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That's "a way" for a 'workaround', per this article -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724072(v=vs.85).aspx but, that's NOT how it is "by default" (which is where I was leading to & hence, the suggestion for a 64-bit port, & not just because 64-bit's the 'future' but because of this 'issue').

* Problem is, by default (especially in "older" code) don't HAVE that "workaround" incorporated either (older work of mine included, shown below)...

Proof/pertinent quote/excerpt:

"By default, a 32-bit application running on WOW64 accesses the 32-bit registry view and a 64-bit application accesses the 64-bit registry view."

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

APK

P.S.=> I wrote a registry cleaner YEARS (heh, 14++ yrs. ago now for 32-bit) -> http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=%22APK+Registry+Cleaning+Engine%22&btnG=Search&gbv=1&sei=wVdBT6WtO6Tv0gH9g6yXCA and "ran into this 'snag'" once I moved to 64-bit Windows 7 ... One of these days, I'll be "porting it" to 64-bit code (via Delphi XE2) though, when I find the time!

... apk

That's "a way" for a 'workaround', per this article -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724072(v=vs.85).aspx but, that's NOT how it is "by default" (which is where I was leading to & hence, the suggestion for a 64-bit port, & not just because 64-bit's the 'future' but because of this 'issue').

* Problem is, by default (especially in "older" code) don't HAVE that "workaround" incorporated either (older work of mine included, shown below)...

Proof/pertinent quote/excerpt:

"By default, a 32-bit application running on WOW64 accesses the 32-bit registry view and a 64-bit application accesses the 64-bit registry view."

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

APK

P.S.=> I wrote a registry cleaner YEARS (heh, 14++ yrs. ago now for 32-bit) -> http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=%22APK+Registry+Cleaning+Engine%22&btnG=Search&gbv=1&sei=wVdBT6WtO6Tv0gH9g6yXCA and "ran into this 'snag'" once I moved to 64-bit Windows 7 ... One of these days, I'll be "porting it" to 64-bit code (via Delphi XE2) though, when I find the time!

... apk

I prefer Autoruns, Process Explorer, and Process Monitor.

Short of nuke and paving the machine, I can clean up even the most foul and neglected of servers and workstations. Sometimes it's just more cost effective to replace it with a new one including data migration. YMMV.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027

http://developer.amd.com/assets/TSC_Dual-Core_Utility.pdf
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594

Because Win95 still rests on top of DOS, it relies on DOS memory: the so-called conventional memory below one megabyte. While almost all memory allocation by Windows programs comes out of extended memory above one megabyte, nonetheless every single Windows program -- even the newest Win32 program -- does still require a small amount of conventional memory, to hold a DOS data structure called the Program Segment Prefix (PSP). Every running Windows program must have a PSP. This structure is only about 300 bytes, but those bytes must come out of the memory below 1 MB, so that they can be visible to MS-DOS.

Besides undermining Microsoft's claims that DOS is gone from Win95, that each Windows program has a DOS PSP also means that Win95 can get wedged into "out-of-memory" situations, simply because all DOS memory below 1 MB has been allocated.

There's more, but that's what the links for. The simple layman's view is this - Windows was an app, and DOS was required to run that app, even on Win95+. The reason the DRDOS reference above was pertinent is because this was the reason that MS lost the suit. That you don't understand this, is probably because you bought this. The lesson you should learn from this is never take the word of a vested interest at face value. That's mistake #1 on your part, especially since finding it and referencing it took all of 2 minutes.

Now on to #2 of what you don't understand: From MS itself, Win2K (NT Kernel) is time-sliced, for all intents and purposes to 15ms. This has not really changed as far as I know even in the most recent kernel. (I was under the impression it was 16ms, since that is what shows on the clock, but perhaps there's a 1ms overhead in thread context switching, quite believable). In case you don't understand this particular topic either, what it means is that even if you yield() or sleep() a thread at the beginning of it's execution, windows won't activate another thread until the next time slice. Even more interesting is that at least for one application, the system clock calls during a time slice will always return the same exact long, indicating that the thread has certain restrictions put upon it, in windows at least. This is not the case with real OSes. (Yes, I do not hold MS or Windows in high regard, it's no secret.)

I hope I've opened your eyes just a little bit and taught you something, since you were apparently completely ignorant of these low-level pieces of information.

Because Win95 still rests on top of DOS, it relies on DOS memory: the so-called conventional memory below one megabyte. While almost all memory allocation by Windows programs comes out of extended memory above one megabyte, nonetheless every single Windows program -- even the newest Win32 program -- does still require a small amount of conventional memory, to hold a DOS data structure called the Program Segment Prefix (PSP). Every running Windows program must have a PSP. This structure is only about 300 bytes, but those bytes must come out of the memory below 1 MB, so that they can be visible to MS-DOS.

Besides undermining Microsoft's claims that DOS is gone from Win95, that each Windows program has a DOS PSP also means that Win95 can get wedged into "out-of-memory" situations, simply because all DOS memory below 1 MB has been allocated.

There's more, but that's what the links for. The simple layman's view is this - Windows was an app, and DOS was required to run that app, even on Win95+. The reason the DRDOS reference above was pertinent is because this was the reason that MS lost the suit. That you don't understand this, is probably because you bought this. The lesson you should learn from this is never take the word of a vested interest at face value. That's mistake #1 on your part, especially since finding it and referencing it took all of 2 minutes.

Now on to #2 of what you don't understand: From MS itself, Win2K (NT Kernel) is time-sliced, for all intents and purposes to 15ms. This has not really changed as far as I know even in the most recent kernel. (I was under the impression it was 16ms, since that is what shows on the clock, but perhaps there's a 1ms overhead in thread context switching, quite believable). In case you don't understand this particular topic either, what it means is that even if you yield() or sleep() a thread at the beginning of it's execution, windows won't activate another thread until the next time slice. Even more interesting is that at least for one application, the system clock calls during a time slice will always return the same exact long, indicating that the thread has certain restrictions put upon it, in windows at least. This is not the case with real OSes. (Yes, I do not hold MS or Windows in high regard, it's no secret.)

I hope I've opened your eyes just a little bit and taught you something, since you were apparently completely ignorant of these low-level pieces of information.

I'd seen this issue before and knew it was due to the software not supporting 120 DPI, which this librarian had set for easier reading. I tried a few different things to see if I could get it to work – I set the "Disable display scaling" option in Compatibility properties, and also tried XP-style DPI scaling as well as the native Windows 7-style scaling.

What you should do is, find the developer of that app, and punch them in the face. Let me explain why.

Windows could do "DPI scaling" for ages - I think it was there in Win95 already? definitely before XP, anyway. But, the way it did it, it was really just a global setting that all apps could read. Some Windows APIs respected it also - e.g. CreateDialog and friends, where you had to specify sizes of widgets in "dialog units", and said units would change according to DPI. VB6 also measured everything in "twips" rather than pixels, also DPI-aware. But many other APIs, even stock Win32 ones, dealt in physical pixels; and so did most apps in practice. At best you'd get correct scaling for stock Windows dialogs and Office...

That was the way it all worked up until Vista. In Vista, the status quo was found to be too broken to maintain, and they've decided to break things a bit so that the defaults would be more palatable. So they've introduced a concept of DPI-aware app - meaning that its author would have to make an explicit API call to tell the OS that, yes, he knows what DPI is, and, yes, he can do proper vector scaling where possible.

Obviously, none of the existing apps did that API call, in which case the OS assumed that they do not know how to properly render themselves at DPI other than default, and performed bitmap scaling on their top-level windows after they were rendered. The result is far from perfect, of course, since what you get are huge ugly upscaled pixels. But at least it was consistently ugly, and it actually made things bigger - which is kinda important for people with bad sight. The assumption was that, for unmaintained legacy apps, it's "good enough", and for maintained ones the authors would get complaints from their users, finally figure out the whole DPI thing, fix their apps, and opt out of bitmap scaling via the aforementioned API call.

Also, when you enable "XP-style DPI scaling", you're basically just disabling bitmap scaling and preventing the OS from lying to the app to pretend that DPI is always at 96 - so even if app did not declare itself as DPI-aware, it would still see the real value and try to handle it the best it can. It's mainly there for old apps that were never updated for Vista, but which were written correctly to begin with.

For the most part, the scheme works - as you note yourself, Win7 is much better than XP in that regard. Unfortunately, there's still no shortage of idiots who call SetProcessDPIAware (or set the equivalent in their app manifest) without actually them being aware of what it means, and what their obligations are when they do it. From your description, it sounds like you've run into one of those cases.

Now, since all this stuff that I've explained above is clearly spelled out in MSDN, and since DPI-aware is not the default setting even for new apps - you have to actually know how to enable it, which implies that you've read at least the summary of what the setting does on MSDN. So clearly, for any developers who did so and still managed to go away without understanding what they do, the only recourse is a face punch - since any attempt to gently educate was lost on them already.

I'd seen this issue before and knew it was due to the software not supporting 120 DPI, which this librarian had set for easier reading. I tried a few different things to see if I could get it to work – I set the "Disable display scaling" option in Compatibility properties, and also tried XP-style DPI scaling as well as the native Windows 7-style scaling.

What you should do is, find the developer of that app, and punch them in the face. Let me explain why.

Windows could do "DPI scaling" for ages - I think it was there in Win95 already? definitely before XP, anyway. But, the way it did it, it was really just a global setting that all apps could read. Some Windows APIs respected it also - e.g. CreateDialog and friends, where you had to specify sizes of widgets in "dialog units", and said units would change according to DPI. VB6 also measured everything in "twips" rather than pixels, also DPI-aware. But many other APIs, even stock Win32 ones, dealt in physical pixels; and so did most apps in practice. At best you'd get correct scaling for stock Windows dialogs and Office...

That was the way it all worked up until Vista. In Vista, the status quo was found to be too broken to maintain, and they've decided to break things a bit so that the defaults would be more palatable. So they've introduced a concept of DPI-aware app - meaning that its author would have to make an explicit API call to tell the OS that, yes, he knows what DPI is, and, yes, he can do proper vector scaling where possible.

Obviously, none of the existing apps did that API call, in which case the OS assumed that they do not know how to properly render themselves at DPI other than default, and performed bitmap scaling on their top-level windows after they were rendered. The result is far from perfect, of course, since what you get are huge ugly upscaled pixels. But at least it was consistently ugly, and it actually made things bigger - which is kinda important for people with bad sight. The assumption was that, for unmaintained legacy apps, it's "good enough", and for maintained ones the authors would get complaints from their users, finally figure out the whole DPI thing, fix their apps, and opt out of bitmap scaling via the aforementioned API call.

Also, when you enable "XP-style DPI scaling", you're basically just disabling bitmap scaling and preventing the OS from lying to the app to pretend that DPI is always at 96 - so even if app did not declare itself as DPI-aware, it would still see the real value and try to handle it the best it can. It's mainly there for old apps that were never updated for Vista, but which were written correctly to begin with.

For the most part, the scheme works - as you note yourself, Win7 is much better than XP in that regard. Unfortunately, there's still no shortage of idiots who call SetProcessDPIAware (or set the equivalent in their app manifest) without actually them being aware of what it means, and what their obligations are when they do it. From your description, it sounds like you've run into one of those cases.

Now, since all this stuff that I've explained above is clearly spelled out in MSDN, and since DPI-aware is not the default setting even for new apps - you have to actually know how to enable it, which implies that you've read at least the summary of what the setting does on MSDN. So clearly, for any developers who did so and still managed to go away without understanding what they do, the only recourse is a face punch - since any attempt to gently educate was lost on them already.

No, it means that Windows has a 100ns granularity on it's timestamps.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724284(v=vs.85).aspx

I've seen as well and when I realized that you don't need to be an admin to install Chrome, I was ticked off. To put it mildly.
That is a gigantic security hole just waiting to be exploited.

It's such a gigantic security hole that Microsoft document how to write an installer that does it on their own website here.

Oh, and if you were actually qualified to do the job, you'd have disabled this in your group policies. Which again, MS tell you how to do here.

I've seen as well and when I realized that you don't need to be an admin to install Chrome, I was ticked off. To put it mildly.
That is a gigantic security hole just waiting to be exploited.

It's such a gigantic security hole that Microsoft document how to write an installer that does it on their own website here.

Oh, and if you were actually qualified to do the job, you'd have disabled this in your group policies. Which again, MS tell you how to do here.

(Silly question, but I'm no Windows admin -- isn't there an equivalent of the "noexec" mount option, to prevent any binaries within certain subtree of the filesystem from being executed?)

Yes. I don't know exactly how it's done, but I know it can be done, since the public computers on my university prevent it.

Google tells me it's called a Software Restriction Policy.

That's weird....I believe that when the dataset is bigger than ram, you just break it into different servers (or just get more ram). This isn't anything new, this is actually old OLD technology, and you can find cases of this everywhere (google, microsoft uses it for hotmail, etc), called the Brick architecture or something like that.

Actually, a ton of research was done on these types of architectures by Jim Gray (who tragically was lost at sea a few years ago) at Microsoft. Not sure how many of these links are still active but: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gray/

From my own experience, at a job a few years ago, we were dealing with a little over 1 petabyte of data, and the system was engineered to NEVER hit platter, and to always have data in ram.

Why can't we require MS to open the data

You mean, like this?

Per my subject-line above (& yes, it IS "doable" even though "the infamous they" often state that a DoS/DDoS is the "unstoppable attack"... I state this, because you do NOT see either Microsoft OR Amazon "going down" to such attacks (they've got infrastructure to stop it)).

By "infrastructure", they have the settings I noted in place (I'll go into them later specifically), but, also such a VASTLY "overbuilt" setup networks + server failover redundancy & monitoring prepped for it. Examples from the "horses' mouth" are quoted next:

MS vs. DoS/DDoS & PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

"At Microsoft we have robust mechanisms to ensure we don't have unpatched servers. We have training for staff so they know how to be secure and be wise to social engineering. We have massively overbuilt our internet capacity, this protects us against DoS attacks. We won't notice until the data column gets to 2GB/s, and even then we won't sweat until it reaches 5GB/s. Even then we have edge protection to shun addresses that we suspect of being malicious." from -> http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/microsoft-were-not-vulnerable-ddos-attacks

* Below helps as well, per my subject-line...

APK

P.S.=> SETTINGS FOR "SECURITY-HARDENING" THE MICROSOFT IP STACK vs. DoS/DDoS:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff648853.aspx

Pay attention to the SYN ATTACK section there, because it demands the setting of several registry parameters that work in combination for DoS/DDoS resistance vs. SYN type DoS attacks...

Now - Couple THOSE with what was noted above in hardware, network, + security monitoring structure in place @ MS (Amazon's MUCH the same really in concept/theory @ least from what I understand too)? No small wonder one never really sees MS networks "go down" to such attacks (Amazon too)... read up, & enjoy! apk

WARNING
The website you are about to visit, update.microsoft.com , may harm your computer.
Find out more
Get me out of here

Proceed to to update.microsoft.com

The only way to derank the results it is to drown it out. It is very unfortunate that they did this to his "name", rather than just news about him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

A google bomb is when you associate keywords with a site when those keywords shouldn't apply:
Low Quality Software
This is a googlebomb, if enough people copy that link to enough different websites then typing "Low Quality Software" into google will produce Microsoft as #1.

This, OTOH, is standard pagerank. People link to spreadingsantorum so Google sucks up the keywords, the keywords include "santorum" with the result that the most popular (#1 most linked) site that uses the word "santorum" ends up being spreadingsantorum. The goal of the site is intentionally manipulative but it succeeds ultimately because it is popular, not because it is unethical.

I personally feel that search engine manipulation is a problem, and while I commend Google's position on their neutrality - I feel some precedence should be given when it involves peoples names. If you have a unique name and somebody blogs bad things about you, you are stuck with those results *for life* every time someone Google's you.

That's funny, because some people's names are nouns for actual existing things which could lead to bizarre results; also inventors who give their names to their product (Phillip was an actual person, it is now the name of a type of screw but is also still used as a name sometimes). Also because actions have consequences, being a colossal dick and having that prevent you from running for office seems like the system working as designed. The average person is protected already simply by the fact that no-one cares, politicians (who chose to put themselves on display) don't have that luxury.

You must be one of those people who holds strong convictions about things they have absolutely no clue about and parrots things they've never investigated, because there's no way anyone familiar with the Windows API could believe they've stopped using Hungarian notation:

GetFileAttributesTransacted, first released with Windows Vista. I think you can figure out how close to 1995 that was. Look at the argument names. This isn't unique, almost API function (including newly released, maybe they'll break with it with WinRT) still uses Hungarian.

no, it doesn't happen anymore. The original style guide was good...

Which one was the original one? Was it the one for Vista and Windows 7? Or Windows XP? Or this tome for Windows 98, 2000 and XP (which was also available in book format)? And I have this one for Windows 95 on my bookshelf.

I am sure that Windows 3.x had them too. For all the faults of Microsoft, you can't say that they don't like publishing books on how to program their operating systems.

Fast forward to the XAML/WPF/C# era and all that went out the window in favour of "rich" UIs where you have a stupid coloured orb that everyone thinks is decoration until you realise it's the main system menu, and every application has a different set of awful skins.

I agree with you on rise of flashy, non-standard user interfaces, but if you want to adhere to an official style guide now you can still use the ones written for each Windows platform (see my first link).

no, it doesn't happen anymore. The original style guide was good...

Which one was the original one? Was it the one for Vista and Windows 7? Or Windows XP? Or this tome for Windows 98, 2000 and XP (which was also available in book format)? And I have this one for Windows 95 on my bookshelf.

I am sure that Windows 3.x had them too. For all the faults of Microsoft, you can't say that they don't like publishing books on how to program their operating systems.

Fast forward to the XAML/WPF/C# era and all that went out the window in favour of "rich" UIs where you have a stupid coloured orb that everyone thinks is decoration until you realise it's the main system menu, and every application has a different set of awful skins.

I agree with you on rise of flashy, non-standard user interfaces, but if you want to adhere to an official style guide now you can still use the ones written for each Windows platform (see my first link).

no, it doesn't happen anymore. The original style guide was good...

Which one was the original one? Was it the one for Vista and Windows 7? Or Windows XP? Or this tome for Windows 98, 2000 and XP (which was also available in book format)? And I have this one for Windows 95 on my bookshelf.

I am sure that Windows 3.x had them too. For all the faults of Microsoft, you can't say that they don't like publishing books on how to program their operating systems.

Fast forward to the XAML/WPF/C# era and all that went out the window in favour of "rich" UIs where you have a stupid coloured orb that everyone thinks is decoration until you realise it's the main system menu, and every application has a different set of awful skins.

I agree with you on rise of flashy, non-standard user interfaces, but if you want to adhere to an official style guide now you can still use the ones written for each Windows platform (see my first link).

How about, when naming variables, you have to put the first letter of the typename in the start of the variable name!

Hungarian notation isn't about using the typename at all.

Please tell that to Microsoft.

When reading through this you misconstrued references to the word 'type' mean 'typename'?

The recent Ubuntu upgrades hosed about ten systems to the point where they wouldn't boot. I remember a Windows XP (IIRC) update years ago that had a chance of making a tiny percent of computers not boot, and people here went absolutely wild.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Windows update only applies critical updates to Windows. The Ubuntu package manager updates third party software, drivers, everything. I can't even count the number of times I've seen updating the video driver hose a Windows machine. Not to mention that the fact that common software comes as executable files from arbitrary websites encourages users to run stuff like that and hose their machine with "xp antivirus 2012" and the like.

And you're comparing upgrading from one release of Ubuntu to another with applying security patches through Windows Update. Have you ever tried upgrading from one version of Windows to another? It's such a well-renowned disaster that hardly anyone even attempts it. And if you were so bold as to skip installing Vista on your 2006-era machine that came with Windows XP so that you don't have to upgrade Windows once every three years, you'll find that an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 is unsupported: You have to do a clean install and "take on every problem you ever had getting the box to run correctly."

But we're talking about something like a 70% failure rate with the Ubuntu upgrades.

I expect I'm right in assuming that the failures you experienced were related because the machines that failed shared a single characteristic that caused the failure. You would hardly have had a 70% failure rate if you had bothered to do a modicum of testing and determined the cause of the failure on the first machine that failed before wantonly breaking the rest of them.

In addition, "backing up /home and reinstalling" is not the simple process you make it out to be; you're taking on every problem you ever had getting the box to run correctly.

Those would be problems you've already solved. In the rare case that they haven't been fixed in the new release, you just pull the documented solution out of the service history and apply it.

On top of all of that, as of 12.04 due this April the Ubuntu LTS desktop releases will be supported for five years. Generally speaking the service lifetime of PC hardware is five years or less, so the idea that you'll have to worry about the consequences of upgrading from one release to another is about to become irrelevant because you'll have bought a new machine by the time the latest LTS release needs to be upgraded.

Ubuntu will never have the funding to pay people to fix the "last mile" of problems, because those aren't sexy.

This is what I'm talking about when I say cliched and outdated. Canonical is not a charity that fixes problems based on how sexy they are. They're a business that pays programmers to fix the unsexy problems their customers actually have.

Riiiight, because .NET is used by anybody, hell I haven't even bothered to install it since ATI replaced .NET with Visual C++ over a year and a half ago, its like Java. Oh and your problem? Took me all of three seconds with Google to find a Microsoft Fix it which involves a ...gasp! A Single button you push. No CLI, no tweaking shit, push the button and reboot. Tada! Now find a fix it for Linux if say, your broadcom worked and was crapped on during the GUI upgrade from 10.04 to 11. what you'll get is a pile of CLI which WILL HAVE TO BE TWEAKED because Linux is waaaay too God damned picky and every. single. thing has to be EXACT. So if the Bash CLI crap is for the broadcom 22.14x and you have the 22.16y you damned well better know it and fix it or you are SOL.;

In the end numbers don't lie and even Asus, who started the netbook craze with Linux, well guess what? ASUS has given up most likely because of the amount support costs thanks to crap breaking. I'd bet my last buck that that is the reason that dell won't release their Linux sales figures because they are losing money on every sale since Dell has to Dell has to run their own repos because again you use normal repos? Its craploa on your drivers. That's right, even though they have a teeny tiny subset they can't even use the default repos without the distro crapping out. that's just sad dude.

UEFI secure boot is enabled by default, but they don't say anything about disabling it or giving the user the option to.

Actually, in the Windows Hardware Certification doc they say "On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup." Page 116

http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/D/F/ADF5BEDE-C0FB-4CC0-A3E1-B38093F50BA1/windows8-hardware-cert-requirements-system.pdf

You're dead wrong. Microsoft barely exists ouside the desktop and some AD/Exchange setups.

Sure, because Azure doesn't exist, nobody uses IIS for large website, nobody uses Dynamics and no big software vendor develops using Microsoft technology.

There's a reason MS is as big as it is, people and companies use their stuff. They may not be the biggest player in every market, but they are by no means insignificant.

With Windows XP going away, in a few years you might be looking for an old box to run your favorite program. In another few years you might be completely out of luck. Even further out, what if Microsoft went bankrupt (or bought by Apple, Google, RedHat, whoever) and their OS division is shelved?

Projects like ReactOS, Wine, DOSBox, etc. allow you to have another possible path in that uncertain future. Your program might not work out-of-the-box, but you have the source to tinker with and try to get it to work.

That is probably the same reason for running Wine on Windows, which is probably better than running an old program within a virtual machine.

Soon enough, you will probably run all of your programs in a browser anyway. But I digress :)

MANDATORY: On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: "Custom" and "Standard". Custom Mode allows for more flexibility as specified in the following:a) It shall be possible for a physically present user to use the Custom Mode firmware setup option to modify the contents of the Secure Boot signature databases and the PK. b) If the user ends up deleting the PK then, upon exiting the Custom Mode firmware setup, the system will be operating in Setup Mode with Secure Boot turned off. c) The firmware setup shall indicate if Secure Boot is turned on, and if it is operated in Standard or Custom Mode. The firmware setup must provide an option to return from Custom to Standard Mode which restores the factory defaults.

Any Windows computer you buy today includes free updates to the operating system for almost 8 years (and that's assuming you never upgrade from Windows 7). Any Mac computer you buy today will be completely unsupported by Apple in 8 years and will have to be replaced.

Ah, Ah! Apple discontinued development of Mac OS 9 in 2002 but Apple still has downloads for it. Ten years and Apple still supports it, so there goes your "8 years". Of course Microsoft still supports old Windows versions too, MS still has update downloads for my Windows NT 4.

Besides any computer only needs to be replaced when it no longer does what the user wants, 10 year old computers can still be used. I volunteer for Free Geek rebuilding used PCs and we rebuild and sell PCs with 2 GHz Pentium 4 which were released in 2000, more than 11 years ago. Though slow compared to newer PCs they still run Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, fine. You're not going to be editing HD videos or 100+ MB photos but you can surf the web and create documents with Open Office/Libre Office.

Falcon

Just download the definitions directly from Microsoft from a known-good system, put them on a USB drive, and install it on the infected computer.

The office file formats have been available for years now.

Apple is now a Patent Troll... have they so given up on innovation that they can on live on shady backroom deals and the charity of a judge?

And still you don't get it, this is much closer:

Apple is now a Patent Troll http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-28/apple-seen-hurting-shareholders-with-jobs-s-thermonuclear-patent-war-tech.html
Google is now a Patent Troll http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/01/google-authorized-motorola-to-seek.html
Samsung is now a Patent Troll http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/01/eu-launches-full-blown-investigation-of.html
Microsoft is now a Patent Troll http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2012/jan12/01-12LGPR.mspx

However, I don't think any of them are Patent Trolls since you can't tell me that any one of them don't research and innovate to a large degree. But I guess "Patent Troll" has now become subverted, just like "Bricked" did.

BTW I feel I have to say this: I DON'T agree with what they are doing, I'm just pointing out your hypocrisy and selective representation of the facts.

Uh... Outlook doesn't come "free with office". In fact, the versions of Office with Outlook are much more expensive than those without. Outlook is the killer app in the group. That said, I agree with the rest of your post.

I'm talking about enterprise licensed Office - I don't know what comes with the consumer/small business Office suites. By the time you're big enough to need an AD server to manage your network, you're big enough for a volume license program.

The "Office Standard 2010" available under their volume licensing program comes with Outlook:

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/office2010.aspx

HyperV has many more dependencies than other virtualization stuff.

For example,.if your host and management client are not in the same AD domain but you want to use MMC to remote manage a HyperV host (say you do not want to allow multiple people to remote desktop to the host), to configure the permissions and other stuff you often have to download and run an _unsupported_ tool: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemote

Or wade through 5 pages of stuff:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2008/03/28/part-1-hyper-v-remote-management-you-do-not-have-the-requested-permission-to-complete-this-task-contact-the-administrator-of-the-authorization-policy-for-the-computer-computername.aspx

And even so, it often still doesn't work, e.g. the added firewall rules might not work for some stupid reason and you have to turn off the firewalls completely.

In contrast with VMware you need a lot few number of ports opened to do remote management, and you normally won't have problems getting remote management. In fact it's almost a "given" that you'd be mainly using remote management.

HyperV may also not work so well if you're not running Linux guests. Recently a colleague had a problem with a Linux guest- some (ICMP echo) frames/packets were being sent but not others (ARP replies)! I solved it by restarting the hyper-v virtual switch. Perhaps that HyperV server was not updated. Whatever it is, even vmware GSX server years ago caused me fewer problems than HyperV.

If it behaves in the same way as the other prerequsites, the installer doesn't include a copy of the SDK. It contains some smarts about checking to see if it's installed on the computer, and if not knows where to go get it (ie the Microsoft download servers). So I don't think that would break copyright, given that it's the Microsoft servers making the copy. According to the Kinect SDK FAQ "The commercial license authorizes development and distribution of commercial applications." I'm no lawyer, but I read that as allowing for the deployment of applications to systems which aren't used for development.

Engineer and doctor are both protected terms in many places, and you cannot hold either title (i.e. on a business card) without accreditation from respective authorities. Misrepresenting yourself as an engineer won't get you more than a lawsuit and fine, but misrepresenting yourself as a doctor can get you jail time.

In parts of Canada, Microsoft was forced to only refer to their certifications as "MCSE", never expanded to "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer".

There's similar attempts to protect the word "architect" although that's a more recent development.

"So 800 years of lag is insufficient, but 4000 years would be?" - Yes, go look at the time periods of transitions between glacial periods and the length of time for a typical interglacial period and it is obvious why I picked a number bigger than 1000 and less than 20,000.

Spell it out. It isn't obvious, and we can't see your mind movie.

If historically, CO2 changes have *lagged* temperature changes, it's *obvious* that CO2 is not a driver, but a follower. This would be true if CO2 changed lagged by 10 years, or if they lagged by 4000 years.

Deciding that somehow human CO2 is magically different than any other sourced CO2, and that *today* it's acting like a driver, when in the past it has always followed, is something that isn't obvious simply looking at the length of interglacials.

I'd suggest you take a look at some Feynman lectures: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/

Pay special attention to his points about how physical law translates through space and time.

5. Encrypted content can be identified as such.

Researchers beg to differ on this point.
(To be fair, they don't go as far as saying "it is impossible to detect this communication", just that "without spending the equivalent of the entire annual US Defense budget it is impossible to detect this communication". But still.)

... and by "minor app developer" you mean a Stanford Research Institute spinoff, where it was created from over 10 years of AI research by DARPA on the CALO/PAL projects, which were in fact the largest AI projects in history? You might remember DARPA from some of their other projects. Like ARPANET amongst others. If you expect to equal 10 years of DARPA AI research and development in a 3-week coding project, well good luck with that.

By minor app developer I was referring more to the fact that others than Apple could easily have bought it as well ($150m is pocket change), if they found it that revolutionary. It is cool technology, implementation and marketing, but not that far off what others have that people are making it out to be.

The decades of world leading research into "AI", voice/natural language processing, machine learning and natural user interfaces from the likes of IBM, Microsoft Research and more recently Google, and others, is hardly a 3-week coding project. But if that is how you'd like to think the technology behind Siri stack up to what others have, be my guest.

Really, no 6.5? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/06/windows-mobile-6-5-review/

And the windows mobile 6.5 sdk from MS.... http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5389

He was referring to WP6.5, however there was no Windows Phone 6.5, there was a Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Mobile is a very different product to Windows Phone.

Really, no 6.5? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/06/windows-mobile-6-5-review/

And the windows mobile 6.5 sdk from MS.... http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5389

Or they could be using location aware printing in Windows 7

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424313(WS.10).aspx

I think you have to have the pro or better editions of Win 7 to use this

More so if you install RequestPolicy. You'll also see all the domains a web page pulls from. (for me seeing the Microsoft Technet forums request stuff from googleapis.com was eye-opener indeed.)

There is nothing extreme about considering going to a theatre to watch a movie as a lame night out, only relegated to bored and absolutely have nothing else better to do. There's plenty of more entertaining interactive experiences on the net. When you go out, your really want to interact with people not sit in some darkened hall getting pissed off when people interact with you.

So it has to be a really good story really well told, to make up for the general lameness of the activity. Now new kinds of publicly shared interactive computer activities will likely become popular. Maybe pubs with M$ table top http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx, where you interact with other people in a social situation (needs applications for this kind of venue) M$ might need to invest in a series of public venues around the world to drive that idea forward.

SNI won't work on BlackBerry devices, old iPhones or iPods, Windows Mobile devices, Android 2 devices, or the browser included with Windows XP. But it works on iOS 4 and newer, which runs on the iPhone 3GS, all retina display iPhones and iPods, and all iPads. It also works on Android 3 and 4 and Windows Phone 7. So we can't rely on SNI until April 2014, when Windows XP reaches its end of life, or two years after carriers stop selling Android 2 phones, whichever is later.

C# is a high level language you have no direct access to memory (or even the machine), and you work with objects not memory, this means you lose some power being one step away from the machine, but you gain security in that the system will stop you doing most stupid things ...

But even C# allows reference variables to be set to null. The type of a C# reference variable is just as much of a maybe as the type of a C++ pointer variable. Null-reference exceptions are just a special case of wrong-type exceptions from a tagged union.

Shuttleworth described HUD as a âoestark contrastâ to Microsoftâ(TM)s ribbon interface, which festoons menus with dozens of the most frequently used commands.

Unfortunately, it's not a "stark contrast" to the Windows Vista/7 Search box, the one that appears right above the Windows (formerly Start) button which you click it. And has since Vista came out in 2007. Oh, even better, it's been backported to XP as Windows Search 4.

And it should be noted that Microsoft stole this idea from Google Desktop.

I have no idea if you can use voice commands to access the Windows or Google versions, though.

Shuttleworth described HUD as a âoestark contrastâ to Microsoftâ(TM)s ribbon interface, which festoons menus with dozens of the most frequently used commands.

Unfortunately, it's not a "stark contrast" to the Windows Vista/7 Search box, the one that appears right above the Windows (formerly Start) button which you click it. And has since Vista came out in 2007. Oh, even better, it's been backported to XP as Windows Search 4.

And it should be noted that Microsoft stole this idea from Google Desktop.

I have no idea if you can use voice commands to access the Windows or Google versions, though.

Except that Microsoft has a long tradition of supporting gays and lesbians going back to 1989.

Otherwise, I might be suspect as well.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/06tc147t.aspx
The Microsoft documents actually tell you to use goto in this case.
I'll accept that when the language documentation tell you to use goto in a case it's acceptable and their examples keep the code readable. However i've always been taught from when i started to program that goto's were bad and to be avoided and i've never come across situations where i have had to use them.