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Or just right-click on the start button and click Network Connections.

This refers to something that was added in Windows 8/Server 2012. There's lots of nice stuff there, actually. http://withinwindows.com/blog/...

So Rafael Rivera made a blog post about this, claiming that Notch might have misunderstood why Microsoft contacted him. According to him all they asked Notch to do was to certify Minecraft so that it could be listed in the Windows 8 Store. Listed as in only displaying a link to www.minecraft.net. Nothing more, no app hosted by Microsoft or anything. Not converting Minecraft to an Metroapp. Just a link. I guess we don't know until Notch clears this up, but if it is true then this news article is wrong and most comments are wrong as well. http://www.withinwindows.com/2012/09/28/notch-doesnt-hate-windows-8-hes-just-confused/

'There's a perfectly good UI paradigm for the desktop that's been around since the 80's...With Windows, some things change sure, but the basic metaphor...has been perfectly good for years and people are used to it.'

I agree, but it looks like MS doesn't:

http://www.withinwindows.com/2011/04/02/windows-8-secrets-windows-explorer-ribbon/

So, with the dreaded Ribbon coming to Windows 8, the dumbed-down Gnome 3 or KDE4 desktop shipped as the default on a Linux distribution near you, and the awful Unity on Ubuntu, have we reached the stage where mainstream user interfaces have actually started to regress? The Xfce guys must be loving this! Meanwhile, imagine the interface hell we'll have when LibreOffice is inevitably ribbonized and Ubuntu ships it as the default suite under Unity...

According to this guy it uses the same APIs as the Windows phone developer tools do.

It doesn't matter what you call it if you can circumvent the "app store" jail and load applications directly.

According to this guy it uses the same APIs as the Windows phone developer tools do.

Yep this is just a trick. Microsoft has released a veiled "Jailbreak" and by the time you're done coding your application for your Jailbroke Windows 7 Phone, you'll realize that you just coded a WinCE application for a mobile phone! Even worse, you purchased one thinking you could jailbreak it!

Sincerely,

Admiral Ackbar

According to this guy it uses the same APIs as the Windows phone developer tools do.

That function was the part where they found the offending code. The comparison shows the similarities mentioned but outline actual code not just headers and data structures. In this case SCO takes a header file for an ELF lib which is an open format to execute binary files so it is pretty much guaranteed to be identical because if they wern't the files wouldn't be able to run ;).

...that they benchmarked IE trunk against OLD versions of other browsers. They didn't even use Chrome 5.0!

In some places it's a significant difference.

I also did some benchmarks of my own on non-Microsoft controlled sites. See the first comment on that page for results. Suffice it to say IE9 has improved since IE8 but still has a ways to go.

Hell, I coldn't even figure out how to remove the wallpaper on that netbook I just bought.

If your netbook has Windows 7 Starter on it, you won't be able to change the wallpaper.

Furthermore, i find the ENTIRE situation very, very unlikely. It's almost as if it was all orchestrated.

Not really that unlikely.

1. Some random pundit was rooting through Microsoft functions because he "felt there was too much code there".

It was .Net code. People often seem to rummage through Microsoft's .Net-based code for no real reason, mostly because it's so easy to do. (In this case, though, it appears he was looking at the code because it had an annoying bug.)

Pundit noticed some code that, despite it not having any reference to ImageReader, and despite this individual having nothing to do with ImageReader, immediately recognised that a dozen-line ReadBytes method was "obviously lifted from the CodePlex-hosted (yikes) GPLv2-licensed ImageMaster project".

There are these things called code search engines. They search publicly-available code for stuff. The code has all its identifiers intact, so it's not exactly hard to find. Since other code was copied - not just the ReadBytes method, which was just given as a sample - it'd probably jump right out in a search. Of course, it also took several days between him first startinf to look at the code and noticing it was copied.

True, but if you RTFA, you see this: http://www.withinwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/example1.png We're not talking about some int parameter here, we're talking about huge chunks of identical code.

The author seems to have added a different example that gives more credence to his claims.

Does the spec suggest you should create a helper class called "UdfHelper"? Does it suggest other class and type names to use? IMO too many of them match up to be coincidence.

http://www.withinwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/example1.png

I'll wait till there's evidence before even commenting about the ramifications of something like this. This is just wild speculation at this point.

He's updated the site with a better example. From the revised article:

Update 11/7: The example I provided yesterday (ReadBytes) was replaced with a new one. Note that it is only an example. I’m not here to prove my case in a huge exhaustive post for you. That’s left as an exercise for the reader.

No... the ReadBytes function was just one of the examples... The author has since replaced the ReadBytes example with another called "ReadLogicalDescriptors"

http://www.withinwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/example1.png

The ReadBytes code was just one example

If you read TFA (yeah, I know...) you'll see the author has updated that original example with others.

It looks like Microsoft's defence will be that the EULA says "“You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software". They'll probably charge the guy with a DMCA violation...

Sacrificing security for usability: UAC security flaw in Windows 7 beta (with proof of concept code) (Jan 30)
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090130/uac-security-flaw-windows-7-beta-proof/

and:

Malware can turn off UAC in Windows 7; "By design" says Microsoft (Jan 30)
http://www.withinwindows.com/

Leaks indicate Microsoft is un-rethinking the Win7 taskbar (Dec8)
http://www.betanews.com/article/Leaks_indicate_Microsoft_is_unrethinking_the_Win7_taskbar/1228780333