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No... they make dog sniffing and scratching noises a little while after the search... thanks for that one Microsoft.
http://windowsdevcenter.com/windows/2004/06/01/graphics/figure1.gif

Citation

You're right about NTFS because I remember doing some simple forensics to figure out when/how a Windows machine was compromised. The access times were quite helpful. I remember thinking at the time that while it was useful, the performance cost of saving all that stuff must be significant if files were being accessed frequently.

Anyway, I googled and you're right that there is an equivalent to "noatime" for the access time feature in NTFS. It's number 8 in the list on that page ("Disable Last Access Time"). The command is apparently:

fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

So, it is setting disable to true (double-negatives are confusing!).

I haven't tried using fsutil before. Make sure you know what you're doing, YMMV, etc. (the Microsoft page says that some backup software uses the last access times, so be careful). The relevant registry key is "NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate", but I don't know when it is used or when it it is safe to change it.

Apparently something like this is available in Vista as well, but storing the last access time is disabled by default for better performance (so, disablelastaccess is already 1, I guess).

See a picture here:

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/windows/2006/04/04 /graphics/figure1.png

And the spelling here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenanigan

Excel did not succeed on its own term, its actual technical qualities are not that great.

You can look further on the web for a long list of articles on Excel limitations (256 columns!), why it should be avoided for serious statistical calculations and modelling, how VBA really sucks, and so on. The lowly gnumeric has much better numerical stability for example. However, Excel is good enough for most tasks.

Excel wasn't popular until about version 6 or so. It's number 1 quality is that it is being sold by Microsoft. Numerous outfits, including random bunches of amateurs have produced spreadsheet programs that are as good or better than Excel, but they don't come bundled with Microsoft Office on just about every business PC in the world.

Excel may be one of the best things produced in Redmont, but to me it is still typical Microsoft software. So far away from technical excellence that it's not funny, but good enough, and present everywhere. Therefore just about everyone uses it for almost anything (calendars in Excel...).

I do see the CD paranoia thing. My wife's company diables the CDROMs and floppies so that nobody can install "foreign" software. I'm not quite sure how they deal with USB , but I think they figure nobody at that office knows enough to use a key or a portable.

Quite simple in an AD environment with Windows XP. These instructions show up all over the place on the net, but most recently I've seen them written up at O'Reilly.

Disabling USB Storage With Group Policy

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1824229,00.as p

It concntrates on the Darwin OS core of Mac OS X's suport for architectures other than PPC.

Notable quotes are:

Just because you can read Darwin on a PC, though, doesn't mean that you can run Mac OS on your x86 box. Mac OS includes many layers of proprietary software such as Cocoa, Quartz 2D, QuickTime and OpenGL graphics. You can forget about downloading Gnu-Darwin or OpenDarwin and start running Mac OS X or most OS X applications on an x86 system. You simply can't do it.

and...

Of course, if Apple elects to only ship its operating system with its own branded hardware, it will avoid this problem. On the other hand, most of the push for Mac OS on Intel historically has come from users who wanted to use the operating system on commodity-priced x86 hardware.

Incidentally, Apple's own download of it's open source (APSL - Apple Public Source Licence) darwin code is available here for x86...

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/

You will need to join the Apple developer network to get at this link though.

Let's just say that it is all a step in the right direction. Whether Apple sticks with proprietary hardware or moves on to a more open hardware and becomes more of a software company remains to be seen. At the moment it is only going to be available on a specific Apple supplied hardware bundle, as per the keynote which says the OS X for Intel preview will be supplied with an Intel 3.6GHz machine.

In the long term though, the model of the software only company has been a fairly proven business model in Microsoft as compared to almost any hardware vendor you can care to name. Arguments about the XBox not withstanding.

Those that are mad keen could always join the Apple developer network, hack the preview OS X to work with non-standard hardware sets and see what happens. Another alternative for the mad keen is Pear PC, a PPC emulator, found here:

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005 /01/18/PearPC.html

Enjoy!

Actually the 3 Pillars of Longhorn were Presentation (Avalon), Data (WinFS) and Communication (Indigo).