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BTW, I never thought Windows would be taking over the mobile world the way it has. But I admit, even I prefer it because I find it familiar. I avoided the whole PDA thing until they merged PDAs with cell phones -- because I never wanted to bother carrying around both. Now that I've waited, I've discovered it's a Windows-based world.

But there are other kids as well:

12-year old Nigerian is a certified Java Programmer

12 year old programmer creates web browser

Pakistan's youngest certified Microsoft programmer - 9 years old

Covered in slashdot before

This bug is reportedly fixed : http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2006/0 7/31/684327.aspx

I play with speech recognition on my mac and it is pretty cool...but cannot say productive...possibly because I am not a native english speaker..

Love to impress my mates with the knock-knock jokes feature in mac speech recognition.. :)

OOXML can represent, with full fidelity, any existing Microsoft Office document. ODF can't.

This in turn lets Microsoft do things like using OOXML as an intermediate format and translate all files from .DOC to OOXML and then back, which allows them to avoid security bugs in the parser. You can't do that with ODF because ODF can't represent those older files.

In 1995 the Pentium Pro introduced 36-bit addressing and combined with windows PAE at the time, could address 64 gibibytes (yes, "gibibytes") of memory.

Do you make a habit out of reading the first sentence of a post and then commenting on it with a smart response?

The second sentence of my post, for your reference:

Most motherboards don't support PAE (either due to lack of re-mappable PCI address space, or even lack of 36-bit address lines!), so we have a hard-limit of 2-3GB in the most popular version of Vista (32-bit).

PAE is not some magic bullet. Support is required in three places: OS, chipset and motherboard itself.

Vista supports PAE just fine, so that's not a problem. The problem lies in the hardware:

Most consumer motherboard chipsets do not support the remapping of memory-mapped I/O space required to support PAE. Even then, some motherboards omit the extra 4 bits of address lines as a cost savings feature. You usually have to trade-up to server boards to get these types of features, and even some of those fall short.

While the limitations of 32-bit Vista may spark a renewed interest in motherboards having proper PAE support, it's too little, too late. I also consider PAE a pretty crappy band-aid for a problem that already has a solution (Vista 64). This was the focus of my original post: we could have avoided this whole memory mess if Vista were purely flat 64-bit.

http://blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald/archive/2007/05 /17/weird-how-people-get-stuff-wrong.aspx

Future versions of Windows Server after {the upcoming Longhorn / 2008} will be 64-bit only, but not the client OS.

I think parent is referring to the Decoy Effect. It's a bit more subtle - the article is well-worth reading.

One of the points that Bill Hilf made in his interview on Channel9 is that Linux was "very different" from Windows. (He then added that either one, other, or both were "very different" from OSX.)

How true is this? I only ask because I have had some experience with MVS (the operating system which has no concept of "files" or "directories") and Tandem (whose weird features I can't remember enough to describe), and I would describe both of those as "very different" from UNIX or Windows.

When it comes down to it, UNIX and Windows look pretty similair to me. They both support WIMP GUIs. They both have concepts of files and directories. They both have users and groups and permissions. Micah hacks the computer system so Nathan can win. Peter controls the radiation power, and the ending is a cliffhanger into the next and final episode. They both have preemptive multitasking and multithreading.

The whole reason that Hilf stated that "Linux is very different from Windows" was part of the justification as to why Microsoft would not build applications for Windows (which was transparent and deceitful). If my belief is correct (that Linux is "similar enough" to Windows), then my opinion of Hilf falls through the floor. Am I correct that Linux is "similar enough" to Windows?

Citation.

(Although to be fair, GP was quoting someone.)

Quoth your sig:

Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!

Because this is no longer needed, now that we have proportional fonts.

Seriously. Who the fuck decided that bitching on the Internet shall no longer be researched before posting? For homework, figure out why the authors of HTML force all spaces after the first to be trimmed in the output.

Maybe MS doesn't support it directly

but... http://tomshardware.co.uk/2005/09/09/windows_in_yo ur_pocket/ or http://www.sureboot.com/ or http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6346-592 8902.html

Here's the reason you can't install Windows directly on the USB drive... turns out its all to do with pageable kernels (that OSX and Linux don't support)

Can you point to a single concrete example of where Windows "thinks it is better, wiser and more powerful than the user"? I've been using Windows for almost as long as I've been using Linux. (12 years and 15 years respectively.) I can't think what you might be referring to - could you be specific please?

I am guessing you don't use your own products... Admin privilege is the rule rather than the exception. See. http://blogs.msdn.com/kangsu/archive/2007/01/15/ru n-vs2005-as-administrator-on-vista-when-debugging. aspx And I have to do this even with SP1, debuging a file based website. Not even IIS7.

It was stated a long time ago that it was to help IT have a more managed patch day.

Each patch is tested thoroughly, but a lot of things happen out in the wild such as odd buggy printer drivers, as noted by this post by a Microsoft developer: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/05/ 04/2402028.aspx

Once people start to understand UAC and how it works, people will begin to harness it and accept it rather than shun away from it.

UAC allows administrators to be logged in 24/7 without having 20+ privileges until the actually need that power. 99% of the time UAC will strip the administrator privileges away from the administrator and grant them with 6 SeXXX privileges to work with. It does this by using two different tokens instead of one. The first is a normal user token, and the second is the real administrator token. When you see that screen where UAC asks for elevation, that's when Vista will grant you the administrator token. Don't believe me? Type "whoami /priv" in a normal shell under the administrator logon. Now open up a shell using "Run as administrator" and type "whoami /priv".

Vista isn't the shining example of everything secure, but it sure is lightyears ahead of XP and a real good step in the correct direction. Windows users will whine and gripe about it, but they will eventually have to go through the same stuff the *nix crowd did along time ago when people were logged in with root 24/7.

If you require Vista to elevate you with certain apps, then create a .manifest file and place it in the same directory as the .exe. The manifest file is just an xml file that tells Vista that the .exe will require administrator privileges to run (queue UAC.) Google "vista manifest" or check this out for more information: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=2112 71

Enjoy..

h

Perhaps Microsoft should set up an audit unit and start giving software a 'UAC-compatible' tick if a piece of software has minimised how much UAC approval is required if its turned on, allowing the publisher to put it on their box so that the customers can tell. Who knows, perhaps one day the UAC system might actually be viable.

In theory, that already exists. In order to use the "Certified for Windows Vista" logo on your software, you have to play nicely with UAC.

You could just download Microsoft's Virtual PC XP image for IE 6 testing and convert it to a VMWare image. Then you can make an copy of it and do a Windows Update to install IE 7 and you can test both versions.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-an d-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx

Actually, American Express Canada does log you in securely. When you click that login button, it executes a script, which then submits the form to an https address.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/20/410240 .aspx

And for a method to do the man in the middle to a wireless user see airpwn

http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=secur ity&seqNum=158&rl=1

Better go with the bad username/password trick to get a full https page.

How about this: the browser could highlight the domain in the URL. If you were browsing a page at www.amazon.com.evildomain.com, then evildomain.com would be highlighted. That would hopefully make it obvious that you're not at amazon.com.

I was trying to tell my dad how to recognize what domain he was at, but I couldn't think of how to describe it while taking into account all the variations a phisher might use. Then I saw a regular expression designed to extract the domain name from a URL. It basically said to take the part just before the third slash. That seems pretty good to me and easy enough to explain to my dad. Can a scammer fake that? Another way in Firefox at least is that Firefox shows the domain on the status bar at the lower right.

Another problem I've run into lately is that a couple of institutions that I deal with have stopped using SSL encryption for the entire login page. They use regular http for most of the page and just have the username and password form submitted with https. The problem is that you see no padlock and there is no way to know that the page is really from the domain you see in the address bar. A man in the middle could have intercepted the page between you and the bank and removed the encryption from the login form and redirected your password to a bad guy. The entire page and everything on it needs to be encrypted with https or the page is insecure. Even Microsoft's Internet Explorer programmers say this is bad and tell the banks not to do it but the banks do it anyway. Read more about it at Microsoft's website.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/20/410240 .aspx

This is not just a possibility but it seems to me like a realistic attack. On most wired networks you don't have to worry too much about ISP employees doing a man in the middle attack on you, but if you're using wireless at a coffee shop you'd better watch out for the https in your address bar. A hacker might use something like airpwn

http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=secur ity&seqNum=158&rl=1

to do a man in the middle attack and to intercept your password. It looks like it would be pretty easy.

I read an easy way you can get an entirely encrypted login page even if they don't have one available. You start your login by giving a bogus username and password. The bank will usually come back with an entirely encrypted login page that says you entered the wrong password. Just check the domain and check for the s in https and then go ahead and enter the correct username and password.

IBM opened up the market for clones, [...]

IBM most certainly did NOT open up the market for clones, it was ripped out from under them by Compaq. They even tried (unsuccessfully) to kill it with the PS/2.

That the IBM PC "Clone" even exists at all is a function of a) dumb luck (IBM using mostly off-the-shelf parts to build it) and b) Compaq very careful clean-room reverse-engineering the PC BIOS.

It has taken court rulings to get it so when you buy a new PC Microsoft where doesn't get a cut -- you know, that famous "Microsoft Tax".

It has always been possible to buy a PC without Windows (or DOS). Always.

By then, the damage had already been done. Everyone needed Word (when Wordperfect at the time was a vastly superior product because that was what everyone else had.

Your history here is way off as well. It took nearly a decade for Word to beat Wordperfect and did so by being better.

The port of Wordpefect to Windows was crap because Microsoft programmed their own apps using APIs they wouldn't tell everyone else about -- so everyone else had slow, flaky software that didn't quite work as well as Word.

No, it was crap because it was a bad port of a DOS program (the first version didn't even use Windows's built-in printer support - if your printer wasn't supported by WP itself, *you couldn't print* !). It had nothing to do with the mythical "undocumented APIs".

In the 90's, Windows was grossly incapable of doing anything involving a network without 3rd party stuff.

Windows was quite capable of networking with Windows and Netware. Which was about all you would expect it to do in the *early* 90s.

My point is, Microsoft has gotten where they are today not by ever having a better offering. But by managing to become the de-facto standard via exclusive licensing, strong-arming distributors, and using that great big whacking war chest they've built up from rolling out minor point releases and charging a fortune for them.

Bollocks. Microsoft have frequently "gotten where they are" by having the better product. Office (primarily Word and Excel) and IE are textbook examples of better products beating the alternatives.

When I first switched to Linux, a 0.99a Slackware was capable of doing a helluva lot more than Windows clean through until NT came out, and in less resources.

Slackware 0.99 was released about the same time as Windows NT 3.1. It was, relatively speaking, a pig - but it was also doing a lot more than Linux, so that is at least somewhat understandable.

If a program crashes, it asks you if you want to send an error report to Microsoft. Press 'send' to send one. If it's a known problem, it'll tell you.

If you're beta-testing Windows, a quick Google gives http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/sentiments/d efault.mspx as a feedback form. I imagine other beta products have their own feedback ways (e.g. Office 2007 had Send a Smile / Send a Frown).

Otherwise... it seems to vary from product to product. Windows Home Server has a dedicated suggestion forum; and pretty much every product has a developer blog.

If that's not direct enough, I can personally recommend another OS with more direct feedback methods...

• Windows handles OS extensions by loading DLLs into Explorer's address space, instead of introducing a layer of separation and interacting with a separate process (a design which would have allowed graceful handling of arbitrary errors in the extension).
• It's apparently easy to accidentally construct code which Explorer believes is a usable shell extension, and likewise impossible to add checks to Explorer such that it will only use, as a shell extension, something which was deliberately intended to be a shell extension. Stop and think about that for a long, long second. That's shockingly shitty design even for Microsoft. Chen blames the application programmers (saying, "lots of people mess up IUnknown::QueryInterface" and linking to a page containing what appears to be an excerpt from the Nag Hammadi scriptures in the original Coptic), instead of realizing that if professional programmers show a consistent pattern of making particular mistakes interacting with an interface, the interface is probably poorly designed.
• As you mention, this seems like a design flaw in the implementation of threading, DLL handling, and process exit. The same construct in Linux does not hang -- it waits until the thread terminates, and then exits normally:

  #include <pthread.h>
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  
  volatile int stop_now;
  
  void stop()
  {
  printf("Stopping, sort of.\n");
  while(!stop_now);
  printf("All done.\n");
  }
  
  void *start(void *arg)
  {
  sleep(10);
  printf("Deciding to stop.\n");
  stop_now = 1;
  }
  
  int main(int argc, char **argv)
  {
  atexit(stop);
  stop_now = 0;
  
  pthread_t thread;
  pthread_create(&thread, NULL, start, NULL);
  
  exit(0);
  }

Raymond answered this question in his comments section -- see http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/05/ 04/2402028.aspx#2412469. The bug was in a shell extension provided with a printer that was not even manufactured anymore when this patch was developed. Even exhaustive QA cannot be reasonably expected to test all Windows shell extensions in existence.

Oh.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mattev/archive/2004/06/21/16 1770.aspx

You should read this, which I wrote a few years ago, and which upset many mac zealots (as seen from the comments)

I see even after people responded to you you STILL didn't RTFA. The particular shell extension was for a printer that was so old it wasn't produced at the time the patch was made. How many pieces of hardware does Windows support? Do you want them to test EVERY one of them with every single bug fix?

You are incredibly fucking stupid. Welcome to my foes list.

I R'd TFA before you made your FIRST stupid fucking comment with your stupid fucking assumption.

Guess what? If one shell extension can cause the problem, then another shell extension can likely cause the same problem. He never explains why that would not be true, so there is no reason to assume that it would not be true. Generally speaking, there's more than one way to write a program that does the same thing, and there's more than one way to arrive at the same error condition.

Does that help you understand my objection, oh ye of little brain?

There is even a comment which raises a more detailed question about the explanation, which has not yet been answered.

On one last personal note: Don't try to out-asshole me. You will fail. I'm not exactly proud of that, but you need to pull your head out of your ass before you come after me.

... but then a great book (PowerShell in Action) came along. Our in-box documentation has gotten much better as well but you pick up Bruce's book and give us a try again. I doubt you'll be disappointed. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs /msh.mspx

Apple asserts patents on the canvas tag, interestingly directly mirroring the concerns Microsoft IE developers expressed about WHATWG all along. So don't expect the canvas tag in IE ever.

Here's the link to the IE Blog posting:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/04/19/what-t o-expect-from-ie-at-mix07.aspx

That is indeed how things are starting to go with MS products. Exchange 2007 is fully scriptable. The GUI is really nothing but an interface on top of the PS commands. Whenever you do anything in the gui it tells you what PS commands it executed.

A lot of it's functionatly can't even be done through the GUI any more. For example to enable an imap mailbox for a specific user you need to execute the PS command
set-casmailbox username -imapenabled $true

It's stuff like this that makes the complaints I read earlier about the | not piping plain text through stdin and stdout like bash does a moot point. Why execute new processes that needs to parse text when you can just interface directly with the application and modify it's settings through a real programing interface?

Take a look at this comparison of a bash script, and PS script here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/01/2 9/virtual-machine-manager-s-powershell-support.asp x

... monads were the windowless metaphysical atoms of perception itself.

This is fitting. M$'s value is all a matter of perception, which is why M$ spends a billion dollars a month on marketing. Without that perception, there would be no windows.

Still, I like the original name, MSH (warning: Fake Community Effort) better. MSH can and should be parsed as "MicroSoft Hell" and it reminds you of the DOS toupper roots of it all.

For those who haven never seen Monad in action and are quick to bash (ha! get it?) Microsoft's new shell, take a look at these two videos. You'll see that it's much more than just bash on Win32. In fact, if it ever catches on, it'll be Unix's turn to play catch-up, because some parts of it are pretty damn amazing. (Note that those are from 2005, but AFAIK, there haven't been substantial changes.)

The whole point of Monad is that it's not just text, it's objects. So, unlike Unix, where you work with a command and then filter its output (which is just text), the output of Monad, while looking like text, is actually kind of like pointers back to the real thing, so instead of just doing a Unix-style command | filter | filter, you can say "OK, run this command, now of the things it output, go back and tell me this and this about them." Like, "Of these things that are running, tell me which five are using the most CPU time, then tell me the version of each, and how much memory they're using."

PS: "...even if it does have a dorky name"--which name were you referring to: the one that sounds like 'testicle' or the one that makes me think of the Lottery? :-)

For those who haven never seen Monad in action and are quick to bash (ha! get it?) Microsoft's new shell, take a look at these two videos. You'll see that it's much more than just bash on Win32. In fact, if it ever catches on, it'll be Unix's turn to play catch-up, because some parts of it are pretty damn amazing. (Note that those are from 2005, but AFAIK, there haven't been substantial changes.)

The whole point of Monad is that it's not just text, it's objects. So, unlike Unix, where you work with a command and then filter its output (which is just text), the output of Monad, while looking like text, is actually kind of like pointers back to the real thing, so instead of just doing a Unix-style command | filter | filter, you can say "OK, run this command, now of the things it output, go back and tell me this and this about them." Like, "Of these things that are running, tell me which five are using the most CPU time, then tell me the version of each, and how much memory they're using."

PS: "...even if it does have a dorky name"--which name were you referring to: the one that sounds like 'testicle' or the one that makes me think of the Lottery? :-)

The simple script, MakeMeAdmin is a closer comparison to sudo.

Adds the current logged in user (who is running the script) to administrators, launches a cmd.exe shell with that elevated (but same account) process, then removes the account from local admins.

So it basically gives you a command prompt shell with the current user's profile, but under elevated privileges.

Though it lacks the sudoers concept.

I don't think you can aquire an open source project. Your comment is a bit misleading. Rather what happened was that the sole developer Jim Hugunin wanted to join Microsoft after meeting with the .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime) team while discussing with them the technical issues he encountered. Jim joined up, and with a team at MS, brought IronPython to it's 1.0 release in September 2006.

There's some history on Jim Hugunin's blog here http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2006/09/05/7 41605.aspx

There's other Python projects for you purists to get your teeth stuck into, but this one isn't one of them, as it is with a lot of .NET stuff. Here, try Jim Hugunin's JVM based Python called Jython http://www.jython.org/

> People using MSFT tech are the types who are easily impressed and afraid of change...yet another flash type scripting thingy.

You don't care to read what's inside Silverlight, yet you mark (lots of) people as being afraid of change with a single move. Nice.

It's not a script thingy. It's the ability to use CLR on the browser (including all the cool stuff like Generics, LINQ etc.), DLR on top of CLR which means a new world of dynamic languages, XAML (the thing what you think a script thingy but actually an object serialization notation), etc etc.

MS developer community is currently bombarded with new technologies / methodologies / patterns since the last three or four years. Some ideas came from Java land (IoC containers, ORM), some built by MS (WPF, WCF) etc. It's in fact hard for the community to grasp all the new bits in such a short period of time but we are keeping up.

It seems that you have ideas without having the necessary knowledge.

IronRuby
DLR

While not directly related to the open-source angle of this story, here is Scott Guthrie (Silverlight team manager) talking about some of the more in-depth aspects of it. (36m long) http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=3045 08

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=3045 08

A fairly detailed explanation of the customization decisions made in Office 2007 can be found in this entry on Jensen Harris' blog.

Isn't that close to what Vista has with ReadyBoost?

iperkings, sounds wrong to me that you haven't received your upgrade. If you come to my blog and contact me through the email link in the upper left nav I might be able to help you get your express upgrade kit. At least I'll see what I can do. Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/wga

/3GB doesn't do that. It lets apps allocate up to 3GB of data (and the kernel 1GB instead), but that's a virtual address thing - how much physical memory the OS sees isn't related at all.

I hope the GP had verified in some way that the machine, somewhere, did see the full 4GB. (Probably during POST.) As opposed to one stick just being bad...

I know you, and most everybody else here, would love to believe that DX10's inability to run on XP was some plot by Microsoft to get people to buy Vista, but you're wrong.

You proclaim that there is "no reason why DirectX 10 can't work on windows XP", but offer absolutely no evidence to back up your claim.

Not surprising, I guess, considering the audience.

I know everybody wants to believe that Microsoft arbitrarily decided that DX10 would be Vista only so they could "force" people into buying the OS, but, as usual, it's a tiny bit more complex than that.

DX10 relies heavily on graphics card memory virtualization. The new Windows Display Driver Model, WDDM, introduces this feature. In order to accomplish this, it required a lot of low level kernel changes. So many, in fact, that back-porting it to XP would basically make XP's kernel into Vista's kernel.

There comes a point where you just have to say that a particular feature is only available in Vista. DX10 fits that bill.

I'll keep XP because of several reasons :

1) Nobody mentions this but Vista is incompatible with Visual Studio 2002/2003.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948853. aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/09/26 /772250.aspx
http://www.techworld.nl/article/2436/problemen-vis ta-en-visual-studio-zorgen-voor-onrust.html

Also, VS 2005SP1 doesn't seem to play nicely as it does on XP when you look at this laundry list of issues
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa964140. aspx

2) XP just plain works! I develop on a latitude 810 and it would crawl under Vista.

3) i'd like to install windows XP on my Intel iMac under Bootcamp. Vista is too unstable for that and as i'm only running it as a secondary OS along OS X i won't make the extra investment.

there's probably loads of other things to consider but these were mine;)

Visual Studio Express is free.

Microsoft sponsors Coding4Fun and the Beginner Developer Learning Center - and did I mention the Kid's Corner?

Free introductory e-texts like "C# for Sharp Kids?"

Let's be honest here. MSDN is positioned to supply just about everything a teacher could ask for in the elementary and secondary grades. In any language you could name.

This should help...

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-an d-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx

I've got two words for you, my friend. Virtual Machines.

Microsoft is even offering free images for Virtual PC, preloaded with IE6 and IE7. The annoying thing is that they're time limited, expiring in August. I think they're being entirely too optimistic about the upgrade rate, especially considering all the computers that can't upgrade to IE7 for technical or policy reasons.

Microsoft announced yesterday its "Silverlight", previously named WPF/E:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/04/15/intr oducing-microsoft-silverlight.aspx.
They call it "cross platform, cross browser plug-in" and it is basically a replacement for flash with wmv lock-in. Oh, and no linux (cross platform means XP+Vista+OSX, I guess)
One nice feature being HD streaming, I have to give it to them.

I'll still stay away...

Erm, a book is licensed too. You don't, for example, have the right to make a copy of the whole book. But you are granted all rights but that.

And with software, you say you already own the damn thing, which is not correct. You already have purchased a license to use the damn thing.

But then, you know, in most cases all the freaking EULA does anyway is reiterate crap you already knew ("you may not copy this software" - well, DUH!). I have yet to see (apart from that clause in Vista's EULA - which actually according to Paolo from Microsoft means that you aren't allowed to run the same copy of Windows as a guest where it is also installed as the Host OS, which is pretty "well, DUH!" anyway) any EULA which tries to remove a right other than the inevitable warranty disclaimer.

I would be interested in seeing some of the more bizarre EULA clauses, so if you have any examples to share, please do. (I think the most bizarre ever seen so far was the clause in a PC Pit Stop program's EULA which stated that if you read the clause you were eligible to receive a monetary prize if you were the first to simply email such and such an email address - it took four months for someone to claim the prize).