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Actually, speaking as a dev in test, while I have no knowledge of this specific fix, I imagine the turnaround and testing required for something like DRM is much lower because of the risk involved and the newness of the product. The reasons are two: a) the DRM system is low risk to patch - you probably aren't going to break anyone because not a lot depends on it compared to, say, the CRT libraries; b) since DRM is a new "product", there probably aren't as many existant tests to run as say, the CRT libraries which have been around in one form or another for 30 years and have so many configuration options that it takes days or weeks to run all the tests: http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2006/08/24/71 8976.aspx

Reminds me of this Raymond Chen post.

Quote:

I find it ironic when people complain that Calc and Notepad haven't changed. In fact, both programs have changed. (Notepad gained some additional menu and status bar options. Calc got a severe workover.)

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."

Really pathetic. Check this out http://blogs.msdn.com/embedded/archive/2005/03/23/ 401377.aspx Amount of time and energy require to secure it and protect from viruses is pathetic.

Sigh... I should know better than to reply to people like you, but I'll bite.

Protect Mode IE is a lot more than an OK dialog. It's a sandboxed version of IE that runs as a user with virtually no permissions on the machine. That means if there is a bug in IE (which there will be), the best somebody can do with it is crash IE. They can't touch any files on the machine that are important, not even the files of the user running IE.

All interaction with the rest of the system is done through a broker, which runs as the current user. This broker is just a few thousand lines of code (I've read conflicting stats, but some say as little as 1500 lines of code). This means the code can be easily audited for security issues. The changes of there being a bug in the broker are virtually zero, at least when compared with the rest of IE.

So it's a bit more than another OK dialog. Sorry to disappoint you... I know you were happy thinking Microsoft wasn't actually improving security in Windows.

I guess it technically isn't re-writing, since they lifted the majority of the stack from BSD in the first place, but hey, did this wheel really need to be reinvented?

For examples of unsigned applications that doesn't break Aero: GAIM. Miranda. Firefox. VLC. We could go on and on.

There is Not good CSS support in the next iteration of the browser so, how could we expect good support in an IDE? Comments on I.E 7

... it'll be interesting to see how people keep those in place without jeopardizing the layouts in IE7.

A lot of them have been destroyed.

For further information on CSS compatability, check out the IEBlog entry, "Details on our CSS changes for IE7", as well as the Quirksmode CSS browser compatability page.

Protected Mode in Vista IE7, Windows Vista and Parental Controls in IE7, and Vista only network diagnostic tools.

Protected Mode in Vista IE7, Windows Vista and Parental Controls in IE7, and Vista only network diagnostic tools.

This is not the same IE build as in the latest Vista build. This release only works in XP. Actually the versions of IE in XP and Vista are not exactly the same. Some of this they blame on the underlying OS but most likely it's just to make vista more attractive.

IE for Vista was going to be named IE7+ and XP simply IE7, however they scrapped that naming convention.

Also another slight name change, on both platforms it's no longer "Microsoft Internet Explorer" it's now "Windows Internet Explorer".

I couldn't find links to this page in the summary or IE7 blog entry, so I'm posting it here as I believe many would be interested in it: List of CSS changes in IE7.

It's mostly bug fixes, notable new features are enabling :hover for all elements, implementing position: fixed, PNG transparency support, and min/max width/height.

> I think if the startup sound in Vista is non-deactivatable, then the most likely cause is due to programmers capitulating at getting the sound controls activated before the sound starts

No, it's because someone at Microsoft wanted to make the audio bits part of the Vista 'experience'. The thinking behind making the sound compulsory is that most laptops and desktops are supposed to have hardware mute buttons (and most do -- except for some sorry-ass HP/Dell owners). What'll probably happen is that they'll add a registry/powertoy override in the end.

> or because somebody insisted that since Microsoft payed some bigname composer to make this one sound

Actually, they got Robert Fripp. And not just for the startup sound -- he's doing all the sounds in Vista.

I have no idea why no other brands do this, but having an actual volume control is extremely useful. I hardly ever touch windows' horrible software volume control and just leave it at maximum.

Which is why Vista's volume control is actually useful - it can control volume per app (thanks to its new audio stack) ... no more getting an earsplitting jingle when your mail arrives because you set the volume to max on that movie you were playing.

Might be easier for King Crimson and Robert Fripp fans I suppose, as Fripp is responsible for "Windows sounds" according to http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1518 53 and http://www.krimson-news.com/2006/08/25/the-fripp-s ound-in-windows-vista/

credit to Krimson-News for this...

"You will be able to mute the sound on your computer speakers or in the volume control panel, so that the sound does not play if you do not wish to hear it during cold-boot.
Since the audio profile for that user will not have been loaded yet, if you try to mute the sound through the sound schemes "no sounds" setting in the Sound control panel in Windows, it will still play since the cold-boot sequence occurs before a user is logged on.
The user sound profile will not contain the option to modify the startup sound since, again, it is not a user specific setting.
They are currently assessing whether or not they will allow ability to programmatically disable (mute) the startup sound, however, if it is made possible, it will not be made possible via the control panel, rather via the registry or otherwise. Read: You will need to be a technical power user in order to make the change if it is possible."

Here's a link to the video of the good Mr Fripp recording those sounds at Microsoft:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1518 53

Oh, only the most fantastic guitarist I know of.
He was in Giles, Giles & Fripp before founding the band King Crimson.
He's known for his soundscapes (Frippertronics) and his increadibly fast and bizarre (machine-like) guitar play.

I have to say, I'm not much of a fan of Microsoft, but I have to admit they made a real good move getting Robert Fripp to do the soundscapes for their product.

For more on his work for Microsoft see this: http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/1/c/81cdb 151-0aae-4f50-ab44-654b5f7ae0db/Vista_Robert_Fripp _2005.wmv
Or to read the article posted on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1518 53
Or maybe even read Robert Fripp's page on WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fripp

I've been using Firefox 2.0 daily builds and Thunderbird 2.0 alpha along side the stable versions for quite some time using PortableApps.com. They are an entirely self-contained directory separate from your regular install.You can even run PortableFirefox from a CD so make sure to turn on the disk cache, otherwise performance is slow.

Firefox's auto incremental updates work great, plus it remembers your tabs so after the restart I'm right where I left off. I'm enjoying the built-in spell check--right now in fact. Firefox's reopen recently closed tabs feature on the renamed History menu is a life saver. I just accidentally closed this tab after checking that my links worked and Firefox brought it back complete will all form information. Google Suggest in the search box rocks.

The RSS feed summary page is cool and has support for Simple List Extensions. Check out a sample here: Jeff Bezos's Wish List. The ability to subscribe using your chosen feed reader is nice.

The tab bar is interesting. It changed to a grey gradient from a lighter, whiter washed out look a few builds ago. The grey doesn't match well with the Windows XP light tan gradient toolbars and the overflow arrow on the side of the tab bar are too faint to be noticeable. The list all tabs drop down on the right side is great though. I guess Mozilla has reached their goal of making the active tab better distinguished.

Generally, it seems to me that memory usage is lower than 1.5, even with 4 windows with 10+ tabs each. :-)

I'm lovin' it!

They're not hiding details from anybody, although they're also not widely publicising details to those who aren't interested in trying out pre-release software – the beta 1 release notes include a summary of new features, and there's more information for developers on how to use the features. (Beta 2 is expected for tomorrow and is primarily bug fixes; there won't be any significant changes to the feature set until Firefox 3, which seems to be the real major release.)

From the release notes:

• Built in Phishing Protection.
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
• Support for client-side session and persistent storage
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

Features like phishing protection were actually announced for IE7 over a year ago, but it seems that Firefox will be the first to ship with them. (Firefox also defaults to an implementation that better protects your privacy than IE, using an automatically-updated blacklist of sites instead of sending every URL you visit to a web service run by a company you may or may not trust.)

What's the deal with getting the latest and greatest system when the old games won't run any better on it anyway?

The real big deal with XBox360 is that MS is releasing development tools that will allow the general public to develop games for the system.

3 rows of menubars and tabs taking up valuable vertical space.

And yet, magically, Word 2007 uses only 135 vertical pixels for UI versus Word 2003's 140.

More things NOT ON the menus == more things that cannot be keyboarded

I suggest you inform yourself about what is being discussed. I don't think you know what you think you know.

3 rows of menubars and tabs taking up valuable vertical space.

And yet, magically, Word 2007 uses only 135 vertical pixels for UI versus Word 2003's 140.

More things NOT ON the menus == more things that cannot be keyboarded

I suggest you inform yourself about what is being discussed. I don't think you know what you think you know.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sandyk/archive/2006/02/24/53 8832.aspx

I especially like this one: "Sun Microsystems: Where Unix came to die."

Too bad such a beast will never exist...

Really? I guess you haven't heard about Windows Server Longhorn's "Server Core" installation mode, then, which is essentially a command-line driven version of Windows. No GUI shell, no applications, no server services, nothing. They've been busy with untangling the dependency hell of Windows so that it can be a lot more modular. That work won't be done for Server Longhorn, but that's their long-term goal.

One of the developers working on Server Core has a blog, more details are there:
http://blogs.technet.com/server_core/default.aspx

or you can watch a Channel 9 video on it here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1968 88

Wow, it's obvious you didn't read the article very closely. The 50-layer thing has nothing to do with virtualization; that's Microsoft's *current* (failing) effort to rescue the Windows codebase from collapse under its own weight, without resorting to virtualization.

What Gartner is saying (and they didn't make this up but are parroting smarter people who suggested it first) is that Microsoft should ditch the backwards compatibility that is hobbling them and start over from scratch with a new OS. (I'd prefer something based on Singularity but that's a long shot.) Virtualization then provides the means for backwards compatibility; simply virtualize Vista in the background to run all your legacy apps and drivers. But this virtualization doesn't have to work like VMWare or Virtual PC today; Microsoft can produce a version of Vista that integrates seamlessly with the host OS when run under virtualization. This is what they're talking about with "integrating data across partitions" and "creating a consistent user experience".

Microsoft has resisted this path, claiming that it's impossible. But Apple has already proved it can work, with Mac OS Classic in OS X. That's what we're talking about here: Microsoft needs to pull an OS X and rewrite their OS from the ground up, then produce "Vista classic" for backward compatibility.

• Minimized ribbon
• Mouse control of minimized ribbon

• Minimized ribbon
• Mouse control of minimized ribbon

They aren't changing shit.

This article is rediculous FUD and increadibly bias. But yea, I know "you must be new here"....

A feature they wanted in the Ribbon from the start, but were afraid they would not have time for, got bumped in the priority queue due to customer feedback. Basically, the ribbon always could collapse, but now it can AutoHide. Whooopie! Let's bash Microsoft.

Watch the movies here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/20/6 72345.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/24/6 76371.aspx

And the Ribbon does not take up all that much space, see the comparisons and pixel height counts here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/5 77485.aspx

I've been a Office 2007 Beta 2 user since it's release. The new UI is fantastic. Try it out for yourselves:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testd rive.mspx

They aren't changing shit.

This article is rediculous FUD and increadibly bias. But yea, I know "you must be new here"....

A feature they wanted in the Ribbon from the start, but were afraid they would not have time for, got bumped in the priority queue due to customer feedback. Basically, the ribbon always could collapse, but now it can AutoHide. Whooopie! Let's bash Microsoft.

Watch the movies here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/20/6 72345.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/24/6 76371.aspx

And the Ribbon does not take up all that much space, see the comparisons and pixel height counts here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/5 77485.aspx

I've been a Office 2007 Beta 2 user since it's release. The new UI is fantastic. Try it out for yourselves:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testd rive.mspx

They aren't changing shit.

This article is rediculous FUD and increadibly bias. But yea, I know "you must be new here"....

A feature they wanted in the Ribbon from the start, but were afraid they would not have time for, got bumped in the priority queue due to customer feedback. Basically, the ribbon always could collapse, but now it can AutoHide. Whooopie! Let's bash Microsoft.

Watch the movies here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/20/6 72345.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/24/6 76371.aspx

And the Ribbon does not take up all that much space, see the comparisons and pixel height counts here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/5 77485.aspx

I've been a Office 2007 Beta 2 user since it's release. The new UI is fantastic. Try it out for yourselves:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testd rive.mspx

Jensen Harris, the lead program manager for the Office user experience, blogged about this change on July 24. He even has videos. His blog is a very comprehensive journal that describes the evolution of the Office 2007 UI, including decisions that went into building the Ribbon.

Warning: jensenh is a good writer, probably on par with Joel Spolsky, so be prepared to spend hours reading through his archives.

Jensen Harris, the lead program manager for the Office user experience, blogged about this change on July 24. He even has videos. His blog is a very comprehensive journal that describes the evolution of the Office 2007 UI, including decisions that went into building the Ribbon.

Warning: jensenh is a good writer, probably on par with Joel Spolsky, so be prepared to spend hours reading through his archives.

Thanks, I'll take a read of that blog. One question I'd have for you is, how customizable is it? Just dumping a pile of functions in front of people is relatively useless unless it can be organized according to personal preference.

Not customizable at all except for a toolbar at the top which you can completely customize with your own commands. Sounds crazy? I thought so too until I read Let's Talk About Customization:

• In fewer than 2% of sessions, the program was running with customized command bars.
• Of the 2% of sessions with customizations present, 85% included customization of four or fewer commands.

So while this is a blow to heavy customizers, it doesn't affect most users. I was actually shocked at first thinking how bad the lack of customization would be, but then realized I haven't modified Office toolbars for years.

What do I need from my UI? Leave it as it is. I have exactly two toolbars in either Word or Excel, and use a fraction of each (if I'm that concerned about screen space, I'll customise more carefully).

Jensen Harris (Office 2007 developer) talks about this in Let's Talk About Customization. From his post:

• In fewer than 2% of sessions, the program was running with customized command bars.
• Of the 2% of sessions with customizations present, 85% included customization of four or fewer commands.

Perhaps the new UI is not so useful for you, since you know all the shortcuts and know how to customize the UI for maximal productivity, but most people do not know or do such things, myself included. You know where everything is, so the ribbon doesn't help you much. I barely know where anything is, and the ribbon makes things a lot easier to find now for me.

What it hasn't done is give anyone any compelling reasons to upgrade. Someone needs to explain precisely how this "ribbon" feature adds value. What does it say about the product as a whole when it's THE most talked-about aspect of the new version? Is the product so stagnant that the only way to get people to eye it as a purchase is to shuffle around the UI a bit?

I would agree with you if it was merely a UI shuffle, but I've used Office 2007 for several months now, and find the new UI to be considerably more usable. Aside from Outlook, I'm not a heavy user, meaning I don't create documents all day, but I do read them often and occasionally I need to make my own. The end result is that I don't know all the shortcuts, what some commands do, or even what commands I need.

The new UI makes finding such commands a lot easier. Instead of navigating 9 top-level menus and numerous submenus in Word 2003, there are instead 7 tabs in Word 2007 and very few dropdowns (I'm assuming so; I can't remember any off the top of my head) to find commands. The biggest difference is in Excel; I'm basically a noob in it but had a far less frustrating time using 2007 recently to make some quick charts and formatting it the way I wanted. Commands now also have more informative tooltips; they're like mini-documentation pages embedded in the app. Formatting previews are also useful. Sometimes you don't know how a command will format something; in 2007 you can hover over the command and get a real-time preview in your document.

For me, the major problem with 2003 is feature discoverability, and that is something 2007 addresses very well. Perhaps if you know where all the features are and their shortcuts you'll find 2007 confusing, but for non-power users like me, all the above combine wonderfully to make 2007 a lot more usable than 2003.

Regarding your comment on UI shuffling, a lot of thought has gone into it. Read Jensen Harris's Office 2007 blog. He describes a lot of the studies and work that went into designing the Office 2007 UI. Excellent resource and insight, especially if you design UIs yourself.

The story is just talking about the option to keep the ribbon in a minimized and only extend when actually used, in which case it looks more like a menu, but it's still a ribbon. This is NOT the default setting.

See Jensen Harris' blog entry of a July 20 for accurate info, including a video of the minimized ribbon in action:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/20/6 72345.aspx

The story is just talking about the option to make the ribbon minimized and autohide, in which case it looks more like a menu, but it's still a ribbon. The autohide/minimized setting is not the default setting.

See Jensen Harris' blog entry of a July 20 for accurate info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/20/6 72345.aspx

I swear, the tech media is getting worse and worse with their misleading, inaccurate, and shallow stories.

But you already get more document space than you used to with the ribbon UI!

I like the ribbon.

What happened to "Developers, Developemrs, Developers" ?

You know what? I've got a copy of the Vista Driver Development kit, and I've written XP and NT drivers in the past.

When Vista comes out, I plan to get a Verisign Class 3 certificate for $500 and write a filter driver to allow RPC-1 drives to be used, sign it and put it on my website.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/12/ 09/502014.aspx

My plan is to catch and hack the IOCTL_DVD_* requests, or maybe you'd need to filter over the DVD drive itself.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/Storage_r/hh/Storage_r/k307_6baca45 d-504c-46b9-9724-f82132c2bead.xml.asp

Also, I'll sign any driver people send to me for a small fee, provided they send me the source code and it's well written.

Well here's a link: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/22/711402 .aspx#713585

It does: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/ 16/702526.aspx

Oh God! Just do NOT do it!

Roaming profiles are an endless source of misery. They break constantly, there are weird synchronization issues, when windows screws up it likes to wipe random settings from the user's registry hive, etc, etc. I could go on (and on and on and crying-fetal-mess-under-a-desk-hiding-from-account ants-with-fire-axes-and-hate on) but I'll let these people have a go.

If you do go for roaming profiles then you'll want to get keyboards that are waterproof. There will be lots of tears and vomit to fend off.

You should be careful with LDAP too. While LDAP isn't necessarily a Bad Idea it can take you places you do not want to go. Before you put users on any LDAP system you should install and fully configure the thing in a test environment AND integrate services you wish to have using the thing. Then try long and hard to break everything possible and see how you can recover. Then delete the whole thing and do it all again a few times. If you aren't sick to death of LDAP by the time you go live with it then you're going to have some bad experiences.

The fact is that /. embarrassed itself last week by posting a year-old story by Thurott on IE7 beta 1's CSS compliance. That slashdot has refused to apologize for or even admit to this error in judgment speaks volumes regarding slashdot's credibility (lack thereof) regarding MS stories. But then, what do you expect from a site that uses childish Borg-Gates and Cracked-Windows icons for MS and Windows stories (while all other topics have editorial-free icons and/or the official logos of the companies involved)?

Here's an interesting and educational video on the improvements IE7 has made over IE6 wrt CSS support:
IE7's CSS support

In the meantime, Microsoft almost seems tentative in their position about standards compliance versus backwards compatibility.

Emphasis mine, changing the meaning a bit, but bear with me. If you read Chris Wilson's blog here, then you can see the following quote:

It's been frustrating, though, to be continually identified as the personal screw-up responsible for IE not supporting more standards today, when it's actually because of my personal influence that CSS is IMPLEMENTED in IE.

Again, emphasis mine (not the caps, though, just the boldface). So - if it weren't for this Chris guy, CSS wouldn't even have been implemented in IE. If he's right, that says a lot about Microsoft. I tend to believe him here.

According to The IEBlog IE7 will not pass Acid2 when it ships.

From Chris' Blog...

... Solid test cases we can access and bug reporting would help which is why we have a public bug database....

Last I heard IE7 does not fix the Expanding Box Bug?

This is a troublesome bug when you're populating DIV tags with generated data. You don't even have to be doing anything advanced.

Microsoft knows about the Position Is Everything Explorer bug list. I've seen IE engineers mention it on their blogs. So I don't buy the "we don't know of specific bugs" routine. And if he wants more concrete bug reports after that set, then theres the Comparison of Layout Engines page which goes through the CSS specs in detail. I'm sure Micrsoft has fixed a bunch of those since IE6, but there are outstanding issues in IE7.

Most software engineers would pay large sums of money to have that type of detail in bug reports. Microsoft is getting that for free, but he is complaining that he does not have solid cases.

Question is, do they use Acid for measurement?

And don't forget this!

(meant to be mildly humorous in a nerdy sort of way)

Correct, except 2nd-gen stack machines have a dedicated stack to hold those return addresses, so they never get to memory. Makes for very fast calls and returns. Experiments by Prof. Koopman have shown that for all practical purposes, a return address stack of 16 elements is deep enough. There is such a 16-deep stack (hidden from the programmer) on the Pentium 4 (and the Alpha AXP too I think): http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/12/ 16/317157.aspx