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Fix this problem: [link] Documenting a design flaw does not make it any less of a design flaw.

This will be fixed in Internet Explorer 7.

SVG: Microsoft implemented vector graphics in Internet Explorer years ago with VML, which they submitted to the W3C in 1998.

CSS: A partial list of fixes regarding CSS that will be in Internet Explorer 7 can be found on the IEBlog. They've fixed a lot.

PNG: Internet Explorer 7 will have support for the PNG alpha channel, bringing it up to the level of support that other browsers have.

JPEG2000: JPEG2000 is patent encumbered. Mozilla/Firefox doesn't support it.

XForms: XForms support is available through a plugin.

The only really valid complaint you have there is their lack of support for the DOM. In particular, it would be very nice if they implemented DOM 2 Events, but I don't think that's likely to happen for Internet Explorer 7.

SVG: Microsoft implemented vector graphics in Internet Explorer years ago with VML, which they submitted to the W3C in 1998.

CSS: A partial list of fixes regarding CSS that will be in Internet Explorer 7 can be found on the IEBlog. They've fixed a lot.

PNG: Internet Explorer 7 will have support for the PNG alpha channel, bringing it up to the level of support that other browsers have.

JPEG2000: JPEG2000 is patent encumbered. Mozilla/Firefox doesn't support it.

XForms: XForms support is available through a plugin.

The only really valid complaint you have there is their lack of support for the DOM. In particular, it would be very nice if they implemented DOM 2 Events, but I don't think that's likely to happen for Internet Explorer 7.

Firstly, this is not news. This was posted on the IEBlog way back in September.

Secondly, this is one hell of a misleading headline. Internet Explorer has supported this interface since Internet Explorer 5.0, released in the year 2000. All that's different in Internet Explorer 7 is that it's implemented as a native object, rather than with ActiveX.

Finally, this matters to practically nobody. Any decently-written code will work just fine in Internet Explorer 7 with no modification whatsoever. Even code written to use browser detection instead of feature/object detection, (a bad idea) will work just fine, assuming that the ActiveX interface sticks around too.

FULL standards compliance is a big deal, is it? I hope you're not using anything that uses Gecko, such as Netscape 7, Mozilla, or Firefox.

Firefox/Mozilla doesn't even fully implement HTML 4.0, nor has it done so in any point in its history, nor is there a target milestone for doing so. Just one example is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9101

Ok so they are choosing not to implement support for displaying soft hyphens. If you hate IE6 for not implementing support for max-width (a css thing) or ABBR (an html thing), don't be a hypocrite. At least most of IE6's compliance issues are (claimed to be) solved in IE7: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242 .aspx

Notice that it's been over five years since the bug was reported, and there is no target for its fix. Imagine the fun that Slashdot would have over a 5-year-old IE bug.

I have used Firefox as my primary browser since Phoenix 0.2beta, and I love it. But I'm not going to say it's perfect (or even perfectly standards-compliant).

I use a few open source windows drivers myself, but even still, I recognise that the majority of crashes in Windows are likely due to buggy drivers and I think locking-down on that is a good step forward. That said, I remember reading a while back on The Old New Thing about how developers would go about defrauding the WHQL driver certification process, and I just cannot see how forcing it to be signed for certification is any different that just certifying it. Developers can still pull the same old tricks to get it certified while still bending the rules.

Still, though... at least it helps against malicious code. Provided they haven't forged a signature. The less zombie-boxes out there the better for all of us. One thing I don't know, though; I saw somewhere that only kernel-level drivers will need to be signed... (I didn't read TFA... only TFC) is it possible to re-write most of those OSS drivers to be user-mode drivers? Is such a thing even possible?

• Peekaboo bug
• Guillotine bug
• Duplicate Character bug
• Border Chaos
• No Scroll bug
• 3 Pixel Text Jog
• Magic Creeping Text bug
• Bottom Margin bug on Hover
• Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
• IE/Win Line-height bug
• Double Float Margin Bug

I'm sure they do.

Right now it is not uncommon for driver installations to "pretend" they are signed - by clicking "I agree", etc, during their installation process.

Head on over to http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2006/01/20 /515606.aspx to see some info from the horse on what kind of information was requested and given, at least as far as Microsoft search is concrned... it's not as bad as many have claimed.

It's not the same software.

When you change the insides, nobody notices

Newer versions of "Calc" were completely written behind the scenes to provide more accuracy (essentially infinite accuracy on simple arithmetic, explained above) while the interface remained the same. So the comparison is flawed.

Fact: The computer will always be compromised -- ref the Dancing Bunnies theorem.

Fact: Networks are chaotic places. In a network of any size (read: corporate) there will always exist vulnerabilities.

Result: The network, as a whole, will always be insecure.

Microsoft's traditional approach to security is very "box" focused: secure the OS. But the network is a collection of operating systems, and the dynamics of securing the network are very different from an individual system. Active Directory, and the ability to reliably apply consistent policies across a domain is the biggest step towards this goal to come out of Redmond, but that's as much a system administration feature as a security feature. There are gaping holes in the technologies available today to secure networks.

The corporate answer I'd expect is something along the lines of providing "opportunities for third-party software vendors" -- but I really think that's a cop out. Your customers lay the blame squarely at the feet of Microsoft. After all, Microsoft provides all the technology necessary to build a corporate network, but not the technologies necessary to secure it.

What is Microsoft's roadmap for providing security technologies that secure the network?

Thanks!
J.J.

If you're willing to do a bit of legwork, you can use Windows as an administrator. It's much, much safer.

Currently, Excel handles 256 columns x 65536 rows... anything larger, and you need to be working in Access. However, if your data fits those limitations, Excel is (IMHO) the best analyst tool under our sun.

Excel 12 (aka Office 2003, currently in development) will have 16k columns x 1M rows. I found information here on the new limits.

I watched the video of the interview with the "Kernal Team" with Rob Short ( http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1488 20) when reading about it on /. (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/ 01/03/1944204).

That was a very interesting interview, I was appreciative of most of their answers to Rob's questions.
In view of the recent WMF vulnerabilities, I did however have a question about the dependancy checking process and software referred to by the team. Who (and how) is the software programmed? I guess what I'm getting at is this: Who or what determines what the software and process involved checks, and how is that related to determining what is dependant on what, and how it fits into the security/vulnerability checking process.
I would have thought that this software/process would have caught the WMF problems that have recently surfaced.

By the way, thanks for taking the time to answer our questions!

"one of the greatest things about firefox is that it is almost exactly the same on any platform"

So was Microsoft Word 6.0, and that was universally hailed as a flaming turd mountain. Behaving exactly the same on every platform, it turns out, is in fact a terrible drawback. Something anyone with a Mac ought to know.

If getting a tattoo is any indication, there are some Windows cultists out there. Not as many as the mac heads, but still, they exist.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/10/ 22/55388.aspx

Maybe there is a reasonable limit (e.g. groups with more than seven developers are inefficient"), but they could finance several hundred teams of bug fixers, testers etc. So why don't they?

This might be an interesting read: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/ 28/53298.aspx

Granted, it's about adding features and not fixing bugs, but it goes on to show that a 5-minute change would translate into hundreds of hours of work. From my experience as a senior developer, that's most certainly true...

I'm actually a lot more optimistic about security (specfically Microsoft security) these days. I used to think (probably correctly) that Microsoft was incompetent in this regard. Microsoft has apparently been ruled by the cowboy coders on one side, and the irresponsible marketeers on the other. But watching the various videos (especially the Going Deep series) on Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com/) interviewing lead developers of various areas, I am more and more impressed. Microsoft employs some DAMN SMART people in Microsoft Research and even a lot of their core development areas (kernel, tools). In the vista kernel video you can tell they are pretty embarrassed about the history of Windows, the registry, etc., finally understand there is a problem, and are actively trying to solve it (creating gigantic dependency graphs of binaries, trying to sort out the configuration (they refer to it as "state") issue). Given that a lot of this good stuff can be incorporated into a commercial product without the bastardization of the marketeers and cowboy culture, I'm optimistic. Watch the video about Avalon - what the guys is describing is essentially X11. That's not news to us, but I have to imagine it's revolutionary at Microsoft to break down, admit to themselves that the existing display/rendering technology is shit and inflexible and un-extendable, and pro-actively go about implementing a network-transparent graphics framework that mimics alarmingly technology of their arch-competitor (*nix). If they can do that, I have hope they can bury a lot of the other problems they have caused for themselves and maybe start doing the Right Thing.

ok, enough </fanboy> ;)

"The biggest problem that Windows has ,IMO, is the lack of a secure user system. They give you all of two options for users in XP; Administrator, and Limited.
Administrator has full control of the computer and unlimited access to the registry
Limited has next to no control over anything besides just "using" the computer."

Correct and it sucks, but is actually only in XP Home. XP Pro has that middle ground, which BTW is being removed in Vista.

"There is no middle ground, no permission system on comparable grounds to Linux. I run as Admin on my Windows box primarily due to the fact that I don't want the hassle of logging out every time I want to update a program or do some other mundane task."

Actually, there is a very robust permission system for both the filesystem and registy and there is a full set of system policies which hand out rights for specific system rights (for example, installing drivers, and changing the system time). The problem is XP Home hides it all from the user, which is stupid. In XP home you can modify file permissions with the command line tool, cacls.exe. I'm not sure about registry permissions, but I do know there is a command line tool to do that too. You can also boot up to safe mode, log in as administrator and access the file permission from explorer. The other problem really isn't Microsoft's (well maybe it is), its the fact that software deveolpers contune to write programs that assume the user with be running them as admin.

"Another thing that bothered me about Windows that is commonplace in Linux is the ability enter and exit Administrator mode without logging out the user through the use of a Password Prompt."

Actually, windows has this ability too - run-as. There is also a cool tool called "Make me admin" which temporairly makes your user account an admn account without having to log off and back on. But that doesn't solve the problem of XP Home making it very difficult to fix permissions so that regular users can run things.

http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/2004/ 07/24/193721.aspx

"8 days should have been enough time for MS to completly check the code involved and use every attack possible."

Yes becuase breaking hundreds of people off their regular duties, tracking down 10 year old code written by someone who either doesn't remember writing it or no longer works there, correcting the code in a way that prevents the exploit, but doesn't impact functionality, testing the correction on all supported versions of windows, numerous hardware configurations, and against dozens of 3rd party software packages that use the library, then documenting the problem, the change, and the disimination of the change, then getting the whole thing wrapped up into a nice neat deployment package, is easy.

Yeah, I can see how 8 days is slacking.

Try reading this article: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/ 28/53298.aspx "How many MS Employees to change a light bulb?"

-Rick

-Rick

Windows sounds and this (and really, region coding in general) are really why I prefer linux.

Not so much.

Speaking of King Crimson, then no, Urge isn't meant for you - Windows Vista is.

That's easier on some operating systems than on others. OS X has the root account disabled by default. Windows makes it theoretically possible to run as a non-Administrator and to use a feature that works like sudo (shift-right click, Run As) for some administration. Unfortunately there are so many applications with silly assumptions about where they can write that there's an entire blog about running Windows systems without Administrator privileges

Syntactic sugar for getters and setters can be useful for providing a more natural interface (as long as people don't abuse them), but they don't really have any place in a language like C++, where almost everything is set in stone at compile time. Properties work well in dynamic languages like JavaScript because the binding takes place at runtime, at the very last moment before the member access is resolved. The code to access a plain member field vs. a property is quite different, and in C++ this must be generated at compile time.

The upshot of this is that you can't change a field to a property and vice-versa while retaining binary compatibility. This means that you've essentially added a gotcha to the language which everyone must be wary of when designing their public interfaces. While a.b = c looks a bit prettier than a.setB(c), in my opinion it's better to be explicit about what's going on to avoid problems down the line.

That's exactly what they're doing in IE 7.

From an msdn blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2006/01/01 /508494.aspx "Slashdot has got itself into some sort of frenzy about the number of RSS users, referring to an October study sponsored by Yahoo (PDF). They claim (and Robert Scoble repeats the claim) that according to the study only 4% of internet users are using RSS. I have news. It's not true. I know, because I blogged about the research months ago. The study actually showed that 4% knew they were using RSS, while 27% were using RSS without realising it. I quote (from the study): "27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology." "

Microsoft has the biggest blogging presence of any corporation, and I can say that their blogs are working extremely well. Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com/ in particular is very successful. The video interviews and real-world feedback from the developers is really helping Microsoft connect better with its users - note the recent Firefox "Genuine" plugin and WMV plugins, Firefox compatibility with MSN projects, and a bigger push towards standards. Moreover, blogging has raised much more enthusiasm for Vista - hearing from the kernel devs how heap management has been improved or from the audio team about how audio mixing and performance are better really makes it clear what the product is and what it will mean.

I don't know why you would want Vista, but for me there is a new networking & audio stacks, XPS & totally cool new printing system, transactional FS, and a lot more interesting stuff. Sure, crawl back under your rock and keep beliving that all what Vista is is Aqua interface AKA MacOS circa 80s ;-P

Seriously a dvd drive costs (16 bucks on newegg). As for pirated movies, MS is not there to help you.

First post - whining why this was even posted?

Most people will get a new computer for Vista, IMHO it'll be there gateway to dual core or 64 bit happiness; that and SLI.

The blog (oldnewthing) however rocks - read the history posts for an insiders view of MS. Very well written and intelligent.

Classic posts

But I have Visual Basic Professional
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/09/ 30/475688.aspx

Be careful what you name your product group
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/ 18/482234.aspx

What was Dr. Watson's original name?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 14/492483.aspx

Why is a drive letter permitted in front of UNC paths (sometimes)?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 22/495740.aspx

Why does Explorer eject the CD after you finish burning it?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/ 12/256472.aspx
Move along - not news.

Seriously a dvd drive costs (16 bucks on newegg). As for pirated movies, MS is not there to help you.

First post - whining why this was even posted?

Most people will get a new computer for Vista, IMHO it'll be there gateway to dual core or 64 bit happiness; that and SLI.

The blog (oldnewthing) however rocks - read the history posts for an insiders view of MS. Very well written and intelligent.

Classic posts

But I have Visual Basic Professional
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/09/ 30/475688.aspx

Be careful what you name your product group
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/ 18/482234.aspx

What was Dr. Watson's original name?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 14/492483.aspx

Why is a drive letter permitted in front of UNC paths (sometimes)?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 22/495740.aspx

Why does Explorer eject the CD after you finish burning it?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/ 12/256472.aspx
Move along - not news.

Seriously a dvd drive costs (16 bucks on newegg). As for pirated movies, MS is not there to help you.

First post - whining why this was even posted?

Most people will get a new computer for Vista, IMHO it'll be there gateway to dual core or 64 bit happiness; that and SLI.

The blog (oldnewthing) however rocks - read the history posts for an insiders view of MS. Very well written and intelligent.

Classic posts

But I have Visual Basic Professional
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/09/ 30/475688.aspx

Be careful what you name your product group
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/ 18/482234.aspx

What was Dr. Watson's original name?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 14/492483.aspx

Why is a drive letter permitted in front of UNC paths (sometimes)?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 22/495740.aspx

Why does Explorer eject the CD after you finish burning it?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/ 12/256472.aspx
Move along - not news.

Seriously a dvd drive costs (16 bucks on newegg). As for pirated movies, MS is not there to help you.

First post - whining why this was even posted?

Most people will get a new computer for Vista, IMHO it'll be there gateway to dual core or 64 bit happiness; that and SLI.

The blog (oldnewthing) however rocks - read the history posts for an insiders view of MS. Very well written and intelligent.

Classic posts

But I have Visual Basic Professional
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/09/ 30/475688.aspx

Be careful what you name your product group
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/ 18/482234.aspx

What was Dr. Watson's original name?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 14/492483.aspx

Why is a drive letter permitted in front of UNC paths (sometimes)?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 22/495740.aspx

Why does Explorer eject the CD after you finish burning it?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/ 12/256472.aspx
Move along - not news.

Seriously a dvd drive costs (16 bucks on newegg). As for pirated movies, MS is not there to help you.

First post - whining why this was even posted?

Most people will get a new computer for Vista, IMHO it'll be there gateway to dual core or 64 bit happiness; that and SLI.

The blog (oldnewthing) however rocks - read the history posts for an insiders view of MS. Very well written and intelligent.

Classic posts

But I have Visual Basic Professional
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/09/ 30/475688.aspx

Be careful what you name your product group
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/ 18/482234.aspx

What was Dr. Watson's original name?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 14/492483.aspx

Why is a drive letter permitted in front of UNC paths (sometimes)?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/11/ 22/495740.aspx

Why does Explorer eject the CD after you finish burning it?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/ 12/256472.aspx
Move along - not news.

Make sure the "run in seperate process" setting is set on the account you are trying to use to run explorer. Makes sense really, the first thing explorer does when it starts is checks if it should shut down if it is already running, so when you use runas its using the setting in the profile of the admin user, not the normal logged in user.

See this blog post for more info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/2004/ 07/07/175488.aspx
This is a very useful blog for running as non-admin. I no longer run as local admin, it really cuts down the risk of bad things happening if you pick up a virus or worm, or you insert a DRMed sony pseudo-cd into your drive...

How on earth can Microsoft's 2nd greatest surprise of the year be addition of RSS support in IE? Blogmonsters living in their blogospherecaves don't seem to have any clue about the real popularity of RSS. Hint: it's close to zero in any scale.

Why didn't the writer tell us about the results of MS Research http://research.microsoft.com/? Or the growth of Raymond Chen's fan club http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/? Or that the notorious nitpick Jacob Nielsen gave a bit of positive feedback to Microsoft and the upcoming Office http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html?

Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?

16,384 columns and 1 million rows in a single worksheet. 255 columns and 65535 rows just don't cut it anymore. The financial world would not even consider a competing spreadsheet due to backwards compatibility concerns. Expect them to upgrade en masse. There was not really a compelling reason to leave Office 97 until this.

> Any language significantly different from a C/C++/Java-like language can't be supported efficiently.

Not so.

Jim Hugunin, creator of Jython, wanted to write a "Why .NET is a terrible platform for dynamic languages" article. He ended up writing IronPython - Python for .net, after finding out that .NET has better support for dynamic languages. And then Microsoft hired him, to work on IronPython and to improve dynamic language support in .NET, so they're dedicated to the concept.

IE supports more standards.

Please enlighten us as to which standards you're referring to. By standards, I mean standards that have actually passed through some sort of standards board, whether it be the W3C, ISO, ECMA, IETF, or some other standards body that I missed.

For example, Firefox 1.5 supports SVG, MathML, and fully supports PNG (IE doesn't do transparency), and has better support for CSS than IE6 does (Microsoft's IE Team lists a number of bugs that they're fixing for IE7).

, and doesn't have confusing and useless features like "tabbed" browsing (you have to have ADD to like this "feature").

Tell that to the IE7 developers. The IE Developer Blog says IE7 Has Tabs.

IE supports more standards.

Please enlighten us as to which standards you're referring to. By standards, I mean standards that have actually passed through some sort of standards board, whether it be the W3C, ISO, ECMA, IETF, or some other standards body that I missed.

For example, Firefox 1.5 supports SVG, MathML, and fully supports PNG (IE doesn't do transparency), and has better support for CSS than IE6 does (Microsoft's IE Team lists a number of bugs that they're fixing for IE7).

, and doesn't have confusing and useless features like "tabbed" browsing (you have to have ADD to like this "feature").

Tell that to the IE7 developers. The IE Developer Blog says IE7 Has Tabs.

.Net's reflection capabilities are quite a bit more extensive than Java's (there is native support for outputting byte-code and even entire classes at run time). If you want to pick on C#/.Net, pick on it's limited exception handling (unchecked exception handling only makes 'black box' use of objects more difficult), or simply the fact that C#'s feature set is obviously derived from Java.

As for features that C# offers that Java doesn't... Wikipedia has a list and links to other sites with more. Whether or not you find these features useful or painful is a matter of taste, though. Many of the features of C# were created to make Visual Basic-style GUI creation easy and painless. C# offers operator overloading, true multidimensional arrays, delegates and unsigned types. Unless you have the pleasure of running in an entirely Java/managed environment, those unsigned types are a life saver (or at least a sanity saver). Delegates (multicast function pointers) make wiring up event-based GUIs a little easier. True multidimensional arrays are either invaluable or useless, depending on the kind of software you write. Operator overloading can also be useful, provided it's used carefully (and can cause no end of confusion if it's not).

It's a pure command-line tool. A GUI toolbar for starting a user-configurable list of tools would have made that tool a lot more user-friendly and acceptable as a tool for corporate use.

Someone made a shell extension version, which is a bit friendlier.

The functionality should have been incorporated in Windows from the beginning as a "Run As..." function and a shortcut property.

Well, some of the functionality is there. If you edit a shortcut's properties in XP, the Shortcut > Advanced button lets you modify the shortcut to run with different credentials. Unfortunately, it's anemic; you can't set the shortcut to use particular credentials, so you instead get prompted every time you run it.

Anyhow, I did download and try this eCondom thing. My opinion is that although DropMyRights is more general, eCondom is way better for dealing with IE specifically. It does seem to address the multiple-entry-point issue I mentioned before (links from other apps that spawn browser windows, typing an URL into the Run box, etc.), which is good. (This is probably why it's tied into IE being the system's default browser, although they likely could fail more gracefully than refusing to work at all.) DropMyRights and eCondom seem like good companions to each other.

I kind of like that eCondom-spawned IE windows have "SAFE" in the titlebar so it's easy to distinguish privileged from unprivileged IE windows. On the other hand, it can give a false sense of security since the title text can be easily spoofed.

The IE v7 Blog

Apparently the next Outlook version will be using the same icon.

None. The Mozilla team were happy to let them use it. ( see here ).

If your user account was previously in the Administrators group, then Windows will, by default, have made you the owner of any files/directories/registry keys that you created with that account.

This behaviour is controlled by the "System objects: Default owner for objects created by members of the Administrators group" setting, which you'll find in secpol.msc, under Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options.

On Windows XP, this defaults to "Object creator". On Windows 2003, it defaults to "Administrators group".

See Aaron Margosis' blog for more information about this setting.

I've been running as LUA at work for a month or so now, and I just reinstalled my home machine, setting my account up as LUA. Fast User Switching makes it easy to flip over to the admin account to install things.

Most things work fine w/o admin privileges. Of the applications I can't live without, Steam is the only one that won't work under LUA. I had to fix it by granting myself full control over C:\Program Files\Steam.

I know this is suicide on slashdot, but take a look at the WinFS PDC demo.

I've got no idea if it will be fixed in IE7.

Explorer rewritten from scratch? Are you referring to Internet Explorer or to the Windows Explorer? And can you please provide me with a reliable link that supports your claim of it being rewritten from scratch? Because about IE i know that it's not rewritten from scratch, see for instance http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242 .aspx --> "In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can"

Monad: i remember reading on slashdot that Monad was NOT gonna be included in Vista. Do you have a recent & reliable link to support your claim that it will?

Thank you.