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No it doesn't. If you install Vista with all the defaults then you are a member of the Administrators group. You still have to go out of your way if you want to start out with a plain old unprivileged user.

"Administrator" in Vista is not the same as "Administrator" in earlier versions. It is akin to be being an 'admin' in OS X or Ubuntu - it just means you can elevate your privileges if required, not that you can do whatever you please.

Mostly correct, Although the Administrator account in Win7 is actually called a 'PA' account by Microsoft. PA being Protected Administrator. From the msdn blogs,

blogs.msdn.com

"User Account Control was implemented in Vista to address two key issues: one, incompatibility of software across user types and two, the lack of user knowledge of system-level changes. We expanded the account types by adding the Protected Admin (PA), which became the default type for the first account on the system. When a PA user logs into the system, she is given two security tokens - one identical to the Standard User token that is sufficient for most basic privileges and a second with full Administrator privileges. Standard users receive only the basic token, but can bring in an Administrator token from another account if needed.
When the system detects that the user wants to perform an operation which requires administrative privileges, the display is switched to "secure desktop" mode, and the user is presented with a prompt asking for approval. The reason the display is transitioned to "secure desktop" is to avoid malicious software attacks that attempt to get you to click yes to the UAC prompt by mimicking the UAC interface (spoofing the UI.) They are not able to do this when the desktop is in its "secure" state. Protected Admin users are thus informed of any system changes, and only need to click yes to approve the action. A standard user sees a similar dialog, but one that enables her to enter Administrative credentials (via password, smart card PIN, fingerprint, etc) from another account to bring in the Administrator privileges needed to complete the action. In the case of a home system utilizing Parental Controls, the parent would enter his or her login name and password to install the software, thus enabling the parent to be in control of software added to the system or changes made to the system. In the enterprise case, the IT administrator can control the prompts through group policy such that the standard user just gets a message informing her that she cannot change system state."
~end of reference

That section above also explains why the desktop goes into secure mode at the UAC prompt.
The Win7 Beta also has a user adjustable control that one can use to adjust the UAC's sensitivity to prompting the user. No idea if that'll be in the final.

So, Win7 Admin accounts are basically limited user accounts that can elevate privileges only under certain conditions. Those conditions are still being tweaked during the Beta as new conditions are being encountered.

Microsoft is having to walk a thin line with UAC, but the added security has been needed for so long now, indeed, they've been severely criticized for not having had it sooner. Windows IS the predominant desktop OS, and it needs to be as secure as possible.

I've been playing with the Beta, and I think they're on the right track for what they have to accomplish while keeping their user base in mind.

Win7's UAC is not as annoying as Vista's was, and I'm sure that longtime Windows users aren't going to put up with the Unix/Linux style su / root way of securing itself at all, as was demonstrated by the UAC outcry in Vista, which isn't near as strict as it's OSS counterparts.

My personal preference would be to imitate the Unix/Linux method, but then, I'm used to it. And I also think that Microsoft Should have to come up with their own method of elevating pr

You assume that MS is really braindead. They're not. UAC runs on a private desktop that only the Consent.exe program can access. This security feature is the same that the Windows CardSpace control panel item uses to protect you from programs trying to get you Card.

Here's a post with links that explains: http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/252090-Windows-Cardspace-Control-Panel-WTF/?CommentID=295064

As Raymond Chen would put it, "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway"

Apparently Raymond Chen posted a response at http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/21/9353310.aspx

It appears that they are getting a "Service unavailable" prompt. Could it really be that they are running their blogs on an IIS server that is running Windows 7? Shock horror, it appears that someone has elevated privileges using vbscript to bypass UAC and has changed the IIS app pool to run under a guest account!

You authorized it when you installed SP1. The extension is clearly described in the ClickOnce section of the SP1 feature list. We all read feature lists, changelogs and release notes very carefully whenever we install something this significant, right?

Technically, Microsoft didn't modify a single bit of Firefox. It just dropped the extension where Firefox could find it.

http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/421171-NET-Framework-Assistant/?CommentID=421225

Copied from Channel 9. Yes, you authorized this. You also authorized this by enabling Microsoft Update IN ADDITION to Windows Update. It does not do this by default.

Basically, if you didn't want this, it's your own fault for blindly allowing things to be installed on the server. It sounds like its there to aid Visual Studio in prototyping web apps with firefox (for those who use firefox) and other general junks.. it's not exactly a trojan. Calm down, morons. Go sue your pillow for a while.

On the down side, how hard is it for Microsoft to add some code to accommodate people who have their hardware clock set to UTC? I mean just put a damn check box there!

Raymond Chen's Old New Thing Article on why this is the case

One reason: What's more, some BIOSes have alarm clocks built in, where you can program them to have the computer turn itself on at a particular time. Do you want to have to convert all those times to UTC each time you want to set a wake-up call?

Honestly, if anything I've only seen a bunch of FUD on slashdot about Windows 7, so I'm not sure what slashdot you're reading. A lot of the enthusiasm over Windows 7 is partly because it is better than Vista, and partly because a lot of people never even gave Vista a chance so a lot of the neat things in Vista seem new to them in 7. As for features, try reading the Engineering Windows 7 blog to see some real new features. You should look at how much Paint has improved if you think that this is a simple minor release. And finally, your statement about incremental releases is the most hypocritical thing about your post. It's OK for Apple to charge full price for what you admit is an incremental release, but when Microsoft does it it's certainly worthy of mockery? Before you start complaing about astroturf, maybe you should try to inform yourself and realize that your bias is showing.

All the benchmarks I've seen so far show Vista/Win7 being close to 30% slower than XP running office apps on the same hardware.

[Citation needed]. Seriously, 30% is a lot, and how do you measure office application performance anyway? Post-SP1 game benchmarks have shown that the performance difference is less than 5% and in many cases identical, largely due to the fact that drivers for Vista no longer suck, so I don't see how office apps, which are much less demanding, could run that much slower.

For one thing, window management in Windows 7 is a lot nicer than any other Windows to date, and I would say miles better than OS X (although OS X's window management is retarded IMO), and performance is a bit better than Vista, and then all the reasons Vista had over XP (integrated search, intelligent prefetcher, hardware accelerated UI, etc.) Document libraries are a neat feature, as is the Homegroup home networking setup, Device Stage looks cool if I had a device to use it with, and the bundled programs like Paint, Wordpad, etc got a nice makeover. Wordpad even supports .odt now.

It sounds like you're trying not to see any benefits of new versions of Windows, which is strange, because XP really isn't that good of an OS in the first place. It's just kind of stable and more or less plug and play, although Vista is even more so with the huge number of bundled drivers (eg. I just plugged my roommate's printer into my laptop and it "Just Worked" (TM)). If you are really curious about what's improved and not just trolling, I'd advise you to check out the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

No. IE7 fixed that.

From what I can tell, Microsoft is indeed doing system programming in C#.

What's your source? I kind of doubt it because of things like these.

Yeah - but there IS a difference....

The "home" versions of Linux most times are focused on speed rather than stability. Not to say the "home" versions are not stable, but the first priority is things like multimedia etc. Also the focus lays on the latest and newest applications.

The "Server" versions are optimized to be rock stable and fast in things you could expect from a server. Multimedia has no high priority here. Also software is not the latest bleeding edge but proved and stable.

So - there is a reason you have two very different types. At the other hand the Microsoft versions are all the same. The only difference is the amount of services (software) added, and the amount of cash you have to deliver...

Actually the server versions of Windows are tuned differently too

http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2009/01/08/why-do-people-think-that-a-server-sku-works-well-as-a-general-purpose-operating-system.aspx
One of the senior developers at Microsoft recently complained that the audio quality on his machine (running Windows Server 2008) was poor.

To me, it's not surprising. Server SKUs are tuned for high performance in server scenarios, they're not configured for desktop scenarios. That's the entire POINT of having a server SKU - one of the major differences between server SKUs and client SKUs is that the client SKUs are tuned to balance the OS in favor of foreground responsiveness and the server SKUs are tuned in favor of background responsiveness (after all, its a server, there's usually nobody sitting at the console, so there's no point in optimizing for the console).

In this particular case, the documentation for the MMCSS service describes a large part of the root cause for the problem: The MMCSS service (which is the service that provides glitch resilient services for Windows multimedia applications) is essentially disabled on server SKUs. It's just one of probably hundreds of other settings that are tweaked in favor of server responsiveness on server SKUs.

There's a ton of usability work behind Office 2007. I don't know if anything's actually published, but Jensen Harris, a Program Manager from Microsoft, has been blogging a lot about the UI and the thoughts behind the ribbon.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible.aspx

Read the blog post. The goal is (in my interpretation) that usability researchers can ask specific questions like "How often do people click on this 10x10 square vs that 10x10 square", and if it's a ratio of 10:1, they can make the more common square bigger. Or ask how many tabs people have open at once, broken down into "new users" and "experienced users", and work on appropriate changes to the performance of the app. I understand it to mean Test Pilot allows researchers (extension authors, browser developers) to allow people to opt in to the tracking to answer their particular question.

Like the Office 2007 ribbon or not, Microsoft collected a very large amount of data to make the decisions they made (go watch Jensen Harris's presentation) and this would be a similar way to ensure that data is available for Mozilla usability researchers.

Plus, the people paid to hack on Labs aren't going to fix the administration/packaging bugs. It's not an either-or situation.

And I think that can be directly traced to them losing their way and ignoring their core markets. One of MSFT's biggest customers have always been business. From the littlest SOHO to the largest enterprise MSFT has been right there making boring as hell backwards compatible low resource business OSes. But then with Vista they suddenly take a giant turn into left field and completely blow off their core market to get into a multimedia pissing contest with Apple.

I mean it is no wonder you have so many sites like this and this showing step by step how to turn Win2k8 server into a desktop. It is because MSFT has abandoned their business users to try to compete with Apple in the multimedia space. Which frankly is insane as Apple has this little thing called the iPod that pretty much gives them the lock on the multimedia space, not to mention the hip factor, and the amount of money they make off of business licenses and support contracts is worth FAR more than the niche they are trying to muscle their way into.

Mark my words, and the MSFT shills can mod me down all you want, but the biggest threat to MSFT is MSFT. They are neglecting their core markets, they are flailing around from one idea to another like the company has ADHD, and by trying to stuff everyone on the planet into this giant bling bling multimedia OS they are screwing over one of their biggest customers, the business users. I mean, is there anyone here with a straight face that can say Vista was made for business? The thing practically screams HTPC! It is like they fired all their business and accounting guys and put some marketing drone in charge of the whole company. And worse, the drone wants to be as cool as Apple so bad it hurts.

Mark my words, if they do not get some common sense and make another business OS then companies like Red Hat will be more than happy to take a shot at those customers. If they want a single codebase, fine and dandy. Make a "Win2k10 Pro" out of Win2K8 server and leave Win7 for the home users. But I truly believe that Win7 will bomb, just as hard if not harder than Vista. And when it does all those corporations that have been ignored for two OS releases will start to look for alternatives.

As Anpheus said above:

It's called "Windows 1.0." Look into it.

I did for you:

http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/e7/WindowsLiveWriter/HappyAnniversaryWindowsontheEvolutionoft_1365F/clip_image002_2.jpg

See that at the bottom? 1985 called, they want their dock back. (Nextstep "innovated" that in 1989, four years later!)

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1101639&cid=26569921

It's called "Windows 1.0." Look into it.

I did for you:

http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/e7/WindowsLiveWriter/HappyAnniversaryWindowsontheEvolutionoft_1365F/clip_image002_2.jpg

See that at the bottom? 1985 called, they want their dock back. (Nextstep "innovated" that in 1989, four years later!)

* Increased Support for multicore CPUs: A fully managed code, that is designed specifically with parallel processing in mind. *rumor*

Fully "managed code"? This sounds like .NET 4.0 which will do this, but it won't be in W7 AFAIK.

It will however have improved performance in regards of multicore CPU's: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going%20Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/

I really suggest if you havent to at least throw up a VM of it sometime.

One advice about that - you don't even need a VM even if you'd rather not mess up with your partitions. Win7 can not only mount VHD (Virtual PC) disk images, its bootloader can boot it from them, too, and you can take the bootloader out from the installation CD and overwrite the one you currently have with it. Here's how.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Rob-Short-and-kernel-team-Going-deep-inside-Windows-Vistas-kernel-architecture/

This is actually not the first time Calculator has received an update, but of course When you change the insides, nobody notices:

I wouldn't be surprised if these are the same people who complain, "Why does Microsoft spend all its effort on making Windows 'look cool'? They should spend all their efforts on making technical improvements and just stop making visual improvements."
And with Calc, that's exactly what happened: Massive technical improvements. No visual improvement. And nobody noticed. In fact, the complaints just keep coming. "Look at Calc, same as it always was."
The innards of Calc - the arithmetic engine - was completely thrown away and rewritten from scratch. The standard IEEE floating point library was replaced with an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library. This was done after people kept writing ha-ha articles about how Calc couldn't do decimal arithmetic correctly, that for example computing 10.21 - 10.2 resulted in 0.0100000000000016.

But did they fix the [calc] bug? Or does it still produce 'scientific' and 'wrong' results for 3+2*2?

Ages ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/25/141253.aspx

The calculator in Windows 7 is also vastly improved: http://lifehacker.com/5078756/windows-7s-calculator-bundles-real+life-uses

The problem with Windows is that sometimes it will realise it already has a driver for the device and "install" it for the "new" USB port.

Actually, if you plug two identical (down to the serial number) USB devices into a Windows machine, Windows shuts down! See The Old New thing, comments section.

I think that people who have been using windows consistently get inured to it or something.

No, we just know where all the GUI configuration settings are located.

Here are your answers:

Things like trying to hide the program and system files from me

Turn on display of system files.

God-fucking-forbid there ever be an unused icon on my desktop!!!

Turn off desktop cleanup

Vista seems to take that philosphy to the extreme with the UAC

UAC can be shut off completely from the control panel, or selectively disabled.

and the seriously messed up control panel.

Switch to classic view

HTH. HAND.

If you are turning all of the bu...er features off then tell me, what is the reason for the "upgrade" in the first place?

I think that people who have been using windows consistently get inured to it or something.

No, we just know where all the GUI configuration settings are located.

Here are your answers:

Things like trying to hide the program and system files from me

Turn on display of system files.

God-fucking-forbid there ever be an unused icon on my desktop!!!

Turn off desktop cleanup

Vista seems to take that philosphy to the extreme with the UAC

UAC can be shut off completely from the control panel, or selectively disabled.

and the seriously messed up control panel.

Switch to classic view

HTH. HAND.

I normally don't reply to anons, since they usually aren't watching for replies, but you seem to know what you're talking about, and do raise some good points, so I'll make an exception. (Good for you!)

"Or they just realize the benefits of using a sane instruction set architecture."

x86_64 is not "sane", it's just less broken than i386. Take a look at the DEC Alpha architecture sometime if you really want a clean 64-bit platform. It's such a pity Intel had Compaq kill it off to keep it from competing with IA-64.

"The switch from i386 -> x86_64 is not about memory addressing. It's about alleviating the register starvation that plagues the Intel instruction set."

x86_64 is very much about virtual address word size, it's just not the only thing about it. Perhaps I do underestimate the benefit of increasing from 8 to 16 general-purpose registers. Maybe it's because most architectures have 30+ GP registers available, so it still seems like a day late and a dollar short. And as I mentioned, gains can be offset by costs. But hey, if the extra registers yield a significant performance improvement for your applications, more power to you. I'm just saying it's overrated, not useless.

"I'm not sure about this, but I read somewhere that on Windows XP and Vista, enabling DEP will disable the support for PAE."

DEP is implemented by setting the NX bit (No Execute) on memory pages containing only data. The NX bit is only available in the larger page tables you get with PAE. So DEP requires PAE.

However, workstation flavors of Win32 force all hardware address to below the 4 GiB mark, in order to maintain compatibility with drivers which assume a 32 bit physical address word. The "Advanced Server" flavors fully support PAE, allowing more than 4 GiB of RAM to be used on Win32.

References:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit
* http://blogs.msdn.com/carmencr/archive/2004/08/06/210093.aspx

But Win i386 still limits physical addresses to under 4 GiB to keep crappy drivers from crashing the system.

"It's not Windows that does this, but the BIOS assigns these addresses. Windows simply does not relocate them, and I don't know if such relocation is possible."

Such a relocation is indeed possible, if your hardware supports it. Actually, what is typically done is that non-RAM hardware stays below 4 GiB, and any displaced RAM is moved to locations above 4 GiB. Google "memory hoisting".

All this 64-bit support is tricky, because for it to work:
* CPU has to support it (but most do, these days)
* Core logic chipset has to support it (ditto)
* Motherboard OEM had to actually run traces for it (varies)
* BIOS has to not screw things up
* PCI stuff has to support DAC (Dual Address Cycle)
* Device drivers have to be able to cope with 64-bit addresses
* OS kernel has to support all of the above

There's lots of places for things to go wrong.

"Why should you worry about running 15+ year old [Win16] code on a new OS?"

Welcome to the world of business IT, where 30-year-old code is still in production use all over the place. :)

Long Mode also means potential compatibility issues with crappy 32-bit code.

"Can you give an example? 32-bit code doesn't even know it's running on a 64-bit OS unless it explicitly asks."

Lots of source code assumes integers and pointers are all 32 bits wide. Recompiling for a 64-bit platform uncovers all sorts of bad assumptions. Was a huge problem in the *nix world when 64-bit platforms arrived on the scene. Now it's a huge problem for the 'doze world.

Only applies to source recompiles, of course, but if you're going to target i386 for all your applications, why bother with a 64-bit platform? A chicken-and-egg problem, to be sure.

Not true. This was explicitly requested (and rejected by MS VP in charge of Windows Steve Sinofsky) on the Engineering Windows 7 blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ (I can't find the exact place where he said they weren't going to do it right now, but he did say so). It won't be happening in Windows 7. Sorry.

When WinSXS decided it would take up 10GB of hard drive space of copies of absolutely every DLL, several times, instead of fixing underlying problems. This IS an issue for those of us who don't have hard drive space flowing out our ears.

You do realize that the WinSXS folder contains mostly links and very few actual files right? If you are measuring the size with Windows Explorer then you are not seeing the true size of the folder. See This article.

If your WinSXS folder is really 10GB then something is seariously wrong with your system.

Simple.

In other news, *foreign* governments are 'stepping up' hacking of UK submarines and warships installed with Windows :P

re's lots of ways to handle this other than full virtualization that offer a better user experience.

Great, then bring them up, because what MS has been doing isn't it.

Perhaps you haven't been reading Chris Jackson's blog discussing the myriad ways that Windows balanaces compatibility of older applications with allowing improvements to OS:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/default.aspx

And here's all the stuff about the shims that let old apps that want to do stuff like write to system.ini still run without actually writing anything to system.ini:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/archive/tags/Shims/default.aspx

re's lots of ways to handle this other than full virtualization that offer a better user experience.

Great, then bring them up, because what MS has been doing isn't it.

Perhaps you haven't been reading Chris Jackson's blog discussing the myriad ways that Windows balanaces compatibility of older applications with allowing improvements to OS:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/default.aspx

And here's all the stuff about the shims that let old apps that want to do stuff like write to system.ini still run without actually writing anything to system.ini:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/archive/tags/Shims/default.aspx

"Right. Zero latency. Talk about lies. It establishes callbacks in the apps, writing into shared memory segments which are then mixed and delivered to the standard linux audio device."

That's pretty much all I want from my audio system. Just give me a precise control over my audio stack and then you can build anything on top of it.

XP does exactly this - there's a fast, efficient, hardware-friendly kernel streaming layer.

Vista on the other hand forces you to use inferior-quality stack because MS couldn't figure out how to do protected audio path with kernel filters.

"Yeah. Zero latency as long as you stay ahead of the playback. Just like pretty much every sound system since the days of the original Soundblaster Pro using DMA."

DirectShow is famous for its imprecise timing control due to KMixer ;) My previous employer made a lot of $$$$$$ by making time-correcting kernel streaming filters.

"Where's the signal processing layer in there? Oh, it's third party. Where's the channel synchronization? Can't find it."

Everything is third-party. JACK only gives you a microsecond-precise information about audio system. You can do the rest yourself.

"And shockingly enough it's all software. Where's that hardware acceleration you're so fond of?"

It's possible to have hardware filters in JACK. The problem is that hardware filters are not that useful for professional-type audio systems. Look at OpenAL/EAX for hardware acceleration of spatial sound and other goodies.

BTW, OpenAL Creative Drivers even work on Vista by bypassing all its audio stack.

And.... SURPRISE! Windows Vista uses 32-bit floats as internal audio sample format ( http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/04/03/volume-in-windows-vista-part-1-what-is-volume.aspx )!

"And what happens under load and the realtime scheduler can't quite keep up? Ah, I see, you get drop outs. What happens on Vista? Nothing, they hook into the scheduler to guarantee that their audio paths get time on the CPU."

Newsflash: if Vista scheduler can't quite keep up - you'll get sound drop-outs (I _do_ get them when I test my audio app on VMWare). There's no way around it. Realtime scheduler guarantees that your audio stack will get the highest priority, just like in Vista.

"It's not a matter of delaying individual streams. It's a matter of delaying individual channels from the same stream. So that your rear speakers sitting against the far wall behind you play just a bit earlier."

That doesn't matter. It's still not hard to do using kernel streaming.

I can distinctly remember that nice '3d-room' settings on my Creative Audigy 2 back in 2003. All in hardware.

>It could actually be that Microsoft got it right. It may be that
>the core of Vista is not as terrible as we all think it is. I've
>seen posts discussing how Vista uses a completely refactored
>kernel, with more layers of abstraction and cleaning up of many of
>the quirks of win32.

I believe they DID get it right. Check this out:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/12/15/continuing-our-discussion-on-performance.aspx

Scroll down about 8 screens to the stuff about PerfTrack.
This does seem "innovative" and "new".

Let us assume that all subsystems are nicely tuned. This does not mean the system will be fast or responsive. Many user tasks will touch many subsystems. How these interact is the benchmarking problem.

With PerfTrack, someone sends in a report "This is Slow", with a trace of the last minute of system activity. Somebody monitoring the PerfTrack logs says "hmm. thats not right". They define an unacceptable level, and broadcast this out to everybody running PerfTrack. These then send reports back automatically only when the performance goal is missed.

Quote:
In our "dialed up" request, we would set a "threshold" time that we thought was interesting. Additionally, we we may opt to filter on machines with a certain amount of RAM, a certain class of processor, the presence of specific driver, or any number of other things. Clients meeting the criteria would then, upon hitting the "Start" event, configure and enable tracing quickly and potentially send back to us if the "Stop" event occurred after our specified "threshold" of time.
End Quote.

They mention they have over 500 of these in use now. A few more months to bake this, and a nice perf boost should be EXPECTED.

If you really want to see what WGA is sending to Microsoft, just capture the packets on their way to the internet and see what's being sent. Has anyone done that and found anything of real interest?

Yes, it has been done. MS has been sued over the amount of personal information being sent back to MS.
MS claimed that even releasing details on WGA in court would allow hackers to take over all of their customers windows computers.

So, we have MS admitting that they (and everyone else who looks) can have full control over windows systems, and they cant have the world knowing what data is being sent back due to security claims (What the govt would call national security, no doubt)

References:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Sued_Over_WGA_Program/1151615015
https://www.hackinthebox.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=28694
http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-faces-second-WGA-lawsuit/2100-1014_3-6090651.html

Oh, and that info about what exactly is sent back to MS that the court ruled can not be released to the public due to 'hackers' being able to take full control over windows?
No, it is not of much interest. And nothing more identifiable than a GUID.

This link contains the full undecoded XML sent from WGA to MS:
http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/archive/2007/03/07/wga-notifications-and-download-and-install-telemetry.aspx

If Microsoft can continue to sell Win7 rather than continue to extend the life of XP for various reasons (netbooks), they'd have set themselves up for surviving the recession as gracefully as possible. Now, how bad that would be despite potential good efforts is a wait-and-see game. 1. XP costs less than Vista partly because OEM's can ship cheaper hardware for XP. If Win7 would run on comparable hardware, and not be 'slow' (or require premium upgrades for graphics chipsets, extra RAM etc), OEM's can sell Win7 for almost the same price, and get consumers to like what they have to offer. This has been hard to do with 'slow' Vista, but Win7 seems to work well on 'less' hardware. It seems like at least not poised to lose again. 2. Businesses like appcompat, and better group policy management. http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ mentions (very briefly) that Microsoft has a separate 'triad' for appcompat. Hopefully, they are delivering. Also, Windows has been good with group policy for a long time, and one can only hope that Win7 has grown in that front. The key question is whether it will be worth the while for businesses to upgrade to Win7. If they can upgrade on existing hardware without too many problems, that would have been a win. They get better administrative control with a newer OS. Again,the key question is one of performance with 'less' hardware. 3. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Win7 is really solid on netbooks. If this is true, then Win7 is already a better chioce in this market. Ordinary people are seeking out netbooks because they are cheap and attractive, and a good OS like Win7 that is likely to support good touchscreen controls is exactly what's needed in this market to help the non-geek consumers. Hopefully Microsoft has improved Win7 to play nice with SSD's. It doesn't look like Win7 is too huge on big-ticket features that can be 'seen'. But that's not where Vista needed improvements - Vista already had plenty of big new features that one could 'see'. So Win7 should ideally be trying to deliver on the 'unseen' fronts to make the whole OS more viable. Again, I'm getting the feeling that this is true.

Heh, WinFS... It's such an easy troll target... ;)

The storage system (not its own file system) called "WinFS" was released as Beta 1, but later cancelled, with components of it ending up in SQL Server 2008. It was later assumed to be dead for good, but Ballmer said in late 2006 that it was still being worked on, although he was not clear on in which products it would end up in. For all we know, the team could be working with the SQL Server team now.

This is among the last pieces of good actual info on this project:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2006/06/23/644706.aspx

Windows 7 will not include WinFS, and it was never announced for it.

Impossible like "xor eax, eax" returning a non-zero value and crashing windows?

Kinda like chroot, which unix has had for a long time...

It's actually a bit more than that. It's not just limited restrictions to access files & registry - they actually lock down the process completely; for example, it is not able to send WMs to other processes, or in general communicate with them using any other form of IPC, except for the one single parent process, and only through channels explicitly designated by that parent process for communication.

Here is a more detailed technical description of how all this works, and what it gains.

IE7 isn't 'run inside a VM' it's run in a process which is prevented from doing a lot of stuff, e.g. it is only allowed file access to the temp directory.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/09/528963.aspx
Internet-facing applications such as browsers are inherently at a higher security risk than other applications because they can download untrustworthy content from unknown sources. IE7's Protected Mode leverage's Windows Vista's UAC, MIC and UIPI features to boost browser security. In IE7's Protected Mode-which is the default in other than the Trusted security zone-the IE process runs with Low rights, even if the logged-in user is an administrator. Since add-ins to IE such as ActiveX controls and toolbars run within the IE process, those add-ins run Low as well. The idea behind Protected Mode IE is that even if an attacker somehow defeated every defense mechanism and gained control of the IE process and got it to run some arbitrary code, that code would be severely limited in what it could do. Almost all of the file system and registry would be off-limits to it for writing, reducing the ability of an exploit to modify the system or harm user files. The code wouldn't have enough privileges to install software, put files in the user's Startup folder, hijack browser settings, or other nastiness.

It's a good idea and it doesn't affect performance.

Better URL for the IE/flash NX-disabling vulnerability:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/08/ie8-security-part-I_3A00_-dep-nx-memory-protection.aspx

About IE8 and ACID2. Define how much it pass ACID2. As much as IE7? If so, not good enough unfortunately :(

No, I mean IE8 actually passes ACID2, while IE7 does not. Here's their blog post about it.

And you said about IE7 compatibility mode, can I force it? If not, I cannot rely on that.

Yes, you (the web developer) can force it, by adding a meta tag to your code (which IE6/7 and all other browsers will ignore):

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

The user can also force IE7 compatibility mode for specific sites (if the developer hasn't already added this tag). More info here.

About IE8 and ACID2. Define how much it pass ACID2. As much as IE7? If so, not good enough unfortunately :(

No, I mean IE8 actually passes ACID2, while IE7 does not. Here's their blog post about it.

And you said about IE7 compatibility mode, can I force it? If not, I cannot rely on that.

Yes, you (the web developer) can force it, by adding a meta tag to your code (which IE6/7 and all other browsers will ignore):

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

The user can also force IE7 compatibility mode for specific sites (if the developer hasn't already added this tag). More info here.

I'm going to call FUD on the whole article. IE 8 RC1 isn't due until Q1 2009, Microsoft reinforced this target late in November. Also Microsoft usually announces releases on the IE team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/ but there was no mention of this. Finally, I am unable to find a link anywhere - in the article, from MS, anywhere.

And don't do any of this: http://blogs.msdn.com/architectsrule/archive/2008/07/01/real-life-dilbert-manager-quotes.aspx

F# is not a part of VS2008 at the moment, and there was no final F# 1.0 release either. For now, you still have to download it separately. That said, its VS integration is certainly much better than what it was.

It does get a lot of publicity from Microsoft lately, though: it has its own section on MSDN, there were a lot of mentions of it on PDC 2008, including a dedicated session, but also in other presentations (e.g. Anders spoke about F# as one source of inspiration, and demoed it, during his C# futures talk), and so on.

Finally, it has been known for a long time that Microsoft is going to "productize" F# (that is, release it as a boxed commercial product). And finally, just now, Don Syme has announced that F# will be shipped as part of VS2010, and that further F# releases won't be separate, but will be part of VS2010 betas.

And yeah, it's a big deal. To the best of my knowledge, it's the first time a functional language (not just in name, but with roots in the traditional academic FP - ML/OCaml) is commercialized and pushed together with a development environment by the company of size and influence of Microsoft.

F# is not a part of VS2008 at the moment, and there was no final F# 1.0 release either. For now, you still have to download it separately. That said, its VS integration is certainly much better than what it was.

It does get a lot of publicity from Microsoft lately, though: it has its own section on MSDN, there were a lot of mentions of it on PDC 2008, including a dedicated session, but also in other presentations (e.g. Anders spoke about F# as one source of inspiration, and demoed it, during his C# futures talk), and so on.

Finally, it has been known for a long time that Microsoft is going to "productize" F# (that is, release it as a boxed commercial product). And finally, just now, Don Syme has announced that F# will be shipped as part of VS2010, and that further F# releases won't be separate, but will be part of VS2010 betas.

And yeah, it's a big deal. To the best of my knowledge, it's the first time a functional language (not just in name, but with roots in the traditional academic FP - ML/OCaml) is commercialized and pushed together with a development environment by the company of size and influence of Microsoft.

F# is not a part of VS2008 at the moment, and there was no final F# 1.0 release either. For now, you still have to download it separately. That said, its VS integration is certainly much better than what it was.

It does get a lot of publicity from Microsoft lately, though: it has its own section on MSDN, there were a lot of mentions of it on PDC 2008, including a dedicated session, but also in other presentations (e.g. Anders spoke about F# as one source of inspiration, and demoed it, during his C# futures talk), and so on.

Finally, it has been known for a long time that Microsoft is going to "productize" F# (that is, release it as a boxed commercial product). And finally, just now, Don Syme has announced that F# will be shipped as part of VS2010, and that further F# releases won't be separate, but will be part of VS2010 betas.

And yeah, it's a big deal. To the best of my knowledge, it's the first time a functional language (not just in name, but with roots in the traditional academic FP - ML/OCaml) is commercialized and pushed together with a development environment by the company of size and influence of Microsoft.

Clearly, playing Quake in the browser is the killer app for this technology.

They would be late to the party: behold, Silverlight Quake.

Personally, I think the killer app for this particular Google tech will actually be playing DN4E in the browser...

Your points on the difficulty of porting games from the Xbox 360 to the PC versus Xbox to PC are valid, but your statements on the Xbox OS are just downright wrong.

The Xbox 360 is not based off of early versions of Windows NT in any way, shape, or form. The last version of NT to support the PowerPC architecture was NT 4.0, and the support it had was cut prematurely, long before the x86 and Alpha versions of NT 4.0 ended their lifecycle (sometime after SP3 but before SP4 for memory, the final SP for NT 4.0 x86 was SP6a).

Keeping in mind that despite being a gaming console, the OS needs to support many advanced OS features that NT 4.0 never supported, it's not only wrong, but doesn't make sense. For example, the Xbox 360 uses the DirectX 9.0c API, NT 4.0 had a crippled version of DirectX 3.0 (yes, seriously). That, and you'd be looking at other things like solid support for multi-core processors (the hardware is a tri-core PPC), which isn't identical to SMP support.

In actual fact, the Xbox OS was built from the ground up. It shares numerous design concepts with NT, much of the same nomenclature, but the OS itself is designed from the ground-up specifically for gaming, with anything not pertinent to gaming not included.

I highly recommend this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx

onhashchange

http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/03/ie8-html5-and-a/

msie8 is the first to implement this event. don't know what that is? ajax is the most important technological development in browsers in recent history (invented with microsoft's xmlhttprequest object, btw). however, ajax breaks history and bookmarking (can't go forward/ back, can't bookmark deep into an ajax session)

a way around this has been to hijack the hash part of anchor links, since they stay on the same page, but create a history. initially, this hack didn't work for msie, because msie didn't consider hash changes to be part of the browser's history, invoking valid msie hatred (msie7 fixed that oversight). but now, from the back of the class, msie jumps to the front of the class with onhashchange, becoming the programmer's best friend

currently, there is no way to tell when a browser's anchor hash link changes other than with extremly ugly, resource wasting kludges like putting a "heartbeat" on the web page (every 200 milliseconds, see if the url's hash link has changed... vomit). however, here's a recent history emulator without the odious heartbeat kludge (but no bookmarking functionality):

http://www.zachleat.com/web/2008/08/21/onhashchange-without-setinterval/

but now, msie, with onhashchange, makes ajax programming for history/ bookmarking elegant... for the very first time. there's plenty of reasons to hate microsoft folks, but hate them for actual real technical reasons

want one? ok: there's msie8's bullshit compatibility button. since msie8 tries so hard to be compliant for once, it is faced with backwards compatibility issues for rendering sites that only really work on msie now

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/27/introducing-compatibility-view.aspx

ugggh

so the lesson is: by all means, hate microsoft and msie. but make sure your hate is grounded in reality, not ignorant bias which i see in a lot of comments here

That's just bunk. There's no inherent limit to 32 bit systems since the PPro:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx
Sucks that a microsoft document answers my questions when all this crap about 32-bit addressing floats around.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08/18/216492.aspx
There's another microsoft document that states the obvious.
The so-called 'limit' is a per-process limit, and is artificially imposed on the whole of non-enterprise versions of windows by microsoft. There's lots of issues with using more than 4GB, you can't really blame them. But you can blame the hardware vendors.
But even the idea of a large video card using memory address space is an artificial limit imposed by poor design of hardware, and dumbed-down versions of windows.
In most cases you're correct (and kudos for being more correct than those who are just plain wrong,) but the limit is, technically, a bug, and not inherent.