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I have an alternate solution I've proposed that will won't save much energy, but will make the transition to and from Daylight Savings easier on all of us.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/archive/2005/04/03/ 405041.aspx

Might as well kill two birds with one stone!

Bad Windows problem.

My helpsvc.exe keeps growing and growing and taking up tens of megs of RAM!

Don't tell me they're going to make me get SP2 to fix it???

Yes!!!? What can I do?

Shortly thereafter, Mozilla mysteriously started signing their packages.

I wonder who would have gottern flamed if someone had trojaned a few million Firefox users using this method. Ah well, we all know open source is perfect, so this type of speculation is pointless.

Shortly thereafter, Mozilla mysteriously started signing their packages.

I wonder who would have gottern flamed if someone had trojaned a few million Firefox users using this method. Ah well, we all know open source is perfect, so this type of speculation is pointless.

I'm talking about the information bar-- directly copied/borrowed from Internet Explorer's SP2 changes; what are you talking about?

See Tony Schreiner's blog for more information.

You can also find more information about the information bar and it's development at Tony Schreiner's blog.

Sure, read this--

http://blogs.msdn.com/joshwil/archive/2004/10/15/2 43019.aspx

As long as you use IntPtr for pointer types it will work just fine. 64 bit apps will use the 64 bit version of kernel32.dll.

Of course it's always possible to introduce bugs if you try to be too clever, e.g.:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joshwil/archive/2004/03/16/9 0612.aspx

But reasonably written code should work on 64 bit without any modifications.

The /3GB switch does not expand the address space of all programs, though:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08/ 12/213468.aspx

What you describe is a problem with exceptions in general. exit() is just like any other exception.

If my library does a throw(foo()) and you don't catch it, your app is going to exit.

This guy's blog is more descriptive.

Larry Osterman writes in his blog that the author fundamentally doesn't understand what he's writing about. Mr. Osterman has worked at Microsoft for 20 years. How old is the author of the article?

How come you're running with admin privs? I'm reading between the lines so sorry if I've made an incorrect assumption.

Aaron Margosis has an excellent blog for those wishing to run as a normal user. I highly recommend using the Privbar so that you can tell the security level of Explorer and IE (you will sometimes need to run them as Admin without wanting to log off and log on as a different user).

Unfortunately there are still a lot of things around that require admin rights to run. Fiddlying with NTFS and registry security permissions sometimes isn't enough (especially if the app has loads of COM objects). Most things can be right-clicked on and "run as" a different user. For things (like Explorer) that I need to run as admin on a regular basis, I have shortcuts setup to prompt automatically (so I don't have to think about it).

How come you're running with admin privs? I'm reading between the lines so sorry if I've made an incorrect assumption.

Aaron Margosis has an excellent blog for those wishing to run as a normal user. I highly recommend using the Privbar so that you can tell the security level of Explorer and IE (you will sometimes need to run them as Admin without wanting to log off and log on as a different user).

Unfortunately there are still a lot of things around that require admin rights to run. Fiddlying with NTFS and registry security permissions sometimes isn't enough (especially if the app has loads of COM objects). Most things can be right-clicked on and "run as" a different user. For things (like Explorer) that I need to run as admin on a regular basis, I have shortcuts setup to prompt automatically (so I don't have to think about it).

Michael Kaplan is Microsoft's Unicode expert. You might want to read through his blog's archives.

I mean, if the project is VB6, there's a good bet that it's using multi-byte characters instead of unicode, but maybe reading his blogs will help give you an idea of what you're facing and what to look for...

Man, I really hope you give us a slashback of how it went after you get back...

They are tying like everything to ignore FireFox

This is not true.

"Now I'm pretty confident that Mitchell doesn't actually know the details of how IE is developed so I don't fully understand the basis of the statement."

The basis of the statement is:

(1) That Microsoft itself argued in a court of law that IE was embedded in the operating system.

(2) That many Windows apps, such as Explorer and the Help System, use the guts of IE to render content.

This is why people say IE is in the operating system. Because IT IS. No, not from a "I'm a kernel hacking geek" point of view, but from a practical one.

And why does this matter in terms of security? Because when IE gets hacked, it means all those programs that make up the OS environment are now vulnerable, and in many cases, now present new vectors for the attack, and more importantly, hacking IE can present a person with many channels into core OS programs.

This does not happen with Firefox. If you find an exploit in Firefox, you have exploited Firefox.

It's not magic, Raymond Chen debunks some of those assumptions in his article. He specifically notes many people view this as undocumented APIs.

The lousy usage approximation is an oddity of Windows: Raymond Chen has documented this, just like every other strange Windows phenomenon .

I vote for the Toshiba Portege M200 though. Much higher resolution (12.1" XVGA+ 1400x1050 pixels), faster Centrino (1.5GHz on mine, 1.6GHz on newer versions), SD card reader, PC Card slot, USB 2.0. And a very cool built-in accelerometer that is underused, but there's a demo application available called WinGimcana.

We waste man hours making you think that you're using a "Superior product", and boy do we hate it.

Damn right. Over the past year I've tried to move towards telling corporate clients that "Unfortunately, getting that to work on your corporate standard of IE will take a week; the demo I showed you was on Firefox, only took half a day". OK, maybe more tactfully than that, but the message has to be got through somehow...

Microsoft says that it will only support standards if their customers ask for it, and by "customers" they mean corporations, not the poor sods who are forced to buy Windows with their PC. If I can get at least some of my corporate clients making enough noise to their IT departments, maybe some of it will eventually filter through to Redmond.

If anybody's wondering where I get the stuff about MS helping corporate clients, have a look at the IE Blog, answering the question "What have you guys been doing since IE6":

Many of the people who had worked closely with our corporate customers focused primarily on servicing. For example, large organizations en route to phasing out legacy systems (e.g. accounting, transaction processing, factory floor manufacturing) ask Microsoft for specialized, "one-off" changes in IE to get that legacy system to work with Windows.

If General Motors demanded that IE give them the same level of standards compliance as Firefox provides, IE would be fixed in a matter of weeks.

FYI

WinFS is about data storage not indexing.

Also theres happends to be a search engine ( your database-indexed filesystem ) called called "Index Server" which was released in 1996 by Microsoft for Windows NT 4, and bundled in the NT 4 Option pack.

Index Server was susequently built into Window 2000 (Release 1999) and Windows XP (Release 2001) and Windows Server 2003.

In 2004 the MSN took the Index Server Codebase and developed this.

As you can see windows already had what you thought it didn't and it had it a long time ago, you can also see that you have confused WinFS(Storage/Structure/Schema) with Search.

Am I alone in wondering whether this truth extends to running Windows Limited Accounts, instead of Administrator logins?

There is a reason that deadlines are pushed back (repeatedly). MS is at this point such a behemoth and so ambitious in promises/updates, that I can pretty much guarantee something will suffer.

If CSS suffers on IE in favor of a more secure browser, that's 100% fine with me. If XMLHTTP is modified significantly, I will take serious issue, because I can see that as the future. And no, web devs are NOT being held back by IE's quirks, but rather few know how to code good UI on the web. Coding C/PERL is one thing...developing an intuitive UI is quite another.

I'm frankly more worried about MyLifeBits as far as privacy and Indigo for security. But, with feature creep undoubtedly underway, this may be an issue in 2010 or so...

here.

This seems contradictory with comments by Chris Wilson, IE Developer, on the IE web log last week:

"We will continue to improve our compliance under strict mode even when it breaks compatibility"

and

"Microsoft does respond to customer demand; web developers are our customers."

See http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/10/15/243074 .aspx.

Even the devs want it to work right... if only they could get these ideas through to execs

(Sorry I think /. is breaking the link, you'll want to copy and paste)

Nope. The IE team completely rewrote their controls to be windowless. If you don't believe me see here.

One final thing I want to note concerns the VB6 runtime. The VB6 runtime ships with Windows XP. This means that the VB6 runtime is covered by the Windows XP support timeline. This means that support for the VB6 runtime will last much longer than that of the development environment. Mainstream support for Windows XP will end 2 years after Longhorn launches and extended support will last for 5 years after that. (check out http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifewin)

Would you like some salt with that crow?

It is rumored that Internet Explorer 7 Beta will be released this summer.

It's more than a rumour, read it for yourself on the Internet Explorer developers' weblog.

My question is the following:

When Firefox was in 0.9x stages, the main mozilla.org website started featuring Firefox as "the" browser to download, and numerous community efforts were made to get end-users to switch.

However, when people had trouble with things like extensions getting screwed up every time people upgraded and so on, we were all told that it's pre-release software, not a "real" release.

Who made the decision to start pushing Firefox early, and do you think the end-users that got a negative impression matter? Is this the type of cavalier attitude we can expect now that Firefox is taking the lead, or will the (IMHO) saner Mozilla Suite developers calm people down a bit?

You might want to watch this video on Channel9.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=4670 2
Its discussing a research project called MyLifeBits, but in general it shows the sorts of queries that WinFS is trying to solve.
Its about following a thread of information through relationships from several data types to reach what you are looking for. In his example he is able to locate pictures of a house he was interested in by following a trail from a contact, through a phone conversation, to the web pages he was viewing while having that conversation.

WinFS is about creating relationships and linking together data from different sources. As much as possible this will be done automatically based on existing data. So for example you go to your cousin's wedding, when get back and you import the photos from your digital camera the system can compare the photo timestamps in the exif data to the contents of your calender app and correctly link the photos to a specific event, time and place, and even contacts.

The fact that it is built into the platform means the core data is equally available to all applications. This means you won't have to keep your calender in Outlook for it all to work nicely, Sunbird would work just as well, and Picassa can show you your photos filtered by people you know from ICQ etc.

Given than Wells Fargo, is a substatial entity, it would be interesting and credible to know how/why they decided to go the windows route since it is possible to maintain a large number networked Linux nodes for remote updates/admin as is cited in the article about windows.

Are windows embedded ATMs really the only game in town?

Microsoft has refused to significantly update Internet Explorer (IE) until Longhorn is released

Internet Explorer 7 will be available for Windows XP.

IE7 is going to suck, make no mistake about it. For average users, the security and so on will have been beefed up a few notches, and the word seems to be that they'll be adding tabs and other user-facing features.

However, as far as web developer interests go, there are no mentions of fixing their badly broken CSS implementation or adding proper PNG alpha-transparency support, so my guess is that IE7 is going to continue to hold the web back for at least another five years with it's totally crap support for web standards.

I wrote an article in my blog about this, and others have done the same.

The more I think about this though, the more I think that what is needed is a way to force Microsoft to fix their web standards problems, so I'm proposing the following solution:

If IE7 is released without the CSS and PNG issues of IE6 being addressed, as many sites that care about standards and can afford the trouble should block it's users from accessing the site, with a clear message about exactly why, and links to better browsers.

There's no way I could do this on any of my customer's sites (I'm a freelance web dev), but on my personal sites, in the event that IE7 still has improper CSS support and broken alpha-PNG, I will almost certainly be blocking it's users from accessing the site, with a message to "come back with a browser that supports standards".

We need to plan this campaign now to put a stop to the adoption of IE7 almost as soon as it comes out, if MS don't fix the issues that web developers are demanding.

I'm not planning to block IE6, because that's been and gone, but what is important is to make sure that IE7 gets it right. Even though I won't be using it myself, I'm damned if I'm going to be stuck having to mangle my perfectly good CSS to cope with it all over again for another five years.

If there's one good thing I hoped Firefox would bring, it would be better standards support for the IE-using masses, so we webdevs could finally make use of CSS2 without having to hack our sites to pieces to cope with IE's crappy CSS implementation.

It seems that MS are going to completely ignore this issue, unless we force them to fix it. So, I think some direct action is required!

Are you with me?

Well they were stress testing SQL Server 2005, on a 64 CPU HP Machine. I don't think you'd consider that a toy.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3141 6

Here is a little more on OS/2, although I would not trust a goddamned thing that Dvorak says, if it's the same Dvorak that keeps making worthless predictions.

Now Peter Torr can trust it!

How about the comments of someone who checked with Wired, or Nintendo's own response to the article?

Or you could, you know, go straight to the supposed source (Wired Magazine, Feb. 2005 issue), and see that it's not listed anywhere.

One of the major problems we've found is that while you might be catching all checked exceptions you won't be aware of unchecked exceptions (like NullPointerExceptions). This disparity between checked/unchecked is the source of many bugs (how many times have you had an IndexOutOfBounds, ClassCast, or NullPointer exception thrown?). It's extremely difficult to cope with with interfaces (you end up with interfaces throwing extremely catch all exceptions like "IOException" for any method they might have). Any implementor can only throw that set of exceptions and needs to throw runtime exceptions versions of anything else.

Without a comprehensive solution that could address all the issues of checked exceptions it was felt that there was too much cost for too little benefit. If there was strong customer demand for this (which there isn't) we would revisit this decision again in the future.

-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)

This was a very large customer request along with generics and the other enhancements we're bringing to the table.

-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)

Acrobat 6 is dog slow to start up compared to Acrobat 5. However, there are some things you can do to _really_ decrease startup times.

Here's a blog entry regarding this AARD system check. Some of the points seem valid if the Windows 3.1 setup actually relied on altering DOS environmental items on the fly as Windows was being installed. Perhaps it wasn't purely some monolithic attempt at owning every aspect of a user's computer after all...

There was actually a sort-of legitimate reason for this. Larry Osterman posted about it on his blog, here, with a follow-up here. It may have been implemented in a nasty way, but I doubt it was inspired solely by malevolence.

There was actually a sort-of legitimate reason for this. Larry Osterman posted about it on his blog, here, with a follow-up here. It may have been implemented in a nasty way, but I doubt it was inspired solely by malevolence.

(link)

It sends shivers down my spine... it sounds like M$ has successfully created zombie race of half-humans who'll eventually infect the rest of humanity with their incidious robotic semen.

Microsoft says Firefox not a threat to IE
Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open-source movement and that if Microsoft's customers wanted new features, they would have told the company about it.

IEBlog - IE7
Why? Because we listened to customers, analysts, and business partners. We heard a clear message: "Yes, XP SP2 makes the situation better. We want more, sooner. We want security on top of the compatibility and extensibility IE gives us, and we want it on XP. Microsoft, show us your commitment."

I love how Microsoft contradicts itself and BS's their 'customer responses'.

Xbox live is a .Net application: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1702 0

If you haven't read the comments yet, do it. They are hilarious. Here are some samples.

If you haven't read the comments yet, do it. They are hilarious. Here are some samples.

If you haven't read the comments yet, do it. They are hilarious. Here are some samples.

If you haven't read the comments yet, do it. They are hilarious. Here are some samples.

Will all you Firefox users now be quiet? Oh, they are talking about me, as well?