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Speaking of that, Vista wont support the old RPC-I DVD ROM drives that aren't region locked.

Have you seen the Office code base? No? Then stop talking out of your ass. There's no reason to believe that Microsoft's code base is any more "convoluted" than OO.o's (which is derived from the years-old closed code of the old StarOffice).

Anatomy of a Software Bug:
        http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/05/ 19/135315.aspx

In short, two lines of code caused an error in Mac Word that preventing saving data entirely in some cases. It took them years to fix this bug even though not being able to save your data should be a pretty high priority fix.

The reason was "the overall complexity ofthe software". The author was talking about the number of features Word has, but he works for Microsoft (like he's actually going to say the code is a mess and risk getting fired?). In any case if you read on you'll see the description of their document format, and how there could be plenty of problems loading another format.

Icon #4 wasn't Firefox's icon, though it was similar. In particular, all of their test icons were landscape rectangles, and the broadcast waves in icon #4 were oriented left-to-right. Firefox's icon is square, with the broadcast waves oriented diagonally from lower left to upper right.

They did state that "The Firefox icon is close, but it lacks the rectangular dimension" (they wanted to match the look of the classic XML and RSS buttons without relying on text).

What's news here is that they not only recognized that Firefox got it right, but they made an agreement to use exactly the same icon.

"Collaboration" is a stretch, but coming on the heels of last month's Microsoft/Mozilla/Opera/KDE SSL validation and anti-phishing summit and Opera's plans to adopt other browsers' terminology where their own differs, it suggests a new pattern in which vendors are still competing on features and implementation, but beginning to collaborate on user experience.

Icon #4 wasn't Firefox's icon, though it was similar. In particular, all of their test icons were landscape rectangles, and the broadcast waves in icon #4 were oriented left-to-right. Firefox's icon is square, with the broadcast waves oriented diagonally from lower left to upper right.

They did state that "The Firefox icon is close, but it lacks the rectangular dimension" (they wanted to match the look of the classic XML and RSS buttons without relying on text).

What's news here is that they not only recognized that Firefox got it right, but they made an agreement to use exactly the same icon.

"Collaboration" is a stretch, but coming on the heels of last month's Microsoft/Mozilla/Opera/KDE SSL validation and anti-phishing summit and Opera's plans to adopt other browsers' terminology where their own differs, it suggests a new pattern in which vendors are still competing on features and implementation, but beginning to collaborate on user experience.

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).

(Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).

(Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).

(Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).

(Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).

(Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).

(Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog (Atom 0.3).

(Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

Internet Explorer 7 will have an improved rendering engine. Most of CSS 2.1 and HTML 4.01 will be supported. The weirder bugs like Peekaboo will be fixed. The PNG alpha channel will finally work.

It'll still be a long way behind everyone else, but it's a substantial step in the right direction.

Well, they already wasted time and money designing icons that, as it turns out, they won't be using, so it doesn't save the art department that much effort.

FYI, Microsoft did design a few of their own icons - this is all about standardizing, not 'innovation'.

$_ =~ s/hurry/BANG/ if($ignition_time > $LOx_introduction_time);

Ever watch the video of the guy pouring LOx over a pile of charcoal that had one piece lit? It left nothing of the grill other than a large burn spot on the ground. Google might find you something more than his site which has only the message about people requesting the "experiment" be removed from the webpage. Another site has a couple images: here

Anyway, he also stated that if he poured first, then lit, each briquet would detonate with about as much power as a stick of dynamite.

tm

It's basically the same, with more syntactic sugar, more slack on execution safety and hence more shoot-yourself-in-the foot factor. And the class library is a bit less coherent. In short, it's an improvement on Java, sort of, for smaller scale projects and/or programmers.

All that and I forgot the damned link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/

Microsoft is also dabbling in widget's, or as they call them gadgets. There is a long video interview about the "gadgets" and their version of Dashboard.

..., start designing.

On all the forums I visit I hear people whining about mobile devices having weak specs like insufficient RAM and slow processors.

The answer that comes up eventually is this:
- RAM, CPU and video chips eat power, raw.
- People don't want bulky batteries in their mobile gadgets.

These two are at constant odds with each other, so unless someone comes up with more energy-efficient alternatives for all the above-mentioned, I'm afraid we'll be stuck with things the way they are for a while.

Quote from an interesting blog posting on MSDN (about the virtues of Persistent Storage on Pocket-PC's):

A typical battery holds 1000mAh of charge. 128M of RAM takes about 500mAh to stay resident for 72 hours. 64M takes about 250. This is why you never saw a 256M WM 2003 device. It would have run for a minute then decided its batteries were critically low.

So there you have it. If you don't trust the numbers (why should you, even if the article is quite recent?), look them up, then do the math.

They've made some neat changes, and the details are here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Windows+Vista

The Slashdots and the Diggs are too Apple and Linux happy.

IE 7 on Vista will run in sandbox that isn't really like anything out there today. (That I know of, anyway.) Even if you're an admin user, IE 7 is contained in such a way that it is not able to access anything outside of its sandbox without explicit permission.

This helps even when non-admins are running IE 7 because it doesn't just prevent system changes (like adding a program to the startup folder), it also prevents changes to anything outside of the sandbox... including files that the non-admin user has full access to.

They accomplish this by using the concept of a broker which IE 7 has to ask to do pretty much anything to the local system, independant of the privledges of the user running the browser. Want to save a file to your desktop? IE 7 must first ask the broker for permission. When the broker gets this request it then asks the user using a dialog. If the user approves, the broker then gets the appropriate information from IE 7 and saves the file for IE 7. At no point does the IE 7 process have access to the desktop or any of the users files.

The net effect is isolating all dangerous code in the broker, which is far simpler and easier to audit and debug than IE 7, thereby decreasing the attack surface dramatically.

For a detailed description of all this, check out the channel 9 video about it.

The OP got it all screwy, and must not have read (or at least understood) the IEBlog entry that explains it pretty well.

Basically, they are removing the intranet zone for XP Home users because they don't believe it's needed, and having it creates another attack surface. You'll be able to get it back if you want, the first time you use what would be an intranet zone address IE will show the yellow Information Bar and you can click to restore it.

Zone spoofing will still be possible by using Trusted Sites zone, although it will be harder since very few sites are in that zone. Software from a few companies like AOL add themselves to that zone without telling the user though, so it still could be possible.

I know this is OT, but actually, Times New Roman is going away, or at least Microsoft will do everything they can to make sure it does. Office 12 will have newer, modern fonts which will also ship with Vista. One of them will be the new default for Word documents. Read more about it here.

These days the shell (Explorer) often automatically prompts for admin credentials when you run an installer. Even if another application launches it via the Win32 call ShellExec (as opposed to CreateProcess). Otherwise it's just a matter of right-clicking and selecting "Run as".

Aaron Margosis' blog is a great place to learn tricks for running as limited user. I use his PrivBar so that I can identify which IE and Explorer windows are running with elevated privileges. From his site, I was able to figure out how to create a shortcut to Explorer so that I can run it as an admin concurrently with it running as my limited user. He has other tricks too for launching processes with temporarily elevated privileges. Once you know how to do it, it's all fairly straight forward. The time spent learning this stuff more than pays itself off when it comes to malicious processes not being able to write to Program Files, Windows, Documents and Settings\All Users, HKLM, etc. Of course this is a last line of defence as really you shouldn't be putting yourself in a position where this measures save you ;)

Not to knock VS too much, it's a great IDE, which I've used since VS 97, and you can certainly configure it to work as preferable, from just using it as an editor/compiler, to using the excellent debugger, to running lex and yacc. [Well things have changed a while since I used it for this, it is a kick they recommend downloading Cygwin - times change!]

That's just a rumor -- it's not true at all. See The Myth of the Binary Key in Brian Jones's MSN blog. It sure does get repeated on Slashdot an aweful lot, though.

It's easy to say, "SUPPORT STANDARDS, DAMMIT!", but not so easy in practice. This blog entry by Microsoftie Raymond Chen is worth reading.

It's easy to say, "SUPPORT STANDARDS, DAMMIT!", but not so easy in practice. This blog entry by Microsoftie Raymond Chen is worth reading.

I'm still baffled by the concept that anyone with a blog would say anything even remotely worth plagiarizing.

Here's a bunch of stuff worth plagiarizing

Actually NTFS does use inodes, and Win32 does allow replacement of loaded modules. However, there is a Win32 call (and an underlying NT kernel call) that returns the file name of a loaded module. There may well be applications that test against specific well-known system DLL names, so renaming those DLLs while they're loaded could result in breakage. I imagine this is the reason why reboots are often required at present.

This is based off of transactional NTFS, which is similiar to a writable snapshot that can be committed back to the MFT.

It is pretty cool stuff.. some early sample code from one of the developers is here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/archive/2005/ 04/25/411874.aspx

Alas, the immutable locked-file-is-in-use problem has to be fixed one Win32::CreateFile() call at a time.

I suppose CreateFile calls without FILE_SHARE_READ (and no FILE_SHARE_WRITE) could be overridden and converted into TNTFS which would solve a huge amount of stupid lock problems.

About 50% of companies use Exchange/Outlook (or OWA) for their e-mail. In order for Linux desktops to become more widespread they need to be able to seamlessly integrate with Exchange. Period.

Ironically, the next version of OWA will be so good that the Outlook rich-client will become more or less optional. As long as your Linux machine has a browser capable of displaying OWA, you've solved your e-mail problems.

The current version of OWA already has decent support for non-IE browsers, and they're apparently going to improve that a great deal in the next release.

See: Exchange 12 Channel 9 Video

If he thinks Microsoft is intentionally breaking compatibility, they he's in for a real shock if he ever tries, say, OS X. (Apple *does* intentionally break backwards compatibility, although not very often; Microsoft bends over backwards to keep older programs running. Read Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ and count how many postings there are about Microsoft fixing bugs in other vendors' programs, or adding in some new compatibility code to cope with assumptions made by some older program.)

You mean like this?

I'm guessing some marketers and engineers in MS got excited about open format and made a splash. For example, Mr. Brian Jones looked genuinely interested in doing so in his blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/). The executives learned about it later, and said "Oh, no, we can't let them open the format ... we'll lose the lock-in!" and they overruled them. Happens all the time in corporations.

Even from a pure CLR standpoint, C++/CLI has some distinct advantages over other C# and VB.NET, such as deterministic destruction, stack semantics for managed classes, and superior optimizations.

Let's have one desktop/widgetset/toolkit be the standard for X on Linux

You don't need a "single widgetset/toolkit" to make a great "user experience".

Windows actually has several widget implementations. Access has its own widget set (don't remember the link, sorry), IE has its own widget set, office has its own widget set (noticed how the scrolling bar in office is like windows 98 instead of looking like in the XP theme? The same happens for messenger BTW)

They don't have a "single" widget implementation - they just have several widget implementations which LOOK THE SAME. In the same way, you don't need gtk OR qt - you want a way to make them look the same (the usability guidelines like menus etc are another matter). Implement the same theme for both desktops and make kde swwitch to a different look when you change the gnome theme and viceversa and you're done.

This study covers an area where Microsoft has invested substantial effort in making a specific set of migration pathways. Microsoft's design method has always been to streamline certain task pathways, and (by design and/or side effect) make work outside those pathways much more difficult.

It's odd that you'd mention this (and it may even be accurate) because, apparently nobody upgrades MS OSes

This has also been done on .NET but as far as I know there is no downloadable version. See this channel 9 video: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=2048 7

I've really been enjoying some of the videos being posted on Channel 9--part of MSDN. It's great to see what real MS engineers are working and thinking on. Just the other day, they posted a video covering Visual Studio TFS.

I'm surprised at myself for liking these videos. I keep going to Chan.9 more than once a day. It's great to get a peek behind the scenes at MS development.

TANSTAAFL dude.

It's easy to build a C++ system with what looks like nice clean code. And it works fine when you run it in your debug environment, usually as an emulation in Windows. Then you build for target and it fails 1% of the time because of some subtlety like exceptions being thrown in a constructor in a wierd error case or something. And here you have no JTAG and hence no debugging, so the only thing you have is printfs to the serial port. Which alter the timing enough to hide the bug.

Of course, big C systems can die in hard to debug ways too, but at least then it's a real problem, like interrupts being disabled too long or something, rather than some harmless looking error handling code someone wrote without thinking.

And a lot of C++ isms can produce really subtle bugs:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/ 22/118161.aspx

And it's worse in a complicated embedded system where you have big chunks of third party binary code, no MMU to keep the heap defragmented and hard real time constraints.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/11/ 21/495466.aspx

Great news... they are opening up something (XML format to be used in Office 12) which is in future. Bravo.

How about the legacy Office formats? I'll say, "Well... hmm... ar... We are going to drop those anyway and it's not worth doing that."

Why use RSS for that when vCard and iCalendar specs already cover that and are implemented by many groupware suites out there. The RFCs cover from HTTP transport of calendar and contact data as well as other MIME enclosures...

You may not be that familiar with MS' tactics in the past. If you want to get your name in everything you have to act like you "contributed" to it. For them to add to an open standard they want to make it look like they proposed new features directly as opposed to a behind-the-scenes addition (open source itself isn't in it for the glory, though it comes naturally) that wouldn't help them out in publicity. I propose Microsoft does an upgrade to Internet Explorer (either 7 and/or more version 6 fixes) in light of the many recent exploits instead of trying to get their hands into more technologies...or perhaps IE 7 will be based on their implementation of RSS? Oh wait maybe I saw this on MSDN recently...

I am down to about 60/35 (Safari for the other 5%) usage with IE barely being used more than FF . Looking forward to seeing integrated RSS in IE7 (I'm sure this will be just one of many features) Quote

Or perhaps, The aggregator allows users to subscribe to feeds in both RSS and Atom formats; suggests and organizes popular feeds; and connects directly to MSN Search, saving a user's search history. No word yet on how or when MSN plans to commercialize the aggregator. The MSN RSS Aggregator .

It seems so much clearer now that the rain is gone! Definitely makes me think MS has something up that they aren't telling people

Do you surf the web as root on your Linux/Solaris/*BSD/other unix-like? No, then why not the other way around, only use admin rights when you need them, aka MakeMeAdmin.
http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/2005/ 03/11/394244.aspx

We had initially gone with a royalty-free license that folks could use if they wanted to build softward that used these formats. We had a lot of feedback on those, and yesterday decided to move away from the licenses and instead to provide a "covenant not to sue". This is a similar approach to what Sun did with OpenDocument.

I have a post on my blog where I include the CNS as well as a description of what the change means. Feel free to provide feedback: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/11/ 22/495876.aspx

-Brian

It really isn't in their best interests to do that. Changing formats is as painful for them as it is for everyone else. That's why the default format in Office hasn't changed since Office 97. At least they've learned from that experience and are not repeating the same mistakes - keeping the same extension and not releasing plugins for older versions of Office. They plan on releasing .docx plugins for Office 2000 - Office 2003 near the Office 12 ship date.

Source

...and a bit more risk.

Generally, running as a Power User is unnecessary. Occasionally, you'll find applications that appear to need this, but it's usually fixable by adjusting rights on specific files/directories/registry keys. Sysinternals' RegMon and FileMon are good tools for identifying where apps are bumping up against security. Occasionally you might have to tweak the local security policy but that's all.

You really should be running with LEAST privilege; a Power User can still (for example) walk all over the Program Files directory, and the ability to modify system time can cause havoc and renders any auditing suspect.

You've always got "Run as..." and the tips at Aaron Margolis's blog if you need to temporarily elevate your privs. I haven't had any lasting issues with running at mere User level, and my machine is as secure as a Windoze box gets.

Interesting that this was moderated "funny".

I am sick and tired of your shady and misinformed "studies"

Studies by Microsoft will point out Microsoft product high points, and competitor's low points. Just as studies by IBM will do the same for IBM, and Novell will do the same for their own studies, and Redhat will do the same for their studies, and Sun will do the same for their studies. Is this really that confusing to people? Banging your chest about it is just...dumb. Ignore it.

Instead of trying to convince people that you have a better operating system, why don't you get off your lazy ass and MAKE A BETTER OPERATING SYSTEM!?

Funny.

Six years ago Slashdotters had a hell of a good perspective to slag Microsoft from, choosing and picking from a huge range of deficiencies of Microsoft's products. Five years ago things got a little rougher, but there was still the 16/32 home OS' to make things fun, and one could pretend that Windows 2000 didn't exist. Three years ago things got rougher, with home users migrating to a pretty good platform as well, and the legacy mess disappearing. Two years ago Microsoft released Windows 2003 - an absolutely kick ass operating system that has proven extraordinarily stable, hugely scalable, and actually quite secure (even out of the box). Shortly they'll be releasing R2 of it, improving it even further.

So I think your advice is a little late. The, pardon the pun, Window with which Microsoft bashers could slam their products on merit has pretty much passed.

The sad reality

In addition to this move towards standardization, we are also going to make some changes to our licensing approach. I've definitely heard the concern from folks over the past few months around the licenses. We want to make this issue much simpler as well as address the core concern, which was that some folks thought we might somehow sue people for using the formats. Obviously we don't want anyone to have that concern, so in order to clear up any other uncertainties related to how and where you can use our formats, we are moving away from our royalty free license, and instead we are going to provide a very simple and general statement that we make an irrevocable commitment not to sue. I'm not a lawyer, but from what I can see, this "covenant not to sue" looks like it should clear the way for GPL development which was a concern for some folks.