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If he's registered as disabled, then your taxes should be paying for that software - that's why it costs hundreds of dollars...

Anyway, I don't know what software it is, but have you considered the free magnifier powertoy? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/power toys/xppowertoys.mspx

Discounts, site licenses, lies; won't somebody please run Windows on a supercomuter? Pleeeeaaaaase.... we really want to leverage the PR....

They are still authenticating their ISO images with CRC... Maybe they should upgrade to MD5... (SHA-256 maybe too advanced for then...)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/ install/

"I'd try to take over the pocket calculator or security alarm markets."

Didn't they already try that with embedded windows - sorry, but this is the best link I could find:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/

Kaminsky downplayed MSFT's ability to lead the effort, but frankly they are in the best position to take action on this. They have the distribution channel to the greatest number of impacted systems. It wouldn't have to be through AntiSpyware - they could release a 2000/XP/2003 patch that specifically hunted this down and removed it or could bundle it into a Malicious Software Removal Tool marketing push -- http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/de fault.mspx

They could even blame Sony for any system crashes and ill effects from the system cleanups - a PR coup!

Korea would be remiss to switch off of Windows, now that Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems is available. And from what I hear, it's not the same ol' song and dance.

But as it is, their competitors (well, competitors in a sense) are going to remove the rootkit for us.

I don't get it, why are they using Kontiki P2P when Microsoft Avalanche P2P technology is a much better alternative?

  http://research.microsoft.com/~pablo/avalanche.htm

Avalanche is an improvement over BitTorrent for file distribution. There's a good research paper on it at:

  http://www.research.microsoft.com/~pablo/papers/nc _contentdist.pdf

which is capably summarized in the following Register article:

  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/16/filesharin g_microsoft/

I don't get it, why are they using Kontiki P2P when Microsoft Avalanche P2P technology is a much better alternative?

  http://research.microsoft.com/~pablo/avalanche.htm

Avalanche is an improvement over BitTorrent for file distribution. There's a good research paper on it at:

  http://www.research.microsoft.com/~pablo/papers/nc _contentdist.pdf

which is capably summarized in the following Register article:

  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/16/filesharin g_microsoft/

You jest, but Microsoft actually does have a horse in this race.

Could not find list prices for Vietnam. I should say, I found http://www.microsoft.com/vietnam/licensing/pricing / but it's in Vietnamese and I did not quite study that language / alphabet.
I have worked for a Microsoft distributor in an Eastern European country in the early 1990's and the list prices for localized software were around 10-20% from the US prices if my memory serves me right. The US version was still at the US price.
For Southeast Asia, I found this article
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/08/tech/mai n621724.shtml
showing how Microsoft dropped prices for an XP Home + Office XP bundle from 19500 baht to 1500 baht (USD 38). Yes, it's a special offer for the Thailand's Information and Communications Technology Ministry, but you can see the discount range they will go to in a poor market.
If Microsoft sells in Vietnam at US prices, they are lunatics - but they have been working in the international market for too long of a time to be that stupid.
The article (and the summary) seem to me to be faulty research accepted without any attempt to check its validity. Just because someone properly cites its sources does not mean that their data is the right data or their conclusions are correct.
Anyway, without a english version of the Vietnam price list we cannot analyze this further, and I do not have one.
Happy Posting.

Do you know exactly the price of Windows XP and Office suite in Vietnam? There are no discount as far as I know. The prices of Windows XP Pro and Office 2003 Pro are $351 and $486, respectively. You can found them here http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/2/4/d240b f43-7cf0-45a7-ae43-b64115d2a442/VietPriceListWebNo nAE.xls. The current GDP of Vietnam is about $300.

When I come across WMV files that don't play in mplayer OS X or VLC, guess what I do? I open them in Windows Media Player for OS X. And it usually works (assuming my lowly ibook/600 can keep up). Shocking, isn't it?

Advertisers have no idea if people are actually listening to podcasts, or if they're just downloading them and never playing them back, so there's no guidance for pricing the accompanying ads. "Prices -- people have been making them up," he says.' Let's keep it that way. Now the advertizers know how to feel how it is to be cheated. Please.. Why not just podcasting for the joy of it.. Keep yous shows real and ban out all the advertisement and privacy problem shit. Lets keep up raising the prices for advertisers-> the more we will actually hear and see what we really want to hear and see. This message was sponsered by The Dump-Mental-Waste Company.. Please see our website at http://www.microsoft.com/

It's simple really, stability comes from donning Window's brand new chainmail +5 vs. malware. http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/default.m spx?Ad=SAH.Abby.00044&id=A/

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/academia/ Take a look at the Microsoft AA program, its a small price to pay for the school to provide a wealth of software for the students

Actually, that's not too far from the truth. MS has a campus in Mt. View, within walking distance of Google's campus.

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/no rthernca/siliconvalley.mspx

Nice start, clearly styled after Microsoft's Office demos. However, these OpenOffice videos seem slightly unprofessional and cover the sort of topics that most users don't need help with. Clearly, for initiatives like the one in Massachusetts, a repository of advanced videos should be made available (see the variety and, more importantly, the relevance of the demos at the above link).

A few basic videos won't sway anyone.

But hey, maybe the whole state of Massachusetts will buy your book, right Roblimo?

If you actually read the .pdf file you will see that, thread/wait (synchronization) (which is the most important component of any high-perfromance multi-thread server application) operations are faster than on windows than linux or freeBsd.

Thread Synchronization -- MSDN Magazine, October 2005

MsgWaitForMultipleObjects doesn't have anything to do with the GUI. It is for message passing.

Point 10).. Just to prove it is not just the XBox 360 with bad PR which sreams "We are clueless and lame", does this marketing really persuade anyone to upgrade to the latest Microsoft office http://www.microsoft.com/office/evolve/default.msp x?

C# is not an OS (Windows) dependent language. It is a platform (ie - Intel x86) dependent language.

I.e., there exists no native CLR for IA-64 (or any other instruction set), and there cannot be one? Are you certain of that?

If you aren't doing any tasks like that which require Windows, the raw machine code (or bytecode, I don't know which is the correct term) can just execute on the x86 processor.

Are you asserting here that the raw machine code into which C# is compiled is x86 machine code? It's not - it's Microsoft Intermediate Language, which gets translated to machine language before the code is run.

I'm the farthest from a Microsoft apologist ( i hate them ), but

They have the Singularity kernel in development, as pointed out here on /. a few weeks ago. The official site is: http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/

So perhaps they are moving in such a direction.

UNIX creates a process with fork, which takes no arguments. UNIX runs a new executable with execve, which takes 3 arguments. So in just two system calls with 3 arguments, you launch an app.

Windows has a CreateProcess() function with 10 arguments, many of which are pointers to structs. I call your attention to the absurd "LPSTARTUPINFO lpStartupInfo " argument, which supplies info about the windows style and current desktop.

ah, schizophrenia...
http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport

That is scary but true. Googling for the official Microsoft FAQ on eulas, states that if it is an OEM install and the license affixed to the machine, then you are out of luck http://www.microsoft.com/singapore/staylegal/faq/d efault.aspx#LostEULA/

Here

Now that you're done being sarcastic, go look into some of the research that is being done at Microsoft Research. Like it or not, it is top of the line work. They're at the cutting edge, and they're well financed.

I still think alot of game systems get relegated to secondary TVs in other rooms

I agree that that is a rather typical situation, which is why Microsoft in particular is taking great pains to position the 360 as a digital media hub suitable for the family room. Whether they succeed or not is anybody's guess, but they are certainly targetting your demographic this time around.

I don't really know, but I think the threat of a lawsuit kills most lawsuits. I mean has anyone challenged this in court?

"1.3 Device Connections. You may permit a maximum of five (5) computers or other electronic devices (each a "Device") to connect to the Workstation Computer to utilize one or more of the following services of the Software: File Services, Print Services, Internet Information Services, and remote access (including connection sharing and telephony services). The five connection maximum includes any indirect connections made through "multiplexing" or other software or hardware which pools or aggregates connections. This five connection maximum does not apply to any other uses of the Software."

I know what they mean, but couldn't that be turned around to mean I can only connect to five computers on the internet? Worst of all, doesn't it make file sharing illegal to run on a XP Home computer as you are providing an information service?

And thats from the XP Home EULA (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx )

But before we even get there, basic economics would have that software is just not a market which lends itself to natural monopoly. Think infrastructure and startup cost:

The cost of a freely-downloadable compiler from Microsoft or GNU, for Windows or *nix, respectively?

The cost of a new, off-the-shelf desktop box is now down around $200, last I checked. Even a high school kid can afford those startup costs!

The software industry has one of the lowest startup costs of any I can think of; that's one of the things that attracted me to it (I can experiment in software, break things, etc. without costing me a dime, but the same is not true in the physical world of, say, mechanical engineering).

Now this is absurd, uncalled for, and a total cheap shot. It's obvious you know nothing about anarchism, or you'd realize that the definition of anarchism is irrelevant to violence.

Anarchism != violence, you are correct. One does not *necessarily* cause the other.

But in every instance of anarchism I'm aware of, violence has been a part of that instance. That creates an awfully-strong correlation factor.

It may have been a bit of a cheap shot, but given the then-parent's promotion of an-cap philosophy in their sig, and given the post's tendency towards that philosophy, it really wasn't much of a stretch.

Anarchism simply means the lack of a "right" to initiate force as a means to an end (i.e. government): that "right" is voluntarily banned from society.

True.

Are you really going to claim with a straight face that it is "impossible" for a group of human beings to live peacefully without some of them posessing the "right" to coercion over others?

There is no such natural right to coercion, that is true. The right of coercion is an artificial one.

But in order to impose a certain amount of order, a certain amount of coercion is necessary.

Consider, for example, the case of an infectious disease outbreak -- avian flu, to be timely. What do you do if such a disease starts spreading rapidly throughout a city? Let the disease run its course and kill thousands or millions, or quarantine those affected such that perhaps only a few hundred die?

Assuming we care about human life, the reasonable response, based on the simple cost-benefit analysis with the goal of minimizing deaths, is to quarantine those people, perhaps against their will -- as un-free a response as that is. But it is a case in which if that action is not undertaken, more people die.

It should be a strictly-limited procedure, of course, and the ability to implement such procedures should be dictated by the public, i.e. via a democracy or republic. But that is already the case in the U.S. and most developed nations around the world.

Another example is that of air pollution. Do we allow people to pollute as they please and wait for the lawsuits to show up at everybody's doorsteps demanding compensation for each given day's worth of inhaled smog? That is grossly economically-inefficient: one person mailing every other person on the roadway at their time of driving -- even assuming that one person could record and look up everybody they were driving near -- and iterating that person's experience over every other person in the city, is algorithmically-retarded; it is a many-to-many operation; an n^2 algorithm, in fact (if you have never studied computer science, then understand at least that n^2 algorithms are the worst-performing class of *common* algorithms there are). And, as a society, we certainly don't want our courts choked with such cases.

No, instead, we require catalytic converters on automobiles, and we require emissions checks.

"But that's force!" you cry... Yes, it is. Bu

The Netscape Web browser implements a proprietary technology known as Server Push to send a type of dynamic page updates to a client. This technology is not supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer. However, you can use Server Push with Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), or you can Client Pull as an optional method of displaying dynamic page updates in Internet Explorer.

I agree with your sentiments, but the educational version of Word (for teachers and students) can be had for about $25. The entire Office suite is ~ $125.

I can't seem to find Word for $25. There's a Student and Teacher edition of Office ($125 or $130, depending on platform), but no corresponding edition of just Word. The Student and Teacher Edition page doesn't even mention the product: I guess it goes without saying that only all of Office is available this way, today.

When I bought Office a couple years ago (when I was at a university), I bought all of Office. And I remember why: because all of Office (with the educational discount) wasn't much more expensive than one piece. It was something like $100 per program, or $125 for all four. I only needed one, but I could imagine that I might need two of them at some point in the future, so I splurged.

If you can show where to find Word for $25 (legally), I'm sure a lot of people would be interested.

That's true, but according to court findings,Microsoft threatened in 1997 to stop support for Office, and used that threat to force Apple to bundle Internet Explorer as part of their campaign against Netscape.

Shortly thereafter is when Microsoft recommitted to the Mac for five years as in the infamous Jobs/Gates presentation, as part of the deal where Microsoft invested in Apple and paid to get off the hook for several of Apple's patents they had been violating.

Microsoft may be able to succeed in this by rigging their OS so that it only works right with their ASP systems. But that didn't work for MSN. Nor was the Microsoft Connected Services Framework a success.

It may also be possible that they could force your customers to register for the right to use your software (so they know who to 'go after', in cutting off your air supply).

And, of course, if your company gets bought out, your license disappears.

I can see lenders and shareholders running screaming from any business that embarks on a major undertaking, having accepted these terms. You would have to be either foolish or desparate to do so unless you could recoup the full cost of your endeavor with your first contract (which could raise the cost of your contract, making you non-competetive).

Unlike the ODF, which (contrary to MS's FUD) does not place any restrictions on a company using it(*), Microsoft's XML license would leave any company accepting it at the abject mercy of a convicted monopolist.

Good luck. You'll need it.

(*)Unlike KOffice (which also implements ODF), Open Office is LGPL, which means that a company could legaly compile in proprietary extensions to OO without having to release their own code. That is, in fact, precisely what SUN does with StarOffice. This opens up opportunities for local vendors that would never be available under MS-Office.

The iRiver H10 is one of iRiver's flagship products. If you hate vendor lock in stay far away from this piece of junk. At first glance it's a really beautiful product, crisp screen, nice volume slider, but it has a lot of flaws ranging from physical design flaws to good old vendor lock in. The H10 uses MTP, Media (read Microsoft) Transfer Protocol. Microsoft's MSDN web site seems to indicate that MTP can work on computers running 98/ME...XP, but iRiver has chosen to further lock people into Windows XP, by also requiring Windows Media Player 10, and at least Service Pack 1. (I tried with both, but found it didn't work until I updated to SP2 with a few additional updates). This leaves out Windows 9x-XP (pre SP1 users), MacOS users, Linux users (though I heard there was some chatter about trying to get something that would work with MTP in the kernel, but I think it got shot down because of licensing issues). More on MTP here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsmedia/downloads/d efault.aspx I won't rant about the design flaws, since the issue is vendor lock in, but who's to say that when Vista comes out iRiver won't drop support for the H10? Cheers

You can restore your licenses on a maximum of two unique computers. If you replace hardware components in your computer or reinstall the operating system, Microsoft considers the changed computer to be a new unique computer.

You won't find it written anywhere but Microsoft gurantees that you're machine will not crash (BSOD) if you use certified drivers and MSI installed software.

So on the one hand, we have you claiming that there's a secret unwritten guarantee that Windows won't crash if you use all-certified drivers.

And on the other hand, we have the Windows XP EULA, which explicitly says in writing that:

Any supplements or updates to the Software, including without limitation, any (if any) service packs or hot fixes provided to you after the expiration of the ninety day Limited Warranty period are not covered by any warranty or condition, express, implied or statutory.

So, shall I believe you that Microsoft guarantees certified drivers won't crash? Or shall I believe the written license that tells me installed drivers, certified or not, are never covered by any kind of warranty?

Gosh, that's a tough one.

First, I don't believe the original poster did much research before posting this Ask Slashdot article. For example, Griffin makes an FM tuner for the iPod.

However, it must be said that of all the choices so far, iTunes allows the consumer to do the most with the music they purchased, and has been rewarded by consumers for their actions - to the tune of controlling 85% of the market in portable digital players and online music.

Because of this dominance in the market place, more and more people are realizing that to get a piece of this market, they are going to have to go through Apple. This is why you are seeing the ROKR, iPod branded speakers (complete with iPod docks), and iPod docks being built into new automobiles. How many manufacturers are providing great accessories for other mp3 players, including recharging stations and integration with other established products? It is clear to anyone who has been following this market that the future is iPod, iTunes, and Apple.

Oh, and as for that Macintosh you want to buy next year? You will be happy to know that you will be able to play your WMV files on it.

A nice benefit of Apple's gcc is that it has supported Objective-C++ since Mac OS X 10.1. Unfortunately, I think that non-Apple versions of gcc cannot yet compile Objective-C++. Although it looks like support might be planned for gcc 4.1. Still, Objective-C code will need to be factored away from code that might require compiling with some compilers.

Incorrect. Windows is indeed a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Here is the entire list of their trademarks and registered trademarks: Microsoft Trademarks

There is a trademark on the Windows name. It's not a TradeMark (TM) but a registered trademark (R). The question is if it's only applicable to operating systems or to software in general.

MS has trademarks on several things which just start with "Windows".

No, YOU could reasonably assume that. Consumers can and do take it one step further. Things like "Windows Media Player" encourage this type of thinking by consumers. Also, it should be noted that MS has trademarks on several things which just start with "Windows".

http://www.microsoft.com/library/toolbar/3.0/trade marks/en-us.mspx

Hmm. How about the .NET development tools Microsoft is giving away for free?

That is the jist of the memo...why pay for Microsoft's products when others are giving it away.
Google will give away a lot of the features and services that were at one point a Microsoft monopoly.
Advice for Bill Gates, stop sending around memos and CREATE something INNOVATIVE and useful. Something that everyone can use and can download for free. Add some advertising to make up for the revenue loss maybe? Also, change the hideous Microsoft support websites that are not only hard to navigate, but usually end up causing more confusion for the average user (SEE: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/1173 as an example.)

1 - The kernel team usually makes it fairly difficult to get them in

2 - Users arent neccessarily happy about their kernel getting massive updates in a "stable" series

In short, it would be nice, but its not realistic.

Unfortunately, this means that tons of open soure kernel modules are always lagging behind the released kernel, and the effort involved in maintaining it (for the developer) and installing/using it (for the end user) is much larger than it should be.

Doing anything to lengthen the time that external modules could be expected to work would be a Very Good idea.

All of us, developers, sysadmins, users have gone through the upgrade my kernel recompile alll my non included open source modules see which ones break try to update them recompile .... Its a real pain and something should be done to cushion it.

This was patched for, yesterday 11/08/2005, here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin /ms05-nov.mspx

Get with it, slashdot article submitters, & RTFA!!!

APK

P.S.=> Enough "anti-microsoft" F.U.D. already, @ least print the 'flaw' was patched for, & read the damn article... One for the Linux crew, here:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/ 140203&tid=220&tid=106

"Linux Lupper.Worm In the Wild"

And yes, the flaw for this worm having an opening is unique to Linux & its variants (in an app that runs on it)... apk