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They would probably run existing x86 Windows programs in a sandbox so that untrusted code (aka all native code) cannot damage the system.

This statement is so vague as to be meaningless, and tells me that you fancy yourself a hacker but have not written much (if any) systems level code. This could mean anything from running in a user process (in other words, how any OS has done for the last few decades), to what Vista is trying to do (a hideous balancing act between running securely and providing compatibility with poorly written apps), to running everything in a VM.

The OS would deny even the computer owner the right to run native code with any authority unless it's signed by Microsoft.

This would be Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot. As much as Microsoft would love to do this, noone would buy such an operating system. Every corporation with any non-Microsoft application would hold up their nose and tell Microsoft to fuck off.

...unsigned code cannot run in the kernel at all in x64

This is actually a good thing, and something that would ideally have been done from the very beginning if they could. Crappy device drivers is an enormous problem in the PC experience.

If implemented correctly, something that Microsoft has shown to be possible with the 360

None of this stuff has ever been that difficult. The part that is hard is while maintaining compatibility with crappy applications that feel the need to engage in crappy behavior, like spewing crap all over the Windows and Program Files directory. Of course, if you seriously believe your conspiracy theory, then all of this should be straight forward.

This is terrible and I hope Microsoft meets a lot of resistance.

Yup, you are right; they will receive a lot of resistance. Their market share will tank and they would get nailed by shareholder lawsuits for such a suicidal business decision.

There was a recent post on the IE7 development blog about the prosecution of a phisher--21 months of jail time and $57,000 returned to the folks he defrauded. It's a start at least. The IE7 dev blog has actually been doing its best to tout their anti-phishing features in IE7, though there have been a number of (IMO legitimate) concerns about how it's being implemented.

The largest reason DX10 will not be on XP is because of the new driver model. For more information about how it is substantially different than the driver model in XP, please see this MDSN blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/

This post in particular is particularly of interest as it explains the interaction of the new window manager with the new driver model:

http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/archive/2006/ 04/02/566767.aspx

The largest reason DX10 will not be on XP is because of the new driver model. For more information about how it is substantially different than the driver model in XP, please see this MDSN blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/

This post in particular is particularly of interest as it explains the interaction of the new window manager with the new driver model:

http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/archive/2006/ 04/02/566767.aspx

DirectX10 and Vista also means Microsoft will drop support for OpenGL in Windows.

Not true; see Kam VedBrat's comments on Vista and OpenGL support. To summarize, Microsoft will provide an OpenGL 1.4 implementation that sits on top of Direct3D, legacy (XP-era) OpenGL ICDs are supported but will disable Aero, and new OpenGL ICDs may be written that works with Aero.

Automatic tiered storage is definitely coming, but probably not in the form of multiple disks that run at different speeds or RAID levels.

Microsoft announced a while back that Windows Vista would support three technologies designed to improve disk speed called SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, and ReadyDrive. SuperFetch is simply a way of preloading applications and data when the OS anticipates that you'll be loading those soon.

ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive both utilize persistent memory caches to speed up access to the disk.

ReadyBoost treats normal USB keys and flash disks like temporary caching locations for data from the disk.

ReadyDrive is essentially the term Microsoft uses to described their support for hybrid hard drives, which are disks that have a built in flash memory module that's used as a persistent cache.

Not only do hybrid disks dramatically increase performance, but they also result in huge power savings for mobile devices like laptops and media players.

Or even the super duper User Interface, it will only be a DirectX-10 install and a Service Patch to add the UI functions.

Possibly, possibly not. They had to change the display driver model to allow interruptible GPU usage, virtualised VRAM, etc - see here for more details.

This may or may not be a change they could roll out to everyone's XP installation without major grief. I'm guessing it's actually a major pain to do it.

And a patch to add the 'UI functions' would mean updating every bit of UI in the Windows base system - Control Panel, etc. to use the Aero style. I don't think it's as small a change as you imply.

PC World articles describing Longhorn aren't MSDN.
And the Ars Technica 10.4 Hype article I cited is not Apple. So what.

All the Channel 9 videos aren't MSDN.
http://channel9.msdn.com/

And. for the casual readers -- WinHEC and TechEd, where WinFS was demonstrated, are developer conferences -- but of course you know that OCG.

Enough arguing with FUD-Spewing Zealots. You want to pretend that Apple didn't hype a technology that never amounted to anything [because it perhaps might avert one sale from MS to Apple], go right ahead and enjoy your delusions. I'm planning on running both 10.5 and Vista and don't give a fuck about the rhetoric of single-OS loyalists.

There is a great interview with the Singularity guys on Channel 9 which details just how much of Singularity is written in 'unsafe' C# and how much is written in safe C# and other languages.

They also mention some benchmarks against the current Windows line up with some surprising results.

"I thought I'd respond to some of the comments I found most interesting here on my blog. Call me crazy but it seems safer than visiting slashdot personally :)"

A video regarding the "Microsoft Robotics Studio" was released at Channel 9 today.
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=2065 74

IE 7 doesn't implement all of CSS 1, a standard that's pushing 10 years old.

It does, however, implement a hell of a lot more of CSS than IE6, and has fixed quite a few CSS bugs. It's a lot more than "IE 6 with a tab bar."

(While we're at it, does *any* browser implement all of CSS1? The main reference I know of only deals with CSS2 and CSS3.)

While I'm disappointed that IE7 doesn't catch up with Opera, Firefox and Safari, I also have to admit that IE7 represents a huge improvement over the previous version.

maybe IE7 will support:hover on list items?

Yes, it will.

IE4 and below don't quite cut it, fallback to javascript code using serverside UA string detect. these are dying anyway, probably I will remove this support when IE7 appears.

In my experience, server-side browser detection isn't worthwhile. It's both more reliable and more maintainable to determine browser capabilities than to try and detect which browser the visitor is using and keep track of the capabilities of all the various browsers.

As for Internet Explorer 4.0 in particular, it's been about six years since you've even been able to actually obtain a legal copy. The last redesign of MSN was broken in Internet Explorer 5.x when it was first launched. I think the time has come to forget about any special workarounds for it.

What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding.

Please don't tar all of us with the same brush. I'll admit that the kind of incompetence you describe is very widespread, but it's by no means universal. There are competent developers out there, and from the sounds of things, you are qualified enough to be able to judge whether any particular developer is competent from looking at their portfolio.

The real problem is that from an average PR manager's perspective, the quality of a site is generally judged on how it looks in whatever their favourite browser is. That's understandable, they are PR managers, not web developers, and if they were web developers they wouldn't need to hire an agency. But how can we make it possible for them to judge the technical quality of an agency's work? Can something like this be explained easily, or does it essentially involve teaching them web development? I can't see any easy answers there, I don't even think anybody's working on it, and until this problem is solved, incompetents will continue to get away with passing off shoddy work.

Because IE automatically ships with Windows, he said, users satisfied with IE7 may not find enough reasons to download and install Firefox when they buy a new computer.

If they are tech savvy enough, start with the IE7 blog at MSDN.

If they don't know the difference between a USB and a Firewire cable, just tell them how much you charge to burn down a machine and rebuild it after their teenage son picks up a dozen worms while searching for pr0n.

For those of you who are new to .Net, Rico Mariani used to be the performance architect in the .Net team. His blog Performance Tidbits, will give you tons of insight into making that .Net application run faster. For the naive, it also tells you when performance matters (which is not all the time). This feed sits right at the top of my subscription list.

History.

You probably got pwned by a weak Administrator password.

RFC3546, section 3.1 specifies server name indication. mod_gnutls has supported it since April of 2005. mod_ssl (bug) is waiting on OpenSSL to make support possible. Opera has supported SNI since 8.0. IE7 has since beta 2. Mozilla/NSS/Firefox is ready to go with NSS 3.1.1/Gecko 1.8.1/Firefox 2.0. Konqueror will support it in 4.0 (bug). Safari is the only major browser without support (fresh bug).

It's kinda complicated: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/ 30/564809.aspx

Who the hell modded the parent up to "5-Informative"? Yes, submitting the login over SSL will prevent passive eavesdropping, but without a secure home page you have absolutely no assurance you are really on paypal's site or that it hasn't been modified in transit to submit somewhere else. Google "airpwn" for an amusing incident (but don't think only wireless is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks).

This is SSL critical mistake #1, the fact that everyone's doing it doesn't make it safe.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/20/410240 .aspx

That is probably because it wasn't really a question, more sort of a flame against the idea of Certificate Authorities with some unoriginal gratuitous insults thrown in.

Without knowing what he wants to do with the certificate it is impossible to answer the question. If he just wants to connect up to his POP3 server via SSL then self signed is fine. If on the other hand he is setting up the online banking service for a money center bank he probably wants something that offers a somewhat higher degree of assurance.

Until recently there has been no differentiation as far as the user is concerned. That changes with Extended Validation in IE7 and the comming versions of firefox

The point of a certificate is that it should say who you are. If this does not matter in your application fine. If it does matter then get a cert that provides the necessary level of assurance for your app.

Then why doesn't the government subsidise call centers? You know, in case we go to war with India and folks back home still need help downloading the internet...

I think this sums it up ....

http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2004/07/24/ 194201.aspx

Ex-MislTech

You're possibly thinking of this, but as you'll note, although they suspected overclocking, the MS engineers couldn't confirm it without calling up/emailing the people who had submitted the crash bugs (the stealth overclocking thing is interesting though).

Although it's possible they now assume overclocking whenever an instruction like xor eax, eax faults. :-)

There are software drivers which try to silently install themselves.

Raymond Chen has covered them several times in his blog (great reading if you're interested in some of the behind the scenes stuff; even if you don't run windows anymore.)

Here is a good example When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers.

There are software drivers which try to silently install themselves.

Raymond Chen has covered them several times in his blog (great reading if you're interested in some of the behind the scenes stuff; even if you don't run windows anymore.)

Here is a good example When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers.

Good for them to try to do something like this, but will it work? After all, aren't all major PC manufacturers generally shipping parts by good companies (ATI, nVidia, Creative, Intel, etc.)? I'm not sure this will do much there, but for the end user market it may be quite a bit better. The only question is how you would rate all those companies that sell nVidia cards and just repackage the drivers. Do they get nVidia's rating since it's their driver, or do they get a lower one since they take longer to package updates?

Driver manufacturers can't exactly be trusted though. Read this story I found today on a MS weblog.

I know the modem in my computer is necessary for boot-up.

>>Who was the most interesting person you interviewed on Channel 9 and why?

>>I'd have to say Bill Hill (guy who runs the reading technology/font teams) He was a huge amount of luck cause he was the first interview Charles and I did but he was hilarious and had great insights. His personality is great, too.

Check this out, the guy is great. (Don't know why but he just reminds me of Billy Connaly. ;-)

Brian Jones says:
...the bottom line is I think he is right that the Microsoft license for the Office XML reference schemas is not compatible with the GPL....

Also, will the OpenXML format be open for the public to participate in further revisions? And for that matter, how sure are we that a next revision of OpenXML will not be further more restrictive than the first edition?

The editors would not have had this problem if they were using Word 2007 Beta 2 :-)
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/13/6 29124.aspx

This is a fake dilemma.

Languages compiled into bytecode can be JIT-compiled into native code, or they can be pre-compiled into native code using a utility like Microsoft's NGEN. And when you are pre-compiling you have all the time in the world to optimize.

In a small but non-trivial program you can usually get C++ to beat Java and C# by throwing away all the high-level features and programming in what can be called "C with templates". But as soon as you start relying on, say, std::basic_string you may get surprised to see that C# and Java are winning. Java and C#'s GC-heap allocated strings are faster than C++'s basic_string if you use them in data structures because in Java and C# you only allocate the string once and pass it around by reference, where in C++ the each copy of basic_string is either going to allocate separate copies of its contents or do thread-safe reference counting which is unfriendly to the processor's cache.

I can also provide examples where real-world C++ will provide significantly better performance than Java or C#.

On a real-world program the performance of C# or Managed C++ is going to be roughly the same as the performance of C++, while depending on the problem Java may trail a little bit because it lacks structures so some data cannot be packed as tightly thus leading to more cache misses.

To see an example of C++ and C# being pitted against each other on a real-world problem take a look at the follow thread:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/05/10/416 151.aspx

As I said, this is a fake dilemma. A more interesting question is how does the performance of mostly dynamically typed languages (Python, Ruby, Lisp) compare to the performance of statically typed languages (ML, Java, C#, C++)?

Peter Norvig has some numbers from four years ago:

http://www.norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html

On a real-world problem without external bottlenecks (database, network) dynamically typed languages can expect to be between two and five times slower than statically typed languages, though the trend is expected to worsen somewhat due to the expanding gap between the speed of the processor and main memory.

Also note that Lisp has by far the best performance among the dynamically typed languages. Companies that write Lisp compilers have been working on the problem far longer than the authors of Python and Ruby, and have significantly better type inference engines and compiler back-ends.

Dejan

The question is -- what is left to blog about at Microsoft at the moment anyway?

Oh, I don't know...maybe from their developer division, in no particular order:

• Windows Presentation Foundation, which basically defines a whole new way of building Windows UIs, complete with designer focused tools
• WPF/E, the subset of WPF which is supposed to run in browser and cross platform - including a .NET BCL subset.
• Windows Workflow Foundation, which has the potential to redefine basic business application development - including a rehostable designer that a business user can comprehend and possibly use.
• LINQ, which gives C# and VB compile time support for querying Sql, object graphs, and XML.
• Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, which brings database development into the same world as code development.
• The fact that Sql Server 2005 is slowly being morphed into an application server, complete with the ability to host the CLR, expose web services, perform data integration, etc.
• Office 2007 being (re?) positioned as a custom business application environment.
• A push towards supporting Domain Specific Languages within Visual Studio.
• Exchange Server 2007, which exposes a web services api, and allows for OWA embedding.

Yeah...that's about all the interesting stuff I can think of coming out of the developer division in the near to medium term. Note that I didn't state this stuff was any good (I haven't had the chance to toy with most of it yet), but I do think it's interesting and worth talking about.

Of course, their other divisions are no slouches either, so we also have (again, in no particular order):

• A brand new deployment format for Vista called Windows Imaging Format, which could make multiple Ghost images a thing of the past.
• A ridiculous number of Office 2007 servers, including a new version of Office SharePoint Server, not to (evidently) be confused with the new Windows SharePoint Services v3.
• OneNote Mobile, which finally puts OneNote where it belongs - on a Windows Mobile device. Now if they'd just add PocketPC support...
• Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003
• Virtual Server Host Clustering, catching up

Gretchen's Goodbye.

She was a technical recruiter at Microsoft, and had some very interesting posts. In her goodbye she said: Microsoft is an awesome place to work, things are looking great, etc. oh by the way I've decided to leave and do my own thing. C'ya later!

JobsBlog doesn't have the profile of Scoble or Mini, but I think that says a lot.

IE at least will render tables happily as they're downloaded, as long as you set the table-layout: fixed style. That way, it uses the first row (or <colgroup> or <col> tags) to determine how to draw the table, and off it goes.

See IEBlog for details.

One of the core components of the new user experience is something we call the "Ribbon." The Ribbon is a strip across the top of the window that exposes what the program can do.

Following that description was an image which apparently shows a ribbon. I'm still having difficulty grasping where the ribbon starts and other user interface controls end because the image appears to be almost entirely full of user interface controls.

The webpage went on to say: "One of the concepts behind the Ribbon is that it's the one and only place to look for functionality in the product. If you want to look through Word 2003 to find an unfamiliar command, you need to look through 3 levels of hierarchical menus, open up 31 toolbars and peruse about 20 Task Panes. It's hard to formulate a "hunting" strategy to find the thing you're looking for because there's no logical path through all of the UI."

Well, this is one of those Duh! statements. There's no logical path through the User Interface because Microsoft has no strong conceptual model of the document or the application functionality. Therefore functions are placed almost at random within the menus, toolbars and task panes.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the menus were supposed to expose all the application functionality. "Ribbons" sound to me as though they are merely replacing menus. Perhaps they have more flexible layout.

Overall it seems to me like Microsoft is implementing Ribbons as yet more eye candy to attract people to upgrade. The talk of increased usability is merely lip service, misdirection from the fundamental problem that I have with Microsoft's user interfaces. The page mentions that "most people don't click on an unlabeled 16x16 icon". Microsoft's at fault here for their feature-driven requirements. It seems to me that a requirement of Microsoft user interfaces (particularly Word and Excel) is that every possible piece of screen real estate needs to have some function: either an icon or clicking with the mouse will do something. That makes the interface incredibly busy - not good for newbies, perhaps not necessary for experienced users.

Microsoft is doing it too. I found their technical careers blog pretty interesting. http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2006/04/05/ 569559.aspx

WPFe - http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1933 67

Hey Spry - XP should automatically ungroup those buttons when you do close other windows and make more room. I can't speak for your exact scenario, and why exactly it wouldn't be ungrouping them when sufficient room exists. I was able to find this feedback link for Windows Vista; you should put forth your thoughts there. No guarantees of a response, but it's certainly better than not submitting feedback at all. Conversely, you may want to send your thoughts on through the Email link on the Windows Ux blog. I see they have no blog posts registered there at all (a pity), but the email link is pretty much guaranteed to be good.

Anyway, back on topic :-). I agree that this is somewhat confusing. We (everyone working in the Developer Division, and all of the people working on the rest of the next-gen Windows stack: WPF, CardSpaces, Workflow Foundation, etc.) live and breathe this stuff every hour of every day, but I can imagine that keeping on top of it under any other circumstances can be tricky. Russ, the Product Unit Manager for the DDCPX team, commented earlier on exactly this point, but I'll reiterate his high-level comments for posterity's sake. Essentially, .NET FX 3.0 is the .NET FX 2.0 (the Whidbey release, and likely what you already have on your computer today), along with a bunch of new frameworks and technologies, including the Workflow Foundation, the Communications Foundation (formerly Indigo), CardSpaces (formerly InfoCard), and Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon).

In theory, an application written to target v2.0 of the Framework should work 100% as well on 3.0 as it did on 2.0. Of course, in reality it never hurts to double-check, but you shouldn't see any functional differences. It should run just as well.

With regard to Winforms, the technology is still very much alive and kicking. A few of our Product Managers have commented on this far more eloquently than I can, but essentially, we believe that the Windows Forms functionality in .NET will be critical for us and for ISVs for many years to come. Visual Studio uses 7.5 million lines of managed, CLR-using code, virtually all of which uses Windows Forms for its UI today. We'll be using Winforms in our product for quite a while yet. It certainly has not been abandoned. The new stuff (I am a huge fan of WPF) is incredibly cool, and the functionality and power it provides is truly remarkable. However, no one can move over to it overnight, and we totally recognize this fact. Please let me know if you have further questions, and I will be sure to answer them to the best of my ability.

Hey Spry - XP should automatically ungroup those buttons when you do close other windows and make more room. I can't speak for your exact scenario, and why exactly it wouldn't be ungrouping them when sufficient room exists. I was able to find this feedback link for Windows Vista; you should put forth your thoughts there. No guarantees of a response, but it's certainly better than not submitting feedback at all. Conversely, you may want to send your thoughts on through the Email link on the Windows Ux blog. I see they have no blog posts registered there at all (a pity), but the email link is pretty much guaranteed to be good.

Anyway, back on topic :-). I agree that this is somewhat confusing. We (everyone working in the Developer Division, and all of the people working on the rest of the next-gen Windows stack: WPF, CardSpaces, Workflow Foundation, etc.) live and breathe this stuff every hour of every day, but I can imagine that keeping on top of it under any other circumstances can be tricky. Russ, the Product Unit Manager for the DDCPX team, commented earlier on exactly this point, but I'll reiterate his high-level comments for posterity's sake. Essentially, .NET FX 3.0 is the .NET FX 2.0 (the Whidbey release, and likely what you already have on your computer today), along with a bunch of new frameworks and technologies, including the Workflow Foundation, the Communications Foundation (formerly Indigo), CardSpaces (formerly InfoCard), and Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon).

In theory, an application written to target v2.0 of the Framework should work 100% as well on 3.0 as it did on 2.0. Of course, in reality it never hurts to double-check, but you shouldn't see any functional differences. It should run just as well.

With regard to Winforms, the technology is still very much alive and kicking. A few of our Product Managers have commented on this far more eloquently than I can, but essentially, we believe that the Windows Forms functionality in .NET will be critical for us and for ISVs for many years to come. Visual Studio uses 7.5 million lines of managed, CLR-using code, virtually all of which uses Windows Forms for its UI today. We'll be using Winforms in our product for quite a while yet. It certainly has not been abandoned. The new stuff (I am a huge fan of WPF) is incredibly cool, and the functionality and power it provides is truly remarkable. However, no one can move over to it overnight, and we totally recognize this fact. Please let me know if you have further questions, and I will be sure to answer them to the best of my ability.

Hey Mike - that's good feedback for the DirectX team to hear. They're not a part of the Developer Division, and I tend not to interact with them on a day-to-day basis. If you ask a question of someone who's involved with DirectX, they'd be much more able to act upon your feedback and give you a sense of where Managed DX is heading than I can. Thanks for passing that along!

It's pretty much acknowledged that MSDN's search is awful, hence them changing it. You can test drive the new version and feed back comments onto the search blog (even if they can't get the ratings on blog posts done correctly!).

Actually, I can tell you how to do one better than that. Go to the weblog for my Corporate VP, S. Somasegar, and leave that feedback for him there, or by sending him mail through the Email page. He does read the feedback posted there, and tries to always respond back.

And as the diagram would indicate, they've done nothing but change the name appearance - the featureset remains identical. Hey - that's just like Windows Vista!

I went to the main "WinFX" page and followed the first link about the rename. Right there in black and white I see all I need to know:

".NET Framework has becomes the most successful developer platform in the world."

I'm going to put down my cup of coffee, pick up the cool-aid and jump right on it! Just another Microsoft developer blogger trying to market for them. And they wonder why only current customers listen.

On a related note, I thought WinFX was originally just the replacement for WinForms, the original .NET objects for laying out application windows. One reason I dropped Windows development is because I got sick of all the ever-changing libraries. And I don't mean gradual improvements. I mean every year they tell you to drop a whole library and switch to something completely different.

People with real world business experience going up against young idealists. Guess what? Business always wins. Always has, always will.

Yeah. For example (then) 40-odd year-old megacorp IBM sure finished off these young idealists back in the 80's. That's why you've never heard of them.

offtopic=100%
it sucks that windows doesn't use symlinks though

It comes with vista:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/fileio/fs/symbolic_links.asp
http://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2006/04/15/5 76568.aspx
just another small tiny step towards compatability. or just another argument that unix is superior.

Every so often somebody comes along and Asks Slashdot if he can somehow make use of the extra 16MB on his graphics card to speed up his computer, and people tell him how difficult it would be.

Well, MS came along and figured that people have all of these USB keys sitting around with lots of extra space, why not put them to good use? So they put it to use as a disk cache. Why would you want to cache a hard disk onto flash memory?

It turns out that flash memory is particularly good at random reads, while hard disks suck at that. Your thumb drive must do 2.5MB/s on 4k reads or faster to use it, while you're lucky if you can get that out of a disk. Why? A 5400rpm drive will spin around 90 times each second. When you do a random read, there's a 50% chance that the part you want is behind the head and another revolution must occur before you can read it. This means that you can only do 180 random reads per second. If each read is 4k, that's 4k*180 or 720kB/s, not counting seek time. Once you add in seek time, an average random 4k read from a flash drive will finish 10 times faster than from a disk drive.

Presumably these "Intelligent Algorithms" determine which data is going to require lots of random seeking, and puts it on the flash device. When that data needs to be paged in, it gets paged from the flash drive instead of the disk drive. Of course you can pull out a USB device at any time, so the flash is only used as a cache that can disappear at any moment.

To prevent individual cells from wearing out, flash drives include wear leveling algorithms so that writes are distributed across the device. This means that when you rewrite or delete data, it will probably not be deleted. Since it's so hard to physically delete data from a flash device, encryption is mandatory. You never know what secrets might be in there!

Also, modern flash devices have 100,000 to 1,000,000 rewrite cycles, and can perform random 512k writes at about 2MB/s. In order to wear out a 1GB card, you would have to write 1,000,000 cycles * 1GB / 2MB/s, or about 15 years of constant random writing. As long as the writing is random, your card will never wear out.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02 /615199.aspx for more details.

dom

this guy tried it using these steps, and it seems to be working nicely for him. He had to delete his EFI partition, which i guess is not really used on x86 macbooks.

As always your mileage might vary i guess.

this guy tried it using these steps, and it seems to be working nicely for him. He had to delete his EFI partition, which i guess is not really used on x86 macbooks.

As always your mileage might vary i guess.

It's just MS inventing an excuse to justify not using PDF. Come on, if you were on the verge of releasing a completely redundant format that was supposed to overtake one you were constantly using, and you needed your format to look more important, what would you do?

They're also removing XPS exporting support from Office at Adobe's request; see this blog post. If they're taking out PDF to push usage of XPS, it wouldn't make sense to remove XPS as well. I personally think they should keep XPS, but we all know how people like you will react...

What you should be questioning is why XPS exists at all.

Those of us who know exactly what XPS is do not question it at all because it is quite clear... despite the lack of seeming malicious intent from Microsoft.

Maybe you too should do some reading on the topic or watch a video.

To follow up on my previous post, if reading to learn more about what XPS isn't your style, take a look at this Channel 9 video from August last year which walked through all of this... maybe then you'll have at least some factual information from which to make a judgment.