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They've already stated they will: Windows XP to compete with Win 7 in netbook market.

It's an empty threat. That whole article is a cry for help, he even says it towards the end. If he thinks free software is about price, he's in for a rude shock.

Good question. There are two physical sizes available: a System z10 BC and System z10 EC. The BC is roughly the same size as a single conventional rack of pizza box servers, and the EC is a double wide (about two racks). In refrigerator terms that's probably closer to the JennAir (or two for the EC) but well shy of the cow locker. Here's a picture of the EC shown to scale with two IBM executives: http://japan.zdnet.com/news/hardware/story/0,2000056184,20368219,00.htm?tag=z.keyword.st

Ah... the NHS: the envy of the world and the only stick with which to beat US.
FYI, NHS was not created by Brown or even Blair. Hell it was created long back before these jokers grew out of their diapers.
Signing the UN convention of rights of the child? That's like a cow's opinion: doesn't count.
Creationism in UK? Look Here and and Here and and Here.
Until you UK weenies come out strongly against the fascist policies of the UK government and roll back these changes OR elect a dynamic leader who does it, you guys ARE living under a modern Mussolini.

...when you hire somebody to develop a business plan for a product, then lay them off and forget to adapt the plan to a changing market.

Admittedly, I don't know many K-12 IT folks who are open-minded about FOSS & Linux. There is a guy a few towns away from me Chris Dawson who writes a blog on ZDnet that addresses his concerns and experiences. Here is a blog that talks about the subject. Browse around some of his back editions, you'll find more info.

I don't know of any such research and studies specifically, but I'd suggest that asking educators and their IT folk about what problems they are trying to solve before offering a solution. Are they trying to run specific Windows-only software? Does that software have a Linux equivalent (browser/office apps)? Can it be run under WINE with no problems? Look at their infrastructure to see if a thin client/LTSP solution for classroom PCs might save them electricity and upgrade costs over the long run.

Do a pilot program in a couple schools, and use them as the basis for further proposals to legislators and other school districts.

A few years ago someone figured out that Intel's compiler was engaged in dirty tricks: it inserted code to cause poor performance on hardware that did not have an Intel CPUID.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/8547

But perhaps they have cleaned this up before the 10.0 release:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=518

steveha

But didn't Microsoft just cut their workforce? http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=11561

  I am sure it wasn't all in the US, but still one hand saying hey lets help American workers get the skills they need to get a job, and then cutting thousands of workers seems to be a bit conflicting in their messaging...

But half of American banks forced HTTP login http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=201. Then there's the fact that people never manually type in HTTPS and they rely on an auto redirect, but the redirect could be intercepted and changed to HTTP. The solution requires a modification of web browsers and DNS to automatically enforce HTTP policy because people will ignore HTTP 100 out of 100 times and they will ignore fake certificate warnings 199 out of 200 times. EV is not the solution to this problem because it still relies on the human to make the decision on security.

See http://www.circleid.com/posts/20090219_https_web_hijacking/

Is your point that what he looks like doesn't make a difference at all in his ability as a network researcher?

True point, but it can still give you some good information. When I look at him, he seems like a pretty nice guy. I could probably chill with him. He's not stylishly dressed, he's somewhat overweight, but he doesn't seem embarrassed at all that someone is taking a picture of him in that state (and he seems to be at some public event). From that you can conclude he's probably not ambitiously trying to win everyone's approval, which can mean something, especially when you compare him to David Maynor, who showed up on the security scene with lies and rigged demos (if you remember, it was the Apple wireless security demo). He clearly cares a lot more about his appearance.

What does all this mean? Nothing firm, but sometimes it's nice to know what kind of people are doing this stuff. Doesn't mean he's good or bad at what he does, but now I know something more about him.

The real story is not that microsoft.com is on the list, it's all the other sites. Ostensibly this is a list of sites that are not standards compliant, which IE8 will treat in as non-standard so they display correctly. But if you check the list you'll find wikipedia.org, google.com, mozilla.com(!!). Are these sites really non-compliant? Or is IE8 just incompatible with them?

> I'm surprised they haven't equipped the tables with RFID readers and use cards with RFID in them

Yeah, they're starting to do that - well for now RFID is officially used to prevent fake chips, but I've heard they're using it to spot typical counting betting patterns (minimum bets with a few high bets per hour).

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-141181.html

Can we just go ahead and admit that the broken windows economy doesn't work.

Seriously, I don't think that it will take long for this to make Windows 7 as popular as Vista is. All we need to do is tell people that Kubuntu is Windows 7 and everything will be fine.

I jest of course. We really should tell them that the one that works is Linux, and the one that looks like it but doesn't work is Windows 7. I'm truly perplexed at the pace with which this one company tries to put itself in the red. There isn't much to say that doesn't come out as MS bashing when I hear this. Lets just throw it away and pretend it doesn't exist... quickly.

This is not correct, Martian signals require a special rabbit ears type antennae, as demonstrated in this photo.

I was too lazy to try and find an amazing source for you, so I just used "I'm Feeling Lucky"...

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2143

Also, you have google answer #2, which states some pretty low requirements for a new SKU:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/01/microsoft-to-google-we-already-offer-that-see-windows-live.ars

Also, here's a nice article to read on someone that actually contacted the UK MS office:

http://labs.vnunet.com/2009/02/windows-7-and-n.html

Sorry to disrupt the trolling copy-pasta, but :
Is this post on ZDNet's forum the original form of this troll ?
Or is this troll older, and jerryleecooper was already copying it from somewhere else ?

I'm just curious to know where this fine piece of humorous trolling was originally born.

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12355-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31199&messageID=579806&start=43

As far as I can tell, this is the source of that rant. Dated March 14, 2007.

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12355-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31199&messageID=579806

Here is a better, brief summary of the work. It shows a standard, deterministic processor with the probabilistic processor as a co-processor.

There are people certainly violating Microsoft's IP in areas like Samba

Wrong. Microsoft has worked with the Samba team to get their protocols implemented as required by the European Union stipulation. To try to attack the Samba team over this would essentially spell an end to Microsoft doing business in the EU.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1064

When dealing with Microsoft, as with the devil, one has to read the fine print. Very carefully. "Royalty-free" merely means no ongoing payments for a patent license; it says nothing about an initial one-time fee. Such a fee, if large, would be fatal for free software.

I suppose this will put your fears to rest, then? Here's the relevant part:

"But," says Herman, "while RAND sometimes means there could be a financial obligation, [Microsoft] will be offering a conventional non-royalty non-fee RAND license. We've always made that clear to anyone who has asked."

So you are still wrong.

Only in the minds of paranoid individuals who'd rather make up conspiracy theories than look at the evidence in front of them.

And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++.

Link

Do my jedi powers sense overconfidence?
No, you do not recall correctly. The have had HUGE fsck-ups like this which they have acknowledged themselves If you bought vista early with the hope that the eventual service pack would fix things, then it would be possible that you might be screwed even worse and be stuck in a cycle of endless reboots.

This is a space that I've observed for a long long time. I can assure you that if anyone ever gets even remotely close to a replacement for Outlook against an Exchange server (or Exchange against an Outlook client), Microsoft will change the APIs so fast your head will spin off and fly away.

MAPI, AD and such are PROPRIETARY protocols folks, and Microsoft knows they are the keys to the kingdom. That's why all the Exchange clients ever created work ok at the start, but before they can really get going they fall back several steps.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1064

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/12/antitrust-pact-payoff-samba-gets-protocols-from-microsoft.ars

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9836784-39.html

http://news.samba.org/announcements/pfif/

You are quite a bit out of date with that thought.

While reading through the article, and some of the talkback, I stumbled across this document which contains results of the actual investigation. It has lots of actual details, and is worth a read. (meanwhile, the news articles are a little too dumbed-down to be of any real value or interest).

There's another problem. Take a look at this excellent article:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162

SATA drives are commonly specified with an unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of 10^14. Which means that once every 100,000,000,000,000 bits, the disk will very politely tell you that, so sorry, but I really, truly can't read that sector back to you.

...

Disk drive capacities double every 18-24 months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we'll have 2 TB drives.

With a 7 drive RAID 5 disk failure, you'll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an URE. So the read fails. And when that happens, you are one unhappy camper. The message "we can't read this RAID volume" travels up the chain of command until an error message is presented on the screen. 12 TB of your carefully protected - you thought! - data is gone. Oh, you didn't back it up to tape? Bummer!

More Specifically

IE8 8.0.6001.18371
FF 3.05
Safari 3.2 (525.26.13)
Chrome 0.4.154.29
Opera 10A B1229

If you are quoting figures for IE8, which is RC status and not yet release, then you should also quote figures for other browser still in testing stages.

For Firefox, the latest testing version is Firefox 3.1 beta 2, and beta 3 is due out next week.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=3295

Here is a link to information on the Bradford BSF deployment if you can't visit the school in person.

I think you'd find if you looked that the user-space parts of any driver can't communicate with hardware directly. They can be given a DMA mapping by the system-level parts of the driver, for reading/writing (normally only one at a time) to the hardware's memory directly, and can call the kernel-level part of the driver for it to do stuff. The kernel-level part would be secured against processes trying to access each-other's graphics-card data.

Wiki says that patchguard is only in the x64 versions of Windows, and actually isn't new with Vista, it's in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 x64 versions too. Considering that MS said that quite a few "Windows" crashes were caused by kernel code "patched" by drivers (especially some antivirus and firewall programs), I'm not surprised that they discourage it.

Though I have just found out that patchguard doesn't stop drivers patching each other. However, the x64 version of Vista requires drivers to be signed by Microsoft, so you couldn't use one driver to patch the graphics driver in an attempt to intercept the rendered video on x64, because you'd never get a driver that did this signed by MS. I don't think you could patch the user-space portion of a driver from your code, unless you were in system-debugger mode, because Windows just wouldn't give you the process handle of it, so you wouldn't be able to write to its address-space. I'm assuming you know enough about "Virtual Memory" to know that processes can't just write to each-other's memory without the kernel's permission.

On the other hand Vista 32 seems to be wide open to a hack that used a dodgy driver to patch the graphics driver in order to intercept the rendering commands used to display the protected video.
But without patchguard running, there is nothing to cause the "slowdown" people attribute to DRM in Vista. Yet they still claim it.

But when it all boils down at the end, it's easier just to use a badly-made blu-ray/hddvd player which has the video flowing over an unencrypted link between two chips, than to try to hack around Vista's HDCP support.

"Vista's new DRM" is talking about support for playing HDCP-protected video streams, and nothing more. Some people lump "patchguard" under "Vista DRM" too, but that's not in 32-bit Vista, and it's not DRM, it's protection of the kernel from malicious and stupid driver code.

This seems to be a reasonably good article on the subject, if you want further reading: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=299&tag=rbxccnbzd1

The real underlaying thing here is not whether it's a virus or not it's the fact the a trojan is in the wild for OSX that's being installed. Mac users typically think that because they are using OSX that they don't have to worry about such things, what this proves is that there is gaining interest out there for malicious attacks on OSX whether or not it's virus, trojan, spyware or worm.

OSX in 2007(no 2008 numbers yet) had more security vulnerabilities in 2007http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=758/ then Vista or XP yet people think it's a more secure operating system, and like Microsoft Apple has at times taken it's time in patching these vulnerabilities. At this current time it is a more secure operating system but only because of it's current market share. I predict that the increase in market share is going to be directly proportional to the increase in malicious software.

While you say that any OS can be compromised like this if a user using OSX had a good virus scanner on their system they would be allot less likely to get infected by this trojan that a PC user who has up to date definitions on their virus scanner. Granted some people do have virus scanners running on OSX. If that's not the point of people criticizing security on OSX then it should be. Even if the OS is less likely to pickup a virus or trojan that can infect their computer they could end up passing it along to a Windows OS.

This doesn't just go for OSX users there are possibilities of the same thing happening to linux distros out there as well. I typically have run avg on my linux installs in the past.

The point I'm trying to make is not to bash Apple I'm simply criticizing the general non technical users mentality towards the OS, as well as the lack of push for better protection from these kinds of infections whether they be by social engineering to get them to install the trojan or if they are a trojan virus that can spread.

Support for multiple CPUs, is but one area where Windows NT was (and remains) superior.
Possibly, but who cares? The world is going multi-core, not multiple CPUs and I would suggest that Apple has the lead there, and will strengthen it with Grand Central, Grand Central Dispatch, and OpenCL.

Read this if you don't believe me.

The application goes "Hey ! Windows ! I need a protected path before I can play this media."

So network performance wasn't degraded severely when audio was played black like this, right?

"Please note that some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not. In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design"

These tests disagree with you, real world performance - not PCMark or anything.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/jul08/07-02EquiptPR.mspx
Pricing and Availability

Microsoft Equipt is $69.99 (U.S.) estimated retail price for a one-year renewable subscription. Each subscription will be good for three home PCs, making Microsoft Equipt ideal for families and individuals with one or several computers

* Compare to Cable TV which started at $240 a year and now runs about $1000 a year. My prices might be high- but I was using current cable prices. (and I'll be moving cable providers once again to get that price back down below $400 a year).

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=445
Under the FlexGo program, users make initial down payments on mid-range PCs and make monthly payments for software and broadband services from their local telcos, much the way customers pay cable providers for TV and Internet access. Microsoft and its partners will allow users to sign up and pay for their subscriptions in a variety of ways, ranging from ATMs and point-of-sale terminals, to the Web.

On the "own" vs. licensed you are picking a nit so I'll clarify.
I can reinstall Win2k, Linux, and my particular copy of Windows XP and it will work. Now and always. No one can stop me from installing my copies.

I can reinstall my copies of Office2000, Openoffice, Gimp, Audacity, etc. and they will work. Now and always.

My windows Vista machine can be automatically disabled by microsoft at any time.
My data stored in microsoft formats has previously become unavailable when microsoft orphaned the application and no longer made copies of it available to read older data. I was reduced to using a hex editor to extract the data.

Yes, any WMA format data can be denied to me by tools written into Microsoft operating systems now. Just like Divx, if something that I purchased which has a valid liscense stops being supported by the liscense servers, then I lose the ability to use the file. Meanwhile, ny MP3, OGG, and FLAC files will continue to work anywhere. And worst case, I can read the DVD onto another non-microsoft O/S (if they someday aggressively disable or even delete files they decide are unlicensed.

You need to open your eyes a bit wider.

Interview: Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior June 19th, 2007.

I had to look more about this network degrading when playing mp3 and found this link at zdnet, that sounds far more convincing than your tinfoil bs about copyright: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=724 âoeThe connection between media playback and networking is not immediately obvious. But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback. Users generally hate this, hence the trade off.â

I would go into more details but I am just learning how to use all the new features myself as I am only beginning the process of deploying it out to the corporate desktops.

Ah, there's the rub. There are pain points. You've a few more miles to walk in those shoes before they're broke in.

You might just get it done. From my first look 7 does look a lot better. But you should actually use those features before you start bragging them up because the devil is in the details. For Full Disk Encryption it's not the deployment challenge - it's the challenge of upgrading a system with it to $Windows_Next_Version. For the image based installers... well, the marketing feature list reads better than the documentation. Probably because the marketing feature list is the documentation.

Centralized software licensing, auditing,.... are all new features in Vista that would appeal to the enterprise.

That this is true makes me sad. I would prefer that people subscribed to open source license enforcement and auditing software. That is, if they feel compelled to have a killswitch at all.

I found this through a quick google search. It seems Nexicon is the company behind YouTube's video identification software, and that it used to be known as Cyco.net, an online seller of cigarettes. After acquiring two small IT companies it had a change of heart, and decided to change its business model from selling tobacco online to providing the content industry with copyright infringement solutions. It makes perfect sense.

Article about the renaming to Nexicon
Article about their work with Youtube

You make some good points. However, even though I my not provide the best talking points, I am not the only one to think so

The SOA is a business-focus driven paradigm. It is the space of top-down development. WOA comes in from the other angle and is resource based. The clear winner here is WOA, because it allows you to combine the resources in new and unexpected ways. This is where innovation lies. SOA, being top-down is more about governing structure, so by definition you'll be more limited. I'm not saying you can't innovate, but it certainly would not be as easy.

As someone who thought SOA would be a good thing (meaning SOAP and XML) I can say without a doubt it sucks.

I am working on IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) (Electronic medical records sharing) and I hate it. We are constantly dealing with the same stupid problems time and time again: XML mismatches.

Please, anyone developing for the cloud or SOA use REST aka WOA (Web oriented architecture).

The difference is simple: Rather than use SOAP for everything, you match it to the usual HTTP paradigms (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, with sensible URLs and HTTP headers).

The elimination of XML eliminates so many issues you will not believe. The best that I can tell is XML is a document, this document can be versioned, while HTTP is a protocol. You therefore eliminate a layer that has to be maintained.

For instance, the PirateBay uses REST-like inerface:
GET http://thepiratebay/browse/603 gives you the

whereas with SOAP you'd need to agree on a transaction name, XML schema, paramters. Then someone will decide that you need to support base64 encoded file uploads and downloads, so that'll have to go in the schema too. With REST you just use the standard HTTP headers...

Friends don't let friends develop SOAP.

Three of four sub-cables connecting Asia-North America have been cut.

This is getting a little crazy, and pardon the tinfoil hat that I'm wearing, how many 'undamaged' cables does this leave?

I think this is really starting to become hard to blame on 'coincidence.'

http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=669

We do scream bloody murder. Politicians suck.

Here's the cite: Ballmer: "Windows 7 will be Vista, but a lot better"

Thank you ! I am serious...thank you. I am so tired of being treated like a nut and being marked "flamebait" and "troll" for saying that Win7 is going to bomb. I swear, it is like I woke up in an alternate reality where the past 3 years never existed. Does NOBODY remember the pre release hype for Vista? Does NOBODY remember how the press gushed on and on and on about how wonderful it was? The first time I loaded up Vista Beta 1 my first thoughts were "Oh...My...God. What are they thinking? This is going to bomb SO hard! The home users will hate it and the businesses will too. Who did this? It is awful!"

And here we are, three years later, and companies are offering machines with With XP Pro downgrade rights! in giant letters to sell their PCs. Why? Because the users have spoken, and the vast majority HATE Vista! Just like you they have either tried to like Vista(I did too. I used it for over a month and couldn't take it anymore) or they have watched a family member fight it and have decided not to go that route. I know that this will shock many Slashdot guys, but most of my users don't even want the "fisher price" look of XP. They want the "classic" that looks like Win9x.

With any other company, they would have in all likelihood listened to their customers and given them what they wanted. What does MSFT do? More bling bling! The majority of the public HATES your OS, in a large part because of the awful GUI, and your answer is to add MORE bling bling onto the GUI that they hate? Does that make ANY sense? And as for the earlier poster asking "why would they switch to Linux?" Simple-1. The GUI can be EXACTLY like XP,or even Win9x. That is what they know, that is what they want. 2. The OEMs are going to have to push SOMETHING if Win7 turns out to be another turkey, because I can't see Ballmer admitting defeat and allowing them to keep selling XP when Win7 comes out. Whether folks will buy Linux or go to guys like me to get XP machines, who knows.

But mod me down all you want. Say I am a troll, or flamebait, or whatever makes you happy. But mark my words, and mark them well. Windows 7 will B-O-M-B. It will bomb just as hard, possibly even harder than Vista, thanks to that confusing taskbar/quicklaunch with almost no way for anyone with even the slightest vision troubles to be able to tell if a program is running or not. And then when it does, just like with Vista, all those bloggers that were gushing over Windows 7 will be "I knew it! MSFT has another turkey on its hands!". But when even Thurrott puts out an article simple VS easy about how Win7 looks simple but isn't easy to use, and Mary Joe Foley is saying "If I wanted a Mac-like environment, I'd buy a Mac" then you know there are problems in paradise. Mark my words, folks aren't going to like Win7 anymore than they like Vista. Maybe the next one after that they'll listen to their customers and give them what they want.

And this time it'll be more than one step removed from the real source of the money.

If you don't believe me, read the oft-cited Peter Gutmann article

You mean the thoroughly debunked Peter Gutmann article. It's full of so many inaccuracies, fantasies, and wild ass guesses as to be almost complete fabrication.

Here's some light reading for you:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=284
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/2006/12/31/windows_vista_drm_nonsense
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx

Also, check out some of the obvious errors in Gutmann's claims.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723

Please stop citing his paper, as it's pure speculation based on a misunderstanding of a pre-release whitepaper.

If you don't believe me, read the oft-cited Peter Gutmann article

You mean the thoroughly debunked Peter Gutmann article. It's full of so many inaccuracies, fantasies, and wild ass guesses as to be almost complete fabrication.

Here's some light reading for you:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=284
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/2006/12/31/windows_vista_drm_nonsense
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx

Also, check out some of the obvious errors in Gutmann's claims.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723

Please stop citing his paper, as it's pure speculation based on a misunderstanding of a pre-release whitepaper.

If you don't believe me, read the oft-cited Peter Gutmann article

You mean the thoroughly debunked Peter Gutmann article. It's full of so many inaccuracies, fantasies, and wild ass guesses as to be almost complete fabrication.

Here's some light reading for you:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=284
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/2006/12/31/windows_vista_drm_nonsense
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx

Also, check out some of the obvious errors in Gutmann's claims.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723

Please stop citing his paper, as it's pure speculation based on a misunderstanding of a pre-release whitepaper.

This one, Einstein?

A digestive virus, plus complications.