money than they would have otherwise. As far as supporting EFI being a hard thing to do, I keep saying the article is just plain wrong. MS is supporting, and even requiring EFI support in all their 64-bit OSs already. Look, here is a quote from the MS website:

EFI is a new standard for the interface provided by the firmware that boots PCs, based on the Extensible Firmware Interface Specification, Version 1.02 (Intel Corporation). Microsoft supports EFI as the only firmware interface for booting 64-bit Windows operating systems.

Because 64-bit Windows will not boot with BIOS or with System Abstraction Layer alone, EFI is a requirement for all Intel Itanium-based systems.

In addition to protocols required in the EFI specification, Microsoft recommends that the firmware also support PXE_BC (remote/network boot), SERIAL_IO, and SIMPLE_NETWORK protocols as defined in the EFI specification. Support for these protocols is required by the "Designed for Windows" logo program for 64-bit systems.

If you still don't believe me, here is the link http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/64bi t/64bitsystems.mspx

This whole notion that MS is somehow daunted by EFI is just insane! EFI started in the PC world, it is supported in the PC world, and that means it is supported by MS. I don't know if the guy in the arti

Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server.

EFI is a new standard for the interface provided by the firmware that boots PCs, based on the Extensible Firmware Interface Specification, Version 1.02 (Intel Corporation). Microsoft supports EFI as the only firmware interface for booting 64-bit Windows operating systems.

Because 64-bit Windows will not boot with BIOS or with System Abstraction Layer alone, EFI is a requirement for all Intel Itanium-based systems.

In addition to protocols required in the EFI specification, Microsoft recommends that the firmware also support PXE_BC (remote/network boot), SERIAL_IO, and SIMPLE_NETWORK protocols as defined in the EFI specification. Support for these protocols is required by the "Designed for Windows" logo program for 64-bit systems.

Hmm, according to the Microsoft page, it is not only supported, it is required for any 64-bit installation on an IA-64 system. So some guy at Microsoft either misspeaks, or gets confused or whatever, and says that no version of Windows will support something that is not only supported, but required by Microsoft on all current 64-bit Windows OSs, and the /. crowd uses this as an excuse to go on about how incompetent and behind the times MS is.

Microsoft Exec : "I just plugged in this USB memory stick, any USB memory stick, and as soon as it recognized it, we just got another 500 megs of memory on this machine.)"

The fact that GPL requires a lawyer to describe what you can and can not do with software is scary enough for businesses. "If we compile our proprietary software with gcc, do we now have to distribute the source?"

You should check that with other compilers, too. The last commercial compiler I bought (a version of Borland C++) came with a list of exclusions to the license that meant any given project may or may not be legal to distribute in binary form if compiled by it, depending on what kind of software it was. I forget the details, but I recall that "operating environments" (which could have described what I was developing at the time) were not permitted, and I think anything that competed with a Borland product may have been excluded.

GCC's fairly simple: all you need to do is read the licences in question (there are two, the one for GCC itself, which is traditional GPL, and one for 'glibc', which is GPL plus an exception to the requirement to license any product linked with it under the GPL) to realise that the answer to your question is no. Anyone reasonably well educated can do it. Certainly any experienced and competent IT manager ought to be able to.

"If we include the GPL'd drivers for the left-handed USB Framis, are we compelled to release our source, or just the driver's source code?"

A slightly more complex question, but it's still reasonably simple to answer. Read the license. It outlines cases where this is necessary in very clear (although admittedly technical) terms. Also note, most businesses would probably ask a lawyer to check the license terms on any product that they purchased the right to use like this anyway.

Businesses do not like confusion. The government gives us all that we can stand, so adding in an obscure, vision-inspired license doesn't make us comfortable.

I think the only way you can describe the GPL as obscure is if you haven't read it. The GPL v2 is very easy to read, and the GPL v3 draft is even easier.

Compare it with other organisations redistribution licenses, e.g. the Microsoft .NET framework EULA, or the even harder to understand Intel Performance Primitives Library EULA.

My thoughts too. There is a Linux BIOS project. Could something be written that makes EFI boot into a Linux BIOS which then allows Vista to be booted?

That would be the biggest boot salad ever seen!

I mean, Real ROM -> EFI -> rEFIt -> eLILO -> Linux BIOS -> Vista!!!

Here's a good solution. Not 100% sure they'll release one for Intel, but then they surprised me and released one for the G5, so I'm guessing it's coming.

Microsoft will have to support EFI in NT 6.0 (consumer version is called Vista) if they are to continue to produce the Itanium server version:

EFI firmware is required for 64-bit Windows on Intel Itanium-based systems.

This is about as significant as Microsoft not releasing a PowerPC version of Vista.

Nope, this is much less significant.

Such announcement would be a huge boost for IBM and Motorola (the PowerPC makers), especially given the kick they have just taken from Apple (who for 15 years were 1/3 of the PowerPC trio of backers).

A revival of Microsoft OS support for the PPC processor family in Vista (NT 6.0) would be a huge deal, given that they dropped it from NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) and NT 5.1 (Windows XP and 2003), after it was supported in NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 (up to SP3, at least).

FYI, here's a snippet from Microsoft's NT 4.0 docs:

Portability means that Windows NT runs on both CISC and RISC processors. CISC includes computers running with Intel 486 or higher processors. RISC includes computers with MIPS R4000or Digital Alpha AXP, or PowerPC processors.

Vista is only going to run on x86, x86_64 and Itanium processors, but the odd thing is that it will need EFI support to boot on the latter anyway. Maybe MS have some toe-stepping avoidance deal with Apple?

There's a cool demo of a simple web-based word processor done in PHP, Javascript and XUL.

Which is to say, he figured out how to call "document.designMode = 'On';" and use execCommand to make his toolbar buttons work. (The font sizes listed in 1-7 are always a dead giveaway.)

I'm not impressed.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/umpc/wowthatsug ly

I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but their InfoCard system is clearly the right answer for Firefox. InfoCard built into Firefox would not only put it on equal ground with Vista/IE 7, it would provide a consistent user experience and user control over identity when visiting web sites, and most importantly would offer bulletproof protection against phishing.

InfoCard would accomplish this by using the OASIS-ratified WS-Trust protocol to pass tokens generated from InfoCard meta-data through an identity selector that positively identifies web sites running instances of a security token service that signs the tokens using a public/private key pair. If the InfoCard-enabled user visits a web site that is masquerading as a valid web site, the identity selector on the local machine pops up a dialog box informing the user that the keys don't match and gives the user a choice whether to divulge his/her identity.

This is strong-ass protection against phishing, and InfoCard/STS/WS-Trust/IE7 will ship with every copy of Vista, quickly becoming a de facto standard as Vista takes hold. If Firefox wants to play with the next generation of Internet identity and security, it needs InfoCard support, period. The only hangup is that InfoCard is proprietary to Microsoft, but I'm sure someone will get around to building an open source reference implementation for Firefox . . . I can think of a group who is up to the task.

........ kris

I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but their InfoCard system is clearly the right answer for Firefox. InfoCard built into Firefox would not only put it on equal ground with Vista/IE 7, it would provide a consistent user experience and user control over identity when visiting web sites, and most importantly would offer bulletproof protection against phishing.

InfoCard would accomplish this by using the OASIS-ratified WS-Trust protocol to pass tokens generated from InfoCard meta-data through an identity selector that positively identifies web sites running instances of a security token service that signs the tokens using a public/private key pair. If the InfoCard-enabled user visits a web site that is masquerading as a valid web site, the identity selector on the local machine pops up a dialog box informing the user that the keys don't match and gives the user a choice whether to divulge his/her identity.

This is strong-ass protection against phishing, and InfoCard/STS/WS-Trust/IE7 will ship with every copy of Vista, quickly becoming a de facto standard as Vista takes hold. If Firefox wants to play with the next generation of Internet identity and security, it needs InfoCard support, period. The only hangup is that InfoCard is proprietary to Microsoft, but I'm sure someone will get around to building an open source reference implementation for Firefox . . . I can think of a group who is up to the task.

........ kris

"it covers only code that implements, precisely, the Microsoft formats, which means that a program under this license does not permit modification"

"it covers only code that implements, precisely, the Microsoft formats, which means that a program under this license does not permit modification"

Link, please? I don't think you are correct.
MS FAQ

And once you've lost a user's confidence, it's hard to get it back. Just ask Microsoft.

Bill, can I be confident that Vista will not have any security holes?

Yes you can, just make sure you buy Vista Ultimate. It is the best one that we offer.

Yikes. The pic on this MS press page looks eerily like a Newton...

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/m ar06/03-09Mobile.mspx

I love them, but they're neither fish nor fowl, they can't fit in a real pocket and aren't enough like a pad of paper. When it gets to 8.5 x 11 x .5 and 3lb, we'll treat it like a true book or notebook and use it for everything.

As long as they think they're breaking ground, when is someone with a "full" OS device going to give us if nothing else a piece of paper screen factor, because let's face it - we're still tied to pieces of paper for handling and output and the sad legacy of 24x80 CRT for display... seems easier to munge the screen than the paper or our brains.

Man, the press thought the Apple event was a non-starter, this looks like the headline of the day is "Yippee - Another Newton | Tablet | eBook"

Check out this one: "View, Listen, Pay".

It's also a pretty good example of a boring and ugly interface. I hope Apple makes something like this soon.

Microsoft use Photoshop? No, that Acrylic!!
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/gr aphic_designer/default.aspx

"When Microsoft starts leveraging their monopoly on your search and ad business, do you think the DOJ will give a rat's ass when you complain to them?"

I think that that would be the intergrated search feature in Vista.

'Search
Users can search documents, e-mail, contacts, and Web sites right from their desktop. Windows Vista searches are not limited to the local computer and can include shared folders, and other network resources. For all those times users think, "I know I've seen that somewhere, but where was it?" search capability makes it easy to find the content that user is looking for.'

speaking of pictures..

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/umpc/howtobuy.m spx

anyone notice how horrid Microsoft seems to be with photoshop? The screen isn't even on the device! Or maybe that's a new feature... able to move the screen around off of the device.

Someone's gonna get in trouble over that ;p

I doubt he would too since this thing runs Windows XP

There are two Vista concepts at play here, SuperFetch and External Memory Devices (EMDs).

"Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. USB flash drives can be used as External Memory Devices (EMDs) to extend system memory and improve performance without opening the box. Your computer is able to access memory from an EMD device much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive, boosting system performance. When combined with SuperFetch technology, this can help drive impressive improvement in system responsiveness."

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/for everyone/performance.mspx

SuperFetch can apparently use an EMD as additional ram and "A unique algorithm optimizes wear patterns, so that a USB device can run as an EMD for many years, even when heavily used.". I think that I'd take it with a grain of salt until I saw it working, this is still marketing fluff as the USB support won't be available until a later preview version of Vista (http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=20 100).

I am curious about the Hybrid Hard Drives mentioned in the article on the Microsoft site. Anyone know which manufacturers are developing hard drives with a large flash cache?

LOL, facts.... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303247/EN-US/ Thats funny, there is code in one file, and in two files just like I said, obviously you know what you're talking about. Really no client apps? http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2004/11/01/25 0823.aspx Hey, you know what keep believing everything you read and being a misinformed fool.