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It cannot "be exploited remotely to execute arbitrary code". It can only crash the service. There is no RCE developed for this vulnerability, yet.

As the CVE says:

The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation in [...] does not properly process packets in memory, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code by sending crafted RDP packets triggering access to an object that (1) was not properly initialized or (2) is deleted, aka "Remote Desktop Protocol Vulnerability."

And the MS security bulletin also holds it as Maximum Security Impact: Remote Code Execution.

This is not FUD, even if there is no worm completed yet, it is a clear failure of MS security, and their concept of many lines of defense. Also, they promised to implement their own rehash of W^X, but apparently failed.

MS Security Essentials is licensed for home use only.

That is wholly incorrect, and has been for some time now. From http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials: Microsoft Security Essentials is available for small businesses with up to 10 PCs.

Actually newer versions of Windows are also included in the patch. Of course learning this would require one to read past the often-incorrect or often-shortsighted summaries :-P

Actually from what I see it appears to be newer versions of Windows as well...

Windows Server 2008 (R2 iirc on the latter...

How many times do I have to repeat myself, you stupid troll?

Windows Server 2008 is NOT THE SAME VERSION of the Windows Server operating system as Windows Server 2008 R2. And that is not a minor nit pick. It is a COMPLETELY different release of the Windows Server operating system. If it was an update, they would have released another SERVICE PACK, like they had already released SP2 for Windows Server 2008, so if you wanted to nit pick you could say that Windows Server 2008 SP2 is a different edition of the Windows Server 2008 OS. But Windows Server 2008 R2 is a different version, as you can see here in this list, straight from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/1163#tab13

Windows Server 2008 R2 (All Editions)
Windows Server 2008 (All Editions)
Windows Server 2003 R2 (All Editions)
Windows Server 2003 (All Editions except Computer Cluster Edition)
Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition

THEY ARE DIFFERENT OPERATING SYSTEMS. The list does not show any the service packs (different editions of the same OS), because they are NOT different operating systems, but it DOES list R2 separately, because IT IS A DIFFERENT OS. Windows Server 2008 is NOT the "most recent version", Windows Server 2008 R2 is.

The only reason it has the same year? Microsoft released two different versions in one year. The first one was Windows Server 2008. The next one was the 2nd released version (R2) in that year (2008): Windows Server 2008 R2.

Windows XP is NOT as current as Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008, period.

AS CURRENT? So now you admit that IT IS CURRENT (as I said it is), it is just not AS CURRENT as Windows 7. Changing the goalposts? Yes I think so. QED, bitches. Windows XP is a current Microsoft operating system and will be until its end of extended support on April 8 2014.

And Windows Server 2008 is not AS CURRENT as Windows Server 2008 R2. You fail yet again.

Nothing stops you from using Windows Remote Management to do exactly the same thing with Windows.

Windows applications may support a subset of remote management, but unfortunately there is often the case that one needs a desktop application to fully configure an app. On Linux the default is text file configs modifiable via CLI, whereas Windows' applications _expect_ you to have a GUI. Until that expectation changes, RDP will be the most powerful remote management available on Windows.

Nothing stops you from using Windows Remote Management to do exactly the same thing with Windows.

Win32s was a Microsoft product

I figured that I'd just do what I did with Vista, and run the server edition of Windows 8 instead of the consumer edition, so that I can have all the new capabilities without the tablet UI.

No such luck.

I ran up the beta and got a few things up and running on it, and it's just mind-blowing to experience how horrendously unusable it is first hand. This is the server edition, mind you, and it had animations, things sliding around, the start menu is gone, and some notification popped up that said something like "tap here to view details". Tap? On a server? Are you kidding me? Everything is a tablet now?

The strangest thing is that the PowerShell 3 command line is so fantastically good* that I almost don't care that they've fucked up the GUI, but for most people any improvements are going to be swamped by the atrocious user interface.

They've stuffed up everything. Things like the new Server Manager look pretty, but it does odd things like adding new menu items after a delay. After clicking some item like a server role, at first maybe only three or four menu items would be shown, so you think, ah well, nothing I can do here... and then after two seconds more menu items appear out of nowhere. If you're like me and click fast, you can miss critical things because some idiot decided to lather on the WinRT asynchronous APIs without any thought to the impact on usability. It's one thing if a placeholder changes after a delay, but to keep structure hidden until an arbitrary delay is a huge design flaw. And why the fuck is it asynchronous in the first place, anyway? Why aren't menu items known ahead of time, like you know... in all other software ever made by man?

Everything has cute tiles now, none of which are big enough to show their text content, so you find yourself having to choose between "Active Direct...", "Active Direct...", or "Active Direct...". It doesn't help that the icons are all cool and Metro and lack distinguishing characteristics.

I love the nested scrollbars, where the horizontal and vertical scrollbars are attached to two different controls with different sizes, where one of them can be used to scroll the other scrollbar into an invisible location.

Of course, everybody has covered the idiocy of Microsoft deciding to eliminate the Start menu, but on Windows Server it's particularly bad because there's a vaguely similar looking icon in its place! If you don't click exactly in the corner of the screen, you launch Server Manager instead, which is not a lightweight app, and can take a while to launch even on an SSD. Expect to learn quickly from your mistakes, because you'll be punished for making them. A lot.

I still haven't figured out how to quickly get a list of all start menu items, without first searching for something and then erasing the search term so that everything matches. I'm sure there's a better way, but it's not obvious to me.

Some of these things might be a bit nitpicky, but from what I've seen the flaws are pervasive, and it's a bad sign that even the most commonly used GUI screens have glaring usability problems despite having what appears to be final layout and artwork.

It's one thing to grumble and have to get used to something new and different if it's better, but it's a whole different story when I'm forced to get used to something that is not only objectively worse, but also totally inappropriate for the type of product: "tap here" on Windows Server Datacenter Edition tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's myopic vision.

*) While they've added some impressive features to PowerShell 3, they've fixed none of the bugs. For example, (Get-ADUser "invalidusername" -EA SilentlyContinue) still throws an exception even though it was told to fail silently. This bug affects a lot of different things and was reported to Microsoft back when PowerShell 2 was still beta! I'm going to whip my crystal ball out and predict that this bug will not get fixed until, lets say, PowerShell 5 Service Pack 2, at which point nobody will care because we'll all be using Apple computers and Google cloud services instead.

OneNote is not Microsoft Office. It's not even properly an Office app. It's an applet at best.

What?? First, on the Office product page itself it is the second Office program listed, after Excel. Second, Onenote is one of the most useful Office programs, but very poorly marketed, it does a lot more than people usually think it does. And it is not only available on IOS, but also on Android.

Do you know who the scientist is? Because of this man's work, his grandson will never be able to get Data to pronounce contractions properly.

Since when is Windows XP a current version of Windows?

Windows XP is still a current version and it will remain a current and supported version by Microsoft, all the way until April 8 2014 (with critical bug fixes / security patches still being released until then). STRIIIIKE ONE. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle

Furthermore, many workplaces (e.g. mine) still purchase all of their computers with XP licenses. XP is very much alive and kicking, despite your (incorrect) claim that it is not a current version.

Windows 7\Srv 2008 are current versions.

Well, you have egg on your face yet again. NEITHER Windows 7, nor Windows Server 2008, are the most recent versions of those Microsoft product lines: that's Strike two, and Strike three... the way I calculate that, YER OUT.

Windows 7 was updated to Windows 7 SP1, so if you're still running Windows 7? Time to update, because your version is OLD and OBSOLETE! You have a whole slew of vulnerabilities and bugs that were patched in Windows 7 SP1.

And Windows Server 2008? It has been replaced by no less than THREE separate service packs/revisions:
Windows Server 2008 SP2
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (the most recent version)

Windows Server 8 is in beta, but I won't count that one against you since it hasn't been officially released yet.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/default.aspx

worst of all by using ac posts instead of your registered account
by Anonymous Coward on 09.03.2012 8:36 (#39300473)

Pot, meet kettle. No further comment necessary.

Since when is Windows XP a current version of Windows?

Windows XP is still a current version and it will remain a current and supported version by Microsoft, all the way until April 8 2014 (with critical bug fixes / security patches still being released until then). STRIIIIKE ONE. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle

Furthermore, many workplaces (e.g. mine) still purchase all of their computers with XP licenses. XP is very much alive and kicking, despite your (incorrect) claim that it is not a current version.

Windows 7\Srv 2008 are current versions.

Well, you have egg on your face yet again. NEITHER Windows 7, nor Windows Server 2008, are the most recent versions of those Microsoft product lines: that's Strike two, and Strike three... the way I calculate that, YER OUT.

Windows 7 was updated to Windows 7 SP1, so if you're still running Windows 7? Time to update, because your version is OLD and OBSOLETE! You have a whole slew of vulnerabilities and bugs that were patched in Windows 7 SP1.

And Windows Server 2008? It has been replaced by no less than THREE separate service packs/revisions:
Windows Server 2008 SP2
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (the most recent version)

Windows Server 8 is in beta, but I won't count that one against you since it hasn't been officially released yet.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/default.aspx

worst of all by using ac posts instead of your registered account
by Anonymous Coward on 09.03.2012 8:36 (#39300473)

Pot, meet kettle. No further comment necessary.

So, couple this idea with something like PEX

It seems to me you're describing is Design by contract. Specifically, Code Contracts in .Net allow you to do this. The compiler there tries to check as much as it can, but checking every situation is simply not possible. It also produces runtime checks, so that your application crashes immediately when the contract is broken, instead of corrupting data.

He's not learning to program. He's learning graphics. He's been a professional developer in the business space for years. He probably already knows Javascript well, so it isn't a stretch to add some canvas usage.

If the Original Poster is in Austin, ACC has some classes taught be people in the industry. I was in the same boat you are in, so I took several of them and enjoyed them. I still bring home a paycheck from C# and SQL Server, but I dabble in games for fun. You might want to look at XNA since you have a .Net background. The Express tools are free, but I assume you already have Visual Studio. XNA will work for Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone. Your game idea is simple enough that you could do it in Silverlight if you wanted to, but learning XNA would probably be more interesting. The hardest part is that you have to do ALL of the GUI yourself where you have traditionally relied on WinForms or ASP.NET or HTML or Razor to do a lot of work for you.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa937791

In case you're not the same guy who posted this exact same idea already...
>>>>/AGDG/
is that way. You may be able to see if the person who posted similar game idea / implementation is still around.

You can contract a freelance programmer to write it for you, then look at the source and gain understanding that way (ever played GORILLAS.BAS?).

Alternatively, take a tutorial for getting graphics on the screen; Then moving the graphics; Then collision detection; Then apply gravity.
Or, simply join a group of people in the modding scene for an established game engine -- ask the mod community how to proceed -- Port to flash when done.
If you already know one language Learning ActionScript is as simple as learning the flash API and ECMAScript syntax...

Windows desktop operating system and Microsoft Office system licenses do not permit renting, leasing, or outsourcing the software to a third party. As a result, many organizations that rent, lease, or outsource desktop PCs to third parties (such as Internet cafés, hotel and airport kiosks, business service centers, and office equipment leasing companies) are not in compliance with Microsoft license requirements. Rental Rights are a simple way for organizations to get a waiver of these licensing restrictions through a one-time license transaction valid for the term of the underlying software license or life of the PC.

Nevermind I looked it up at https://partner.microsoft.com/40104043

On a desktop, such as an internet cafe, you can license per user or per device, whichever suits your needs. With virtual desktop environments, like OnLive, you would license per device or talk with Microsoft and come up with an agreement beforehand.

Licensing Windows for VDI Environments

Cut the FUD. No money was donated, only software. The same software they give to every other non profit organization. Microsoft has a pro-science stance on the issue.

So I hate to be tech support on /., but geez...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281308

The only thing hard is the Kerberos/SPNs, which just requires approporiate rights.

Is Windows $95 the OEM version? You're not supposed to use the OEM version on a Mac or a home-built desktop PC.

As an aside, .NET lacks here, and massively because there is no spirit to make libraries available to others for free causing a non-availability of free libraries.

Gonna have to disagree with you on that point. The .Net languages, runtime, and framework libraries are all included in the .Net / Windows SDK and it's freely available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/dlx/en-us/listdetailsview.aspx?FamilyID=6b6c21d2-2006-4afa-9702-529fa782d63b You can download and install the SDK and start coding right away.

Don't confuse Visual Studio with the languages / framework.

Even if you're referring to the availability of free-as-in-beer/speech libraries there are quite a few of those on CodePlex, GitHub, and CodeProject, depending on what you need.

Good grief... so you're saying that by using Erlang you need a minimum 20 cores to get a measly 2x speed-up over a single-threaded program, which is probably easier to write too?

Multi-threaded programming is not unique to Erlang, writing parallel code in Java, C#, or even C++ is not exactly rocket surgery, so the comparison to strictly single-threaded code is unfair. I can get a program in any one of those languages to scale up to at least hundreds processors without breaking a sweat. Heck, any web application is automatically multi-threaded with both Java and C#, and with version .NET Framework v4.5 or later it can be trivially made asynchronous as well on top of that! You don't need a single lock or threading primitive of any kind to achieve that. If you want to get more advanced, all three platforms give you easy to use and powerful libraries to make multi-threading safe and efficient.

It's only the crappy open-source platforms written by non-professionals that struggle to scale, which is why Erlang looks so good in comparison to a lot of beginner programmers, and why Node.js is so fascinating to them. Ooo... look... we've invented asynchronous calls, which is brand new and fascinating, because clearly nobody has ever done that before...

The real benefit of Erlang is not speed, but reliability and online maintainability. It's designed for non-stop systems where uptime is more important than performance. This is explicitly stated in its documentation as the primary design goal of the language! Using Erlang to improve the performance of code is asinine. If speed matters, any of the three popular languages will run circles around Erlang.

That fancy 64-processor SGI box of yours? You've lost 90% of its performance to Erlang's inefficiency, so I could get the same performance out of a 6-core computer with an efficient programming language. I have 6 cores in my desktop. I bet it cost a few digits less than your SGI box.

Retrieving images to match with a hand-drawn sketch query is a highly desired feature, especially with the popularity of devices with touch screens. Although query-bysketch has been extensively studied since 1990s, it is still very challenging to build a real-time sketch-based image search engine on a large-scale database due to the lack of effective and efcient matching/indexing solutions. The explosive growth of web images and the phenomenal success of search techniques have encouraged us to revisit this problem and target at solving the problem of web-scale sketchbased image retrieval. In this work, a novel index structure and the corresponding raw contour-based matching algorithm are proposed to calculate the similarity between a sketch query and natural images, and make sketch-based image retrieval scalable to millions of images. The proposed solution simultaneously considers storage cost, retrieval accuracy, and efciency, based on which we have developed a real-time sketch-based image search engine by indexing more than 2 million images. Extensive experiments on various retrieval tasks (basic shape search, specic image search, and similar image search) show better accuracy and efciency than state-of-the-art methods

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/149199/0630.pdf

This is probably not as simple as Microsoft trying to patent something which has already been done before. You may want to check out some of the actual research they have done here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mindfinder/ I seriously doubt that they are not familiar with all of the prior art examples that have been brought up here, and they would not have spent the money on a patent if they did not think they had improved on the existing methods sufficiently for it to stand up to even basic scrutiny.

Personally I'm surprised that nobody has come up with an application that basically merges what TOR and Freenet does into one. A distributed storage would provide both the capacity and the upload bandwidth, while freeing up resources from onion sites.

Funnily enough, Tor arose from a project called Free Haven that aimed to do pretty much what you're suggesting: robust, distributed storage with anonymous access. So far the anonymous access part of the problem has attracted more attention than the distributed storage part, so we have a very high-quality anonymous access component (Tor), but until recently there wasn't a distributed storage component of comparable quality. Perhaps Tahoe LAFS is ready to fill that role.

Unlike Free Haven, Freenet didn't separate the anonymity problem from the storage problem - it tried to solve both problems at once. Nikita Borisov found that Freenet 0.5 provides little or no anonymity to a substantial fraction of users. As far as I know, nobody has analysed the anonymity provided by more recent versions of Freenet, which is not a situation anyone relying on Freenet for anonymity should be happy about. Tor has received a lot more analysis from the security community, and while its anonymity properties are limited, those limits are well understood.

TLDR: Combine Tor with distributed storage, but don't use Freenet.

Dear luddite, get off of the internet. Please. Win 2k is 1.5 years beyond its extended support end date. http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?c2=1131

While you're whining about apps and OS that can't run in 512MB ram, the rest of us have blazing fast desktops that never touch swap, because 16GB of ddr3 ram is something like $100-150 today. It costs more money to sit around whining than it does to get more ram than you know what to do with.

Profiles gone? I don't know what you're talking about. Start any modern firefox with the flags -no-remote to prevent opening another window of an existing firefox instance, and -profilemanager to open the profile management/selection window. I have all my shortcuts changed to start it that way by default.

My mobile has more ram than your computer.

my university offers it to every student

Until you graduate. Or does your university also offer it to alumni?

If you wanted Windows for free You could most likely get a copy off of a friends old computer

The license for an OEM version is tied to a particular motherboard, and OEM versions aren't for home-built desktop PCs.

you likely know someone whos work or school gives them access to tons of free take home versions of Windows.

But is the target market for this product dedicated enough to 1. home-build a PC and 2. traverse a friends-of-friends network to obtain a free copy of Windows for it? There's a time-money tradeoff, and I was under the impression that the target market for a game console wanted the convenience of plugging in and playing over all else.

...it's hardly surprising. Seriously, Microsoft has numerous date formats within their system with which to work. Want to the know the current time? You have to use SYSTEMTIME. Need to know the date-time stamp for a file? Then you need to use FILETIME; but why would you need to have a file dated in the 17th century?

...it's hardly surprising. Seriously, Microsoft has numerous date formats within their system with which to work. Want to the know the current time? You have to use SYSTEMTIME. Need to know the date-time stamp for a file? Then you need to use FILETIME; but why would you need to have a file dated in the 17th century?

This isn't a new claim. See: Do We Need Inheritance? [PDF], Evolution of Object Behavior using Context Relations, Selective Open Recursion: Modular Reasoning about Components and Inheritance [PDF], Encapsulation and inheritance in object-oriented programming languages and many other academic sources.

It's widely acknowledge that inheritance violates encapsulation. It's a fundamental problem with OOP.

If you prefer a less academic and more practical discussion, try a Google search for OOP criticism.

According to Microsoft all time started on Jan 1, 0001.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.ticks.aspx

No fricking wonder the "system idle process" uses 19% of a cpu. The OS is counting to a billion every second.

Ooops. But they still lots of things in 32bit land, too.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.aspx

According to Microsoft all time started on Jan 1, 0001.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.ticks.aspx

No fricking wonder the "system idle process" uses 19% of a cpu. The OS is counting to a billion every second.

Ooops. But they still lots of things in 32bit land, too.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.aspx

eh.. no? Even my computer illiterate parents do that. Slashdot likes to make fun of Joe sixpack, but sometimes we seems so stuck in the past that we are actually less proficient with using modern Windows 7 PCs than ordinary Joes. Like the leet people who think they speed up their PC by turning off hardware accellerated Aero "eye candy", replacing it with the software default that actually is slower.

Or the people who turn off search indexing to "speed up games" and end up making the start menu search unusable. Or the people who insist on doing a complete OS reinstall every couple of months. Or the people who don't run AV software because it's too intrusive (they've obviously never tried MSE). Or turning off UAC, disabling the firewall, turning off "unnecessary" services because they don't understand what they do, etc.

There are a lot of things "power users" do that are not relevant anymore or even damaging to actual performance and functionality, simply because that's what they've always done and they can't comprehend that things change and get better over time.

Cause you Linux nerds know you want to put it in a VM at least. Avoid their .exe downloader thing.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso

If you mean windows starter edition you can run as many programs at once as you want. check your facts before posting.

I did:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/04/21/1356245/windows-7-starter-edition-3-apps-only

Don't believe everything you hear on the Internet..especially something you heard off Slashdot for crying out loud.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/windows-7-starter-top-questions

See number 6 on the list.

Atomic is in VC11 dev preview (changelog).

Sadly, still no variadic templates.

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are brought into a large room and told to stand against one wall. On the floor of the room is a very precisely drawn grid; on the opposite side of the room are three sacks.

The three learn that each sack contains $1 million, and that the object is for each of them to cross the room and grab a sack. The only rule is that they must cross the room in half moves only. This means that first they can walk exactly half the distance from where they stand to the sack. Then, they can again walk half the distance from where they stand to the sack, and so on.

The mathematician stands still for a moment, then shakes his head.

"Distance = 0 will never be true."

And with a sigh of defeat, he turns, and walks out of the room.

The physicist stares off into the distance, and he, too, shakes his head.

"Time to traverse distance equals infinity."

And with that, he sighs in defeat, turns, and walks out of the room, joining the mathematician outside. Soon, they are joined by the engineer, who walks out of the room grinning, and holding all three bags.

"Sometimes, close enough is good enough."

(Quoted from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb263911(v=vs.85).aspx ...but this definitely predates Microsoft)

This seems like beating a dead horse, but I'll do it again...

Microsoft provides toolkit for Office 2003 to open MS 2007/2010 formatted files. (Without buying an upgrade).

Here is the link.

You can download it straight from Microsoft.

After playing with the XLS, I discovered that it actually was their XML format in a zip archive. They seem to now be calling that XLS instead of XLSD (?).

Then it had been misnamed by someone, because Microsoft use a variety of different extensions for their new file format (depending on whether it contains macros), and XLS is not one of them.

You can get the compatibility pack for previous versions of office to allow you to open the new file format in your version of Office and a lot of the earlier ones (it is not listed, but the pack works back to at least Office 97). It works pretty well, and means that you are not forced to upgrade with "a series of endless incompatible formats". I only upgrade about once a decade, and even then it is only when I get given an upgrade for free. Also, the file formats only change once a decade too, so it is not too much of a problem (the last change prior to 2007 format was with Office 97).

I was 14 years old in 1994
I had a Macintosh LC 475 back then. It had a 25 Mhz Motorola 68040 CPU and had come pre-installed with Microsoft Virtual PC for the Mac which emulated x86 architecture on the Motorola 68040.
A magazine called PCQuest ( It was a geek-focussed magazine then; it's a CIO-focussed magazine now ) came out with Slackware on the CD. ( I cannot remember the version)
I managed to installed Linux as a VM on my Mac 18 years ago using this. ( That's a link to my blog post with more details as to how I did it )
Of course I did not know what Virtualization was. I did not have an internet connection even!
It took me a year to get X running - just by reading the man pages and configuring modelines and hsync and vsync values
My proudest moment was when I wrote my own man page using nroff ( IIRC ) and it showed me bold fonts in a terminal. I did not know even know what a terminal was, except that Jeff Goldblum destroyed the Aliens by uploading a computer virus through it ( Movie: Independence Day ) I am nostalgic

I work for a small private school. Microsoft damn near gives their software away to non-profits and schools. If you have hardware running the wrong version of Windows, Microsoft will most likely upgrade you for free.

Go here and do a bit of research:

http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/en-us/community-tools/nonprofits/

Put together a request and send it to Microsoft. You may be surprised at the response. Microsoft's business strategies have been less than nice in the past, but I can not fault how well they treat schools and non-profits.

-ted

Your own quote pretty much admits there is a standard.

No, it did not. Here is the test: do you have to pay to license the exFAT file system? Yes. Do you have to pay to license the SD format? Yes. Does the author of the file system call it a standard? No, it calls it "our exFAT file system".. If Microsoft did proclaim it as a standard, would that be good enough for the Slashdot community? No. We tend to like our standards to be maintained by a standards body, not an individual company and especially not Microsoft.

But as I said before, I can see your argument as to why you might informally refer to it as a standard, but it seems a bit rich to arbitrarily define a proprietary, commercial specification as a standard (when the author's have not called it that nor have them submitted it to a standards body), only to then accuse the company of forcing it onto the industry. If you want to blame anyone, blame the people at the SD Card Association for choosing a patent encumbered file system. Or the device makers for choosing the SD format.

Boring read.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302577

You need to have the licensing right for the software that you have.

http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/buy/licensing/Pages/schoolenrollment.aspx

But right now you need to tell the people who say 'make it work' how big the fine is for not have the licensing right.

What about shit like this in Windows Update?

Firefox Add-ons to Support .NET Application Deployment .NET Framework 4

The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) plug-in for Firefox and the .NET Framework Assistant for Firefox enable XAML browser applications (XBAPs), loose XAML, and ClickOnce applications to work with the Mozilla Firefox browser.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc716877.aspx

Older article but there are probably newer ones on the web:

Microsoft updates its controversial Firefox plug-in for .NET 3.5
http://betanews.com/2009/06/25/microsoft-updates-its-controversial-firefox-plug-in-for-net-3-5/

Anybody else remember .HTA HTML Applications? Sounds like that idea, resurrected.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496(v=vs.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384129(v=vs.85).aspx

APK

P.S.=> I am GLAD I brought this point up, and that you cited your "workaround-objection" (in case anyone decides to use HiJackThis' sourcecode now that it's open) - the reason I mention this, is simple: IT GIVES OTHERS A 'FOUNDATION' TO BUILD ON, but, more importantly?

This codebase's a potential foundation for a new antispyware/antivirus/antimalware application and standing on the shoulders of giants here would be, a way.

(1/2 way there @ least, or rather, a 1/3... because HiJackThis is ONLY A READER/REPORTER, and you'd have to have the 'signatures' of the malwares too (do they provide that? I wouldn't *think* so, but who knows!))

Yes... that's the other part that might be "prohibitive" & possibly impossible to acquire fast WITHOUT licensing (and would demand upkeep) as far as detection signatures.

The thing holding one back as I noted for this?

The RegKeyDelete... Thus, it looks as if you'd HAVE to have a 64-bit port really, to work on 64-bit reg view via reflection.