The license for HD Photo is unusually permissive for something that comes from Microsoft. It's available as part of the same Open Specification Promise that covers Office Open XML and the various WS-* web service protocols. Red Hat's general counsel has stated that OSP is compatible with FOSS licenses, and Lawrense Rosen has approved of it as well. So, chances are good that it's safe.
Remember that almost -no- software comes free of a license. The expectation that anything will be "unburdened by licensing or copyright" is a bit unrealistic. A good license that asserts rights favourable to you is actually a lot better than no license at all. The GPL v2, permissive as it may be, has rights and requirements just like any other license.
Software patents are always hanging around waiting to screw people over, too. Since it's unlikely that we'll see fundamental changes in the legality of software patents anytime soon, the best thing in the short- to mid-term for open-source software that gets into novel territories is for some big corporation like IBM, Sun, or even Microsoft to scoop up the patents for those new technologies, then explicitly state that they will never pursue litigation. That'll help save FOSS projects from being targeted by litigous turds who hold a patent on something obscure.
Now the only way Microsoft is going to get anywhere with HD Photo in the longer term is to: a) prove that it's actually technically better than other formats out there (and this sounds like it's the case, given that it can offer the same quality as JPEG, in half the file size, with faster encoding and decoding to boot)... they won't need to twist anyone's arms into creating implementations if it's really that much better. b) submit it to standards bodies. ANSI, ISO, Ecma all lend a lot of credibility to any specification. c) maintain an open process for working on new revisions. d) convince porn sites to use it. seriously! if a porn site could save 40, 50% of their bandwidth by switching image formats, they'd be all over it.
The Mozilla team has identified a couple dozen issues with Vista + Firefox (and Thunderbird). Some of them are fixed already (like making Firefox DPI aware), and some have yet to be (e.g. multiple UAC prompts when installing updates). Some are also "enhancements", like setting the default downloads folder to the new "Downloads" folder in the user's profile, instead of the desktop.
Porobab the biggest one is this: they're considering implementing the same "Protected Mode" sandbox that IE7 uses to run the browsing engine & ActiveX controls on pages with lower permissions than the user themselves have. It's a good idea, because if you narrowly define the precise paths by which something can get out of the sandbox (like the "save" dialog box), it's easier to secure, and vulnerabilities are somewhat mitigated. There's nothing about the technology that's really IE-specific, either; it's a security framework provided by the OS itself.
It also needs to be said that Vista actually includes a compatibility shim for 2.0.0.0 thru 2.0.0.2, to work around some of the problems Firefox has. Yes, Microsoft actually invested time and effort in making Firefox work mostly correctly on Vista.;-) But it's up to the Mozilla team to fix the bugs so that the shim isn't required in the future.
I would wager that those 3,000 good/featured articles make up the bulk of what people who go to wikipedia read about. Don't be so sure about that. For the month of January, the top 20 Wikipedia articles (excuding the main page) were as follows:
Wiki, Wikipedia, Saddam Hussein, Sex, United States, Naruto, Wii, Gerald Ford, List of sex positions, World War II, Playstation 3, Sexual intercourse, Christmas, YouTube, Windows Vista, Adolf Hitler, Pornogrpahy, Deaths in 2007, Martin Luther King Jr., and List of Naruto episodes.
In February, Anna Nicole Smith and Valentine's Day and Windows Vista are now in the top 10, and Gerald Ford is nowhere to be seen in the top 100.
Of these articles, only Gerald Ford is a Featured Article, and of course, he died last month, which is the only reason his page was so popular. Wikipedia, Wii, and Windows Vista are the only listed Good Articles.
The articles that make it to Good or Featured status are the ones that have editors who are interested in pursuing those goals. That in itself is hard work, but the ongoing entropy due to vandalism and unskilled editors is a frustration that distracts those editors from forging ahead with new work.
That was as far as I wanted to go at this point. The stark reality about Vista is that driver support is minimal at best. Rather shocking considering XP had drivers for much more hardware. I'm really curious if anyone knows why driver support is so minimal at this time. Does the consumer version have more? If not, all of the people who bought Vista are in for an uncharacteristic surprise.
Is the lack of drivers a conspiracy to get people to upgrade hardware?
Why are the hardware vendors so far behind supplying drivers?
There are a lot of different answers for this. Let's start from the top:
Microsoft completely rewrote the entire audio stack in Vista. Top to bottom, boom, all gone. They had to do this... audio drivers were responsible for a sizable percentage of all total kernel panics in XP. The whole structure was rickety at best... third-party ASIO drivers had to be provided to get decent performance in audio authoring applications like Propellerhead's Reason, and it has also been quite common for desktop apps like Winamp to use DirectX to play audio instead of the regular sound API. Latency and reliability were two serious weak points with Windows audio.
The new audio driver infrastructure puts most of the driver code in userland instead of in the kernel, and some new memory mapping techniques have been introduced that allow the usermode audio driver to access the audio card's DMA buffers directly. This gets around the user->kernel data transition that used to be required for playing audio. Being in usermode also means that the OS can recover gracefully from an audio driver failure... it can restart the driver, report the failure to Microsoft (who then takes those reports and whaps the responsible hardware vendor over the head with it), and continue playing sound. There are other benefits to the new architecture, too, like being able to support per-application volume controls, and a plugin architecture for supporting different types of audio effects.
There was another problem -- before Vista, there was NO STANDARD for writing audio drivers. Microsoft couldn't provide an out-of-the-box class driver that could reliably play sound on a wide range of audio cards... Creative had the last de-facto standard with "Soundblaster 16", but even Creative has abandoned that in favour of their proprietary Audigy stuff. Now you might go, "but what about AC97?"... AC97 was poorly implemented most of the time, and there has never been a way for a single driver to run all those chips. A lot of custom software is required... if you've ever seen an audio UI in Windows that looked like it'd been beaten from birth, it was probably there to support AC97. Granted, some parts of the AC97 standard got better over time (like introducing jack detection support), but a lot of the implementations were still basically ass on a stick.
Intel introduced the Intel High Definition Audio standard a few years ago, which is a much better-defined system and is a lot more insistent on high-quality output. Most audio solutions created now (with the notable exception of Creative) support Intel HD Audio. Windows Vista comes with a class driver for it, which means that any audio device that is built on this standard will work without any third-party drivers. Microsoft is really pushing this, too... they've made it a requirement for OEMs to include audio solutions that don't require additional drivers in order to get the Windows Vista Capable logo.
This is GOOD. This means that we're no longer beholden to audio driver manufacturers to keep writing new drivers for their older stuff. Unfortunately, this is also why a lot of older audio chips don't work in Vista... in some cases, the companies just don't want to put the effort into it, and in other cases, the companies are GONE.
Microsoft begged and pleaded with manufacturers to get on board, so that their pre-IHD devices would be supported in Vista. Some did, some didn't. Some are still working on it. Some have
Okay, I think I'm probably more qualified than most people to comment on the state of Wikipedia's Microsoft articles, considering that I've personally started a couple dozen articles on Windows-related stuff, and I have more than 1,000 Microsoft-related articles on my watchlist. I work a bunch on Mac OS X articles, too... I don't really consider operating systems to be a worthy subject of religious advocacy; they make for a great hobby, sure, but that's about it. All I care about is making sure that the subjects are presented accurately and without bias in either direction.
Wikipedia articles are edited by people from Microsoft on a regular basis. Most of the time it's simple stuff, like fixing spelling mistakes, updating links, and putting some newly published information in about future releases. (This is one example of an MS employee edit to the Office Open XML article. Pretty harmless.) It's quite rare that someone at Microsoft adds in unabashed "pro-Microsoft" stuff, and when they do, I or other interested editors remove it entirely or tone it down. But, I have yet to see any kind of co-ordinated efforts to astroturf Microsoft Wikipedia articles... if anything, it's just individuals who are proud of their work and want to write about it... you can tell, it doesn't have that shiny PR veneer on it. I've had to remind a few Microsoft employees to stay within the encyclopedia's neutrality and verifiability policies, but it never turns out to be a problem; almost everyone who's new to editing Wikipedia needs to learn that.
Frankly, I see far more crap by juvenile pro-Apple zealots, like redirecting the Windows Vista article to Mac OS X and other such time-wasting noise. That's a reflection of the kind of uphill battle Wikipedia has to fight against vandalism.
Shit, after 7,000+ edits to Microsoft-related articles, maybe Microsoft should be offering to pay me to keep Wikipedia clean of anti-Microsoft crap, since I assuredly work harder at it than some dude with an O'Reilley blog. I wouldn't take their money for it though... or if I did, I'd make a public display of donating it all to the Wikimedia Foundation. They need the money more than I do.
If Microsoft wants to pay someone to write more into the OOXML articles, that's fine, I don't care -- but there's no damned way they're getting material inappropriate for Wikipedia past me & the other regulars. You can be sure of that.
Mac OS X users better not get too smug about this, either, since Apple is going to have to incorporate the technology if they want HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs to play on their hardware.
Stop buying garbage, consumer-level hardware from the major OEMs if you don't want consumer-level garbage software shoved in your face.
Let's pick on Dell, since they're what I'm most familiar with in my professional dealings:
Part of the reason many of their machines, -especially- the Dell Inspiron laptops, are so cheap is because the cost of the machine is being heavily subsidised by 3rd-party product placements. They also outsource technical support for consumer-level hardware to second-rate call facilities in India that don't have the capability to escalate problems to technicians in the United States.
If you buy a Dell Precision laptop, you'll get the proper media and you won't be subject to piles of shovelware. Yes, it's somewhat more expensive, but you get treated much better. The build quality of the Precision line is miles better, to boot; it's more likely to last the rigours of four, five years of use.
According to this article, though, it would seem that Microsoft is actually blocking games from running via any other means than the Game Explorer. I assure you, as someone who's played a variety of games on Vista (Civ 4, Heroes of M&M 5, Eve Online, etc. etc.), that there are no such restrictions. I don't even remember the last time I saw Games Explorer... I run games in Vista exactly like I did in XP, and there's no problems other than the typical growing pains you'd expect from beta video drivers.
Where things have changed in Vista, is if you have an account that has Parental Controls applied to it to limit the kinds of games that can be run. Vista knows the ESRB (& other ratings boards) ratings for quite a large number of games, and can block access to them if the parents don't want their kids to play them... but that's not the default setting. You have to go out of your way to set it up.
Yet again, the need for the CLR to support this moronic language creates a very obvious security flaw. Huh? Where's the logic in that? Blaming VB.NET for a security vulnerability in a Win32 API is like blaming Perl for a security vulnerability in the Linux kernel API. This has absolutely nothing to do with the CLR, Visual Basic (.NET or 6), or any other specific language... the vulnerability exists on the lowest level of the Win32 API (CSRSS, amongst other things, is Win32's interface to the Windows kernel). Any language that can call into Win32 can trigger this vulnerability... including Perl.
Now hang on a minute. It's one thing to talk positively about what Mac OS 8.5 was accomplishing back in 1998, but if you're going to talk about Windows, at least get your facts straight!
First of all, nothing Apple has shipped up to now even comes close to what WinFS was trying to solve. It's not a search engine... it's a relational database store for arbitrary user data that presents content to the operating system as a series of "entities". Comparing WinFS to a content search indexer is missing the point. See WinFS. Frankly, it's a good thing that they waited, because they have piles of other things to fix with Windows before they introduce something this drastic.
Microsoft shippied the first version of their content indexing service in mid-1996, though it was really the Content Indexer component that was part of the Object File System aspect of Cairo. That was announced in 1991. It didn't ship as a standard component that would do system-wide indexing until 2000, but it has been there all this time. Microsoft did buy a company in July 2004 called Lookout to get their Outlook indexing capabilities, which was then rolled into MSN Desktop Search.
The problem, of course, was that the Indexing Service UI sucked horribly. Most Windows 2000 users haven't even seen it because they don't know it's there! Then again, most long-time Mac users will tell you that Sherlock has always sucked on OS X, and suffered from its own problems of not being sure if it was a program to search your local drive, or to search the Internet.
In short: Lame duck vs. lame duck.
Oh, and, MSN Desktop Search (the first non-crap search indexer from Microsoft) shipped before OS X 10.4 with Spotlight (the first non-crap search indexer from Apple), but that's not something a Mac user would say, right?:-) The content indexer included with Vista and MSN Desktop Search are almost identical code-wise, and is merely an evolution of what's been around in Windows for many years. See Windows indexing service. Now we just gotta wait a little bit longer and see what Apple does to top Microsoft's offering in Vista.
How many teenagers do you know that set up and run phishing sites by themselves? Sounds like these are kids taking the fall for other people. I don't know about phishing sites, but teenagers have often been involved in computer-crime cases.
For example, there's Sven Jaschan, who was 18 years old when he was arrested in conjunction with writing the NetSky and Sasser worms. There's also Ehud Tenenbaum, who was also 18 years at the time he was arrested for hacking into various Pentagon and Knesset computer systems. Chad Davis spent time in prison for hacking into the White House and U.S. Army web sites. He was 19. And of course there's Adrian Lamo, who was barely getting his 20s started when he hacked into the New York Times.
Conspiracy theories can be fun to bat around, but a lot of young hackers get into the "business" simply because it's fun, and it lets them flex their hacking muscles. Phishing sites are no different... sometimes people do it just to see what they can get away with.
Most of the standards revolve around XML-based web communications (SOAP, WSDL, WS-*), but there's also their Virtual Hard Disk format (VHD) that's used in their virtualization software, Sender ID related stuff (remember all the issues a couple years ago that this "standard" wouldn't fly because it wasn't free enough for open source use? no longer), and Office XML formats (2003 and 2007).
The people who cameup with this stuff can be seen in a Channel 9 interview explaining it in more detail:
They're very explicit in stating that open-source developers working on Linux can implement these specifications that Microsoft devised without having to enter a license agreement, pay royalties, or worry about being sued for patent infringement or whatever. Jean Paoli is one of the people interviewed... he's one of the creators of XML, by the way, so you can probably imagine the scope of his personal interest in seeing XML-based standards being as widely adopted as possible. And if that's not enough to convince you, even Lawrencse Rosen (google him if you don't know the name) approves of Microsoft's OSP initiative.
Now, granted, these are not the keys to the Windows kingdom, but it's a step in the right direction, and Microsoft should be encouraged to get as many specs out into the Open as possible, as soon as possible.
This story is overflowing with FUD and misrepresentation. A routine fact-check will demonstrate this. Let's pull this apart:
According to Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president of the Taiwan-based company, the issue is simply that the basic home edition of Vista, Home Basic, which is available for preorder on Amazon.co.uk for 154.99 pounds ($293), is so basic that users will be forced to move to Vista Home Premium, at 189.99 pounds ($359).
First of all, they got the prices of Vista wrong: Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is 185 GBP; Vista Home Premium is 224 GBP.
Second, price-conversion. Everybody knows that you don't take the street price of a product in British pounds, run it through xe.com, and come out with the street price in USD. Microsoft's MSRP on Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is $199 USD, -not- $293 as given in the article. Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $239 USD. Note that the MSRP on XP Home Edition is $199 USD, the same as Vista Home Basic.
Third, Microsoft has never sold an edition of Windows with the Media Center included on the retail market, so in a way there isn't really any good point of comparison.... of -course- it's going to be more expensive than XP Home.
"The new (Vista) experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won't feel it at all," Wong told PC Pro magazine. "There's no (Aero) graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."
Yeah well, guess what? some people just don't want or need that stuff. Actually, I'd hazard a guess and say that the vast majority of users don't want or need Media Center functionality or a remote control. That's not what's worth harping on about. Home Premium does have a lot of neat things in it, especially for mobile users, media centers, tablet PC owners, etc., but it's useless for a lot of people who just use their computer to get stuff done.
Wong also said that the manufacturer's license for Vista Home Premium is 10 percent more expensive than for XP Home.
It's also got far more functionality (Media Center, new mobility features, XBox 360 connectivity, Tablet PC features) than XP Home Edition or Vista Home Basic Edition, the latter of which Acer is refusing to sell to its customers.
"We have to pay more but users are not going to pay more," Wong said. This would mean an increase in the cost to PC manufacturers of 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Wong, in a business where the profit margin is around 5 percent or less.
Quit your bitching, Mr. Wong. If the price of Windows is going up by 10% because you are choosing to force a higher edition on your customers, you pass that price increase on to users... it's not your job as a company to absorb price increases from Microsoft.
At the top of the Vista lineup is the Ultimate Edition, which can be preordered for 325 pounds ($614) and, again, is significantly more expensive than the XP operating system it replaces.
Ultimate Edition is covers a lot more ground than XP Professional. The thing comes with Media Center, twice as many games (good ones, too, like Chess and Majongg), backup software that doesn't suck, a bunch of extra software and add-ons analogous to the XP Plus! Pack, and even a friggin' UNIX stack to boot -- and that's not even going into
With the resource overhead I've seen in the beta version of Vista "hardcore gamers" would have to be retarded to make the switch. It'll only decrease the performance of your games, and all games for the next 3-4 years at least will keep running on XP.
Really? My Athlon XP 1800+ with 1GB of memory and a Radeon 9600XT is able to run the games I play just great with Vista RC2... I've even run Eve Online and Heroes of Might & Magic V at the same time with no problems. Granted, neither game was really smooth on XP given my old hardware. I also played through the entirety of Thief 3 on Beta 2 (it didn't crash even once, and performance and audio were solid), and Civilization 4 works as well as always (ie. not great; it really lags in modern eras, but that was the case in XP too).
The performance delta can't possibly be significant enough for most people to notice. I've heard people say 5-15%... I haven't noticed it. Actually, it reminds me of Windows 98 -> XP where people talked about how XP was so much slower.
The benefits of Vista's new audio and video stacks (being able to upgrade/downgrade drivers without a reboot, for example, as well as the OS's ability to restart a crashed driver without a blue-screen), are things I think gamers will appreciate a lot. Being able to control the volume of applications individually, no more bizarre "flickering" behaviour in full-screen DirectX applications when other applications display toast-style popup windows (Messenger, Outlook, notification balloons, etc.)....
Once ATI, nVidia, Microsoft, Creative, Turtle Beach, and others shake out the remaining major bugs (give it 3-6 months), Vista's will be a good platform to play games on. Better than XP, for sure.
I'm an a large site that's running XP SP1 on all of quite a few thousand machines and I'd just like to say that one week notice of termination of support is ridiculous.
You're right, one week is totally ridiculous and unnacceptable.
Of course, ehm... they announced this a long time ago -- January, to be precise.
I'm not really sure why you chose to quote the Windows NT 4 Resource Kit documentation as a basis for your opinion on the Windows' UNIX support. That documentation is going on 10 years old!
How about you look at something a lot more modern, like the "Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications":
That's what is shipped with Windows Server 2003 R2, and most of the same stuff is included with Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions. The POSIX support is quite a lot better... and the environment in general is good enough that they're able to support the entire GNU toolchain, Perl, curses, and a lot of other things. It even comes with vi. Yeah... Microsoft vi, wrap your head around that one.:-)
One of my degrees is in comp sci. I've taken a GUI design theory classes. It took me > 3 minutes to figure out how to add something to the new start menu (right click, create shortcut isn't there... explore (all) user(s) and I don't have permission to write. I can't drag a shortcut in... hmmm)
I really want to make a snarky comment about how comp-sci majors tend to know jack shit about user interface design, while also thinking that they know *everything* about computers because they have a comp sci degree.... but, ehhh, I'll digress. But I will say this: If you don't understand how to use Vista, RTFM. The help system in Vista works pretty well, just type in a question and it'll give you some answers.
On to your nits:
Battery: Have you checked to see what power plan the computer is running on? There are three plans that ship with Vista by default: High performance, Power saver, and Balanced. Click the battery icon to see which one you've chosen, or to change it. Personally I've found that my laptop runs -significantly- cooler on Balanced and Power saver than it does on High performance. This is because Windows will throttle the CPU, reduce power to the wireless network card, prevent the content indexer from running, and so on. You can make your own plans, too.
Aero (with transparency disabled) doesn't use significantly more battery power than having it turned off. It offloads some work to the GPU, yes, but it's work that would otherwise be done by the CPU. You should get a much better understanding of what the Desktop Window Manager does (and doesn't do) before committing yourself to a claim along the lines of "Aero halves battery power".
Networking: Vista has the notion of "Public" networks and "Private" networks. Private networks are generally trustworthy, and public ones aren't. When you configure a new connection (wireless, VPN, dial-up, or wired... ad-hoc or infrastructured... ipv4 or ipv6... doesn't matter), it gives you the opportunity to choose between two types of private networks (Home and Work), and a Public network. There are two kinds of private networks because a great many people have laptops that they shuttle between work and home.
That's one of the major differences in networking between XP and Vista: Vista understands the concept of "Locations", and it will automatically reconfigure your firewall / sharing / discovery settings to suit the network you're on. Once it's been configured, you don't have to do anything other than connect to the network. You can make as many locations as you like, too... multiple workplaces, multiple wireless networks, etc.
This totally blows away anything XP has, and is a solid step up from what OS X Tiger offers (and believe me, I've done a lot of commuting with Panther & Tiger over the last few years, so I know what's what).
Start menu: If you want to add a shortcut to the start menu, right-click on it and choose "Pin to start menu". Or, drag the icon onto the start button. Or, right-click the start button, choose "Open", and you can work with it as an Explorer folder. None of this has changed from Windows XP.
The "All users" is only writable by administrators, yes -- but that's logical because you don't want one standard user being able to change what's on the Start menu of other standard users, right? If you want to share files between users, use the Public folder and its many children.
Really? I guess you haven't heard about Windows Server Longhorn's "Server Core" installation mode, then, which is essentially a command-line driven version of Windows. No GUI shell, no applications, no server services, nothing. They've been busy with untangling the dependency hell of Windows so that it can be a lot more modular. That work won't be done for Server Longhorn, but that's their long-term goal.
It's strange how Radiohead have chosen to do this, considering they were one of the first major bands to offer MP3 downloads to the public. Kid A was released for free online before in stores, and they found it advantageous. This was at the same time as their refusal to release singles or advertise the album in order to sell it purely on its merits.
Uhhh, no, you've got that completely wrong. Kid A was *leaked* onto the Internet in its entirety a few months before the album's release, and bootlegs of performances from the band's summer 2000 tour in Europe were being traded about on Napster. Radiohead benefitted from something they really didn't have much control over, and the result was that Kid A opened on the US and UK charts at #1.
MS products are easy to use but I wouldn't be to happy for them to be used for my apps as they aren't secure or stable enough, common requirements for enterprise products.
You say that, but have you looked at the stats? IIS 6.0 is has had -far- fewer vulnerabilities in its lifetime than Apache 2.0.
Apache 2.0: http://secunia.com/product/73/... 32 advisories since January 2003, including multiple remote access vulnerabilities. most recently, a system access vulnerability was found with mod_rewrite. 2 vulns still unpatched.
IIS 6.0: http://secunia.com/product/1438/... 3 advisories since April 2003, with one remote access vulnerability that was discovered last month, and actually requires an attacker to have a valid logon to the system, and ASP needs to be enabled (it isn't by default). none unpatched.
So really, if you're choosing between Apache and IIS on the basis of security, it's hard to argue in favour of Apache these days. IIS 4 and 5 were rightly scoffed at for poor security (and it didn't help that Windows 2000 had IIS enabled by default), but that's long since changed, and even if you don't ever plan on using Microsoft products, they should at least be credited for making IIS a lot more secure.
Just so you know, the Malicious Software Removal Tool doesn't actually install anything on your machine. All it does is look around for some common types of malware, remove them if they're present, and then exit and leave no trace of itself.
Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why Windows Installer takes a lot longer than NSIS:
1) It creates a System Restore point before every install. That way, if something goes horribly wrong (e.g. it changes some registry setting that prevents booting), you can roll back your Windows install to a prior restore point using safe mode.
2) During an install operation, it creates records of everything it does, so if the installer crashes, or there is a power failure, or you lose a connection to the source files or destination directory, or who knows what else, Windows can recover from it gracefully.
Vista's disk partition utility in Setup (as well as in the OS itself) also lets you resize existing partitions downwards. That's a pretty handy new feature.
FAT32 is unsupported on a Vista boot partition because they're really pushing the security angle, now, and they also use new NTFS 6 features like symbolic links in the Windows directory structure... formatting drives in FAT32 is still possible, of course.
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The license for HD Photo is unusually permissive for something that comes from Microsoft. It's available as part of the same Open Specification Promise that covers Office Open XML and the various WS-* web service protocols. Red Hat's general counsel has stated that OSP is compatible with FOSS licenses, and Lawrense Rosen has approved of it as well. So, chances are good that it's safe.
Remember that almost -no- software comes free of a license. The expectation that anything will be "unburdened by licensing or copyright" is a bit unrealistic. A good license that asserts rights favourable to you is actually a lot better than no license at all. The GPL v2, permissive as it may be, has rights and requirements just like any other license.
Software patents are always hanging around waiting to screw people over, too. Since it's unlikely that we'll see fundamental changes in the legality of software patents anytime soon, the best thing in the short- to mid-term for open-source software that gets into novel territories is for some big corporation like IBM, Sun, or even Microsoft to scoop up the patents for those new technologies, then explicitly state that they will never pursue litigation. That'll help save FOSS projects from being targeted by litigous turds who hold a patent on something obscure.
Now the only way Microsoft is going to get anywhere with HD Photo in the longer term is to:
a) prove that it's actually technically better than other formats out there (and this sounds like it's the case, given that it can offer the same quality as JPEG, in half the file size, with faster encoding and decoding to boot)... they won't need to twist anyone's arms into creating implementations if it's really that much better.
b) submit it to standards bodies. ANSI, ISO, Ecma all lend a lot of credibility to any specification.
c) maintain an open process for working on new revisions.
d) convince porn sites to use it. seriously! if a porn site could save 40, 50% of their bandwidth by switching image formats, they'd be all over it.
The Mozilla team has identified a couple dozen issues with Vista + Firefox (and Thunderbird). Some of them are fixed already (like making Firefox DPI aware), and some have yet to be (e.g. multiple UAC prompts when installing updates). Some are also "enhancements", like setting the default downloads folder to the new "Downloads" folder in the user's profile, instead of the desktop.
;-) But it's up to the Mozilla team to fix the bugs so that the shim isn't required in the future.
Porobab the biggest one is this: they're considering implementing the same "Protected Mode" sandbox that IE7 uses to run the browsing engine & ActiveX controls on pages with lower permissions than the user themselves have. It's a good idea, because if you narrowly define the precise paths by which something can get out of the sandbox (like the "save" dialog box), it's easier to secure, and vulnerabilities are somewhat mitigated. There's nothing about the technology that's really IE-specific, either; it's a security framework provided by the OS itself.
It also needs to be said that Vista actually includes a compatibility shim for 2.0.0.0 thru 2.0.0.2, to work around some of the problems Firefox has. Yes, Microsoft actually invested time and effort in making Firefox work mostly correctly on Vista.
Wiki, Wikipedia, Saddam Hussein, Sex, United States, Naruto, Wii, Gerald Ford, List of sex positions, World War II, Playstation 3, Sexual intercourse, Christmas, YouTube, Windows Vista, Adolf Hitler, Pornogrpahy, Deaths in 2007, Martin Luther King Jr., and List of Naruto episodes.
In February, Anna Nicole Smith and Valentine's Day and Windows Vista are now in the top 10, and Gerald Ford is nowhere to be seen in the top 100.
Of these articles, only Gerald Ford is a Featured Article, and of course, he died last month, which is the only reason his page was so popular. Wikipedia, Wii, and Windows Vista are the only listed Good Articles.
The articles that make it to Good or Featured status are the ones that have editors who are interested in pursuing those goals. That in itself is hard work, but the ongoing entropy due to vandalism and unskilled editors is a frustration that distracts those editors from forging ahead with new work.
That was as far as I wanted to go at this point. The stark reality about Vista is that driver support is minimal at best. Rather shocking considering XP had drivers for much more hardware. I'm really curious if anyone knows why driver support is so minimal at this time. Does the consumer version have more? If not, all of the people who bought Vista are in for an uncharacteristic surprise.
Is the lack of drivers a conspiracy to get people to upgrade hardware?
Why are the hardware vendors so far behind supplying drivers?
There are a lot of different answers for this. Let's start from the top:
Microsoft completely rewrote the entire audio stack in Vista. Top to bottom, boom, all gone. They had to do this... audio drivers were responsible for a sizable percentage of all total kernel panics in XP. The whole structure was rickety at best... third-party ASIO drivers had to be provided to get decent performance in audio authoring applications like Propellerhead's Reason, and it has also been quite common for desktop apps like Winamp to use DirectX to play audio instead of the regular sound API. Latency and reliability were two serious weak points with Windows audio.
The new audio driver infrastructure puts most of the driver code in userland instead of in the kernel, and some new memory mapping techniques have been introduced that allow the usermode audio driver to access the audio card's DMA buffers directly. This gets around the user->kernel data transition that used to be required for playing audio. Being in usermode also means that the OS can recover gracefully from an audio driver failure... it can restart the driver, report the failure to Microsoft (who then takes those reports and whaps the responsible hardware vendor over the head with it), and continue playing sound. There are other benefits to the new architecture, too, like being able to support per-application volume controls, and a plugin architecture for supporting different types of audio effects.
There was another problem -- before Vista, there was NO STANDARD for writing audio drivers. Microsoft couldn't provide an out-of-the-box class driver that could reliably play sound on a wide range of audio cards... Creative had the last de-facto standard with "Soundblaster 16", but even Creative has abandoned that in favour of their proprietary Audigy stuff. Now you might go, "but what about AC97?"... AC97 was poorly implemented most of the time, and there has never been a way for a single driver to run all those chips. A lot of custom software is required... if you've ever seen an audio UI in Windows that looked like it'd been beaten from birth, it was probably there to support AC97. Granted, some parts of the AC97 standard got better over time (like introducing jack detection support), but a lot of the implementations were still basically ass on a stick.
Intel introduced the Intel High Definition Audio standard a few years ago, which is a much better-defined system and is a lot more insistent on high-quality output. Most audio solutions created now (with the notable exception of Creative) support Intel HD Audio. Windows Vista comes with a class driver for it, which means that any audio device that is built on this standard will work without any third-party drivers. Microsoft is really pushing this, too... they've made it a requirement for OEMs to include audio solutions that don't require additional drivers in order to get the Windows Vista Capable logo.
This is GOOD. This means that we're no longer beholden to audio driver manufacturers to keep writing new drivers for their older stuff. Unfortunately, this is also why a lot of older audio chips don't work in Vista... in some cases, the companies just don't want to put the effort into it, and in other cases, the companies are GONE.
Microsoft begged and pleaded with manufacturers to get on board, so that their pre-IHD devices would be supported in Vista. Some did, some didn't. Some are still working on it. Some have
Okay, I think I'm probably more qualified than most people to comment on the state of Wikipedia's Microsoft articles, considering that I've personally started a couple dozen articles on Windows-related stuff, and I have more than 1,000 Microsoft-related articles on my watchlist. I work a bunch on Mac OS X articles, too... I don't really consider operating systems to be a worthy subject of religious advocacy; they make for a great hobby, sure, but that's about it. All I care about is making sure that the subjects are presented accurately and without bias in either direction.
Wikipedia articles are edited by people from Microsoft on a regular basis. Most of the time it's simple stuff, like fixing spelling mistakes, updating links, and putting some newly published information in about future releases. (This is one example of an MS employee edit to the Office Open XML article. Pretty harmless.) It's quite rare that someone at Microsoft adds in unabashed "pro-Microsoft" stuff, and when they do, I or other interested editors remove it entirely or tone it down. But, I have yet to see any kind of co-ordinated efforts to astroturf Microsoft Wikipedia articles... if anything, it's just individuals who are proud of their work and want to write about it... you can tell, it doesn't have that shiny PR veneer on it. I've had to remind a few Microsoft employees to stay within the encyclopedia's neutrality and verifiability policies, but it never turns out to be a problem; almost everyone who's new to editing Wikipedia needs to learn that.
Frankly, I see far more crap by juvenile pro-Apple zealots, like redirecting the Windows Vista article to Mac OS X and other such time-wasting noise. That's a reflection of the kind of uphill battle Wikipedia has to fight against vandalism.
Shit, after 7,000+ edits to Microsoft-related articles, maybe Microsoft should be offering to pay me to keep Wikipedia clean of anti-Microsoft crap, since I assuredly work harder at it than some dude with an O'Reilley blog. I wouldn't take their money for it though... or if I did, I'd make a public display of donating it all to the Wikimedia Foundation. They need the money more than I do.
If Microsoft wants to pay someone to write more into the OOXML articles, that's fine, I don't care -- but there's no damned way they're getting material inappropriate for Wikipedia past me & the other regulars. You can be sure of that.
You're going to be paying for HDCP whether you use Vista or not. Eventually (and probably not too long from now), every video card by every manufacturer will have HDCP capabilities built in, even if your operating system of choice doesn't use the technology. Vista doesn't enable HDCP unless the content you're playing specifically demands it, anyhow. No such content exists now, anyways... movie studios won't be selling movies with this stuff enabled for a few more years.
Mac OS X users better not get too smug about this, either, since Apple is going to have to incorporate the technology if they want HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs to play on their hardware.
Stop buying garbage, consumer-level hardware from the major OEMs if you don't want consumer-level garbage software shoved in your face.
Let's pick on Dell, since they're what I'm most familiar with in my professional dealings:
Part of the reason many of their machines, -especially- the Dell Inspiron laptops, are so cheap is because the cost of the machine is being heavily subsidised by 3rd-party product placements. They also outsource technical support for consumer-level hardware to second-rate call facilities in India that don't have the capability to escalate problems to technicians in the United States.
If you buy a Dell Precision laptop, you'll get the proper media and you won't be subject to piles of shovelware. Yes, it's somewhat more expensive, but you get treated much better. The build quality of the Precision line is miles better, to boot; it's more likely to last the rigours of four, five years of use.
Always remember: You get what you pay for.
Where things have changed in Vista, is if you have an account that has Parental Controls applied to it to limit the kinds of games that can be run. Vista knows the ESRB (& other ratings boards) ratings for quite a large number of games, and can block access to them if the parents don't want their kids to play them... but that's not the default setting. You have to go out of your way to set it up.
The real reason why people are switching from PS3 to Wii:
This commercial.
Now hang on a minute. It's one thing to talk positively about what Mac OS 8.5 was accomplishing back in 1998, but if you're going to talk about Windows, at least get your facts straight!
:-) The content indexer included with Vista and MSN Desktop Search are almost identical code-wise, and is merely an evolution of what's been around in Windows for many years. See Windows indexing service. Now we just gotta wait a little bit longer and see what Apple does to top Microsoft's offering in Vista.
First of all, nothing Apple has shipped up to now even comes close to what WinFS was trying to solve. It's not a search engine... it's a relational database store for arbitrary user data that presents content to the operating system as a series of "entities". Comparing WinFS to a content search indexer is missing the point. See WinFS. Frankly, it's a good thing that they waited, because they have piles of other things to fix with Windows before they introduce something this drastic.
Microsoft shippied the first version of their content indexing service in mid-1996, though it was really the Content Indexer component that was part of the Object File System aspect of Cairo. That was announced in 1991. It didn't ship as a standard component that would do system-wide indexing until 2000, but it has been there all this time. Microsoft did buy a company in July 2004 called Lookout to get their Outlook indexing capabilities, which was then rolled into MSN Desktop Search.
The problem, of course, was that the Indexing Service UI sucked horribly. Most Windows 2000 users haven't even seen it because they don't know it's there! Then again, most long-time Mac users will tell you that Sherlock has always sucked on OS X, and suffered from its own problems of not being sure if it was a program to search your local drive, or to search the Internet.
In short: Lame duck vs. lame duck.
Oh, and, MSN Desktop Search (the first non-crap search indexer from Microsoft) shipped before OS X 10.4 with Spotlight (the first non-crap search indexer from Apple), but that's not something a Mac user would say, right?
Should be interesting...
How many teenagers do you know that set up and run phishing sites by themselves? Sounds like these are kids taking the fall for other people. I don't know about phishing sites, but teenagers have often been involved in computer-crime cases.
For example, there's Sven Jaschan, who was 18 years old when he was arrested in conjunction with writing the NetSky and Sasser worms. There's also Ehud Tenenbaum, who was also 18 years at the time he was arrested for hacking into various Pentagon and Knesset computer systems. Chad Davis spent time in prison for hacking into the White House and U.S. Army web sites. He was 19. And of course there's Adrian Lamo, who was barely getting his 20s started when he hacked into the New York Times.
Conspiracy theories can be fun to bat around, but a lot of young hackers get into the "business" simply because it's fun, and it lets them flex their hacking muscles. Phishing sites are no different... sometimes people do it just to see what they can get away with.
And Microsoft can release any specs at any time so Linux could implement "interoperability" improvements.
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The fact that Microsoft does not do either should tell you all you need to know about the "interoperability" bullshit.
You got a +5 for this. Nice work!
The problem is, you're wrong.
Here's the real truth:
Microsoft recently put out a set of almost 40 specifications under a new thing they've got called the "Open Specification Promise":
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
Most of the standards revolve around XML-based web communications (SOAP, WSDL, WS-*), but there's also their Virtual Hard Disk format (VHD) that's used in their virtualization software, Sender ID related stuff (remember all the issues a couple years ago that this "standard" wouldn't fly because it wasn't free enough for open source use? no longer), and Office XML formats (2003 and 2007).
The people who cameup with this stuff can be seen in a Channel 9 interview explaining it in more detail:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=259
They're very explicit in stating that open-source developers working on Linux can implement these specifications that Microsoft devised without having to enter a license agreement, pay royalties, or worry about being sued for patent infringement or whatever. Jean Paoli is one of the people interviewed... he's one of the creators of XML, by the way, so you can probably imagine the scope of his personal interest in seeing XML-based standards being as widely adopted as possible. And if that's not enough to convince you, even Lawrencse Rosen (google him if you don't know the name) approves of Microsoft's OSP initiative.
Now, granted, these are not the keys to the Windows kingdom, but it's a step in the right direction, and Microsoft should be encouraged to get as many specs out into the Open as possible, as soon as possible.
This story is overflowing with FUD and misrepresentation. A routine fact-check will demonstrate this. Let's pull this apart:
According to Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president of the Taiwan-based company, the issue is simply that the basic home edition of Vista, Home Basic, which is available for preorder on Amazon.co.uk for 154.99 pounds ($293), is so basic that users will be forced to move to Vista Home Premium, at 189.99 pounds ($359).
First of all, they got the prices of Vista wrong: Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is 185 GBP; Vista Home Premium is 224 GBP.
Second, price-conversion. Everybody knows that you don't take the street price of a product in British pounds, run it through xe.com, and come out with the street price in USD. Microsoft's MSRP on Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is $199 USD, -not- $293 as given in the article. Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $239 USD. Note that the MSRP on XP Home Edition is $199 USD, the same as Vista Home Basic.
Third, Microsoft has never sold an edition of Windows with the Media Center included on the retail market, so in a way there isn't really any good point of comparison.... of -course- it's going to be more expensive than XP Home.
"The new (Vista) experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won't feel it at all," Wong told PC Pro magazine. "There's no (Aero) graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."
Yeah well, guess what? some people just don't want or need that stuff. Actually, I'd hazard a guess and say that the vast majority of users don't want or need Media Center functionality or a remote control. That's not what's worth harping on about. Home Premium does have a lot of neat things in it, especially for mobile users, media centers, tablet PC owners, etc., but it's useless for a lot of people who just use their computer to get stuff done.
Wong also said that the manufacturer's license for Vista Home Premium is 10 percent more expensive than for XP Home.
It's also got far more functionality (Media Center, new mobility features, XBox 360 connectivity, Tablet PC features) than XP Home Edition or Vista Home Basic Edition, the latter of which Acer is refusing to sell to its customers.
"We have to pay more but users are not going to pay more," Wong said. This would mean an increase in the cost to PC manufacturers of 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Wong, in a business where the profit margin is around 5 percent or less.
Quit your bitching, Mr. Wong. If the price of Windows is going up by 10% because you are choosing to force a higher edition on your customers, you pass that price increase on to users... it's not your job as a company to absorb price increases from Microsoft.
At the top of the Vista lineup is the Ultimate Edition, which can be preordered for 325 pounds ($614) and, again, is significantly more expensive than the XP operating system it replaces.
Ultimate Edition is covers a lot more ground than XP Professional. The thing comes with Media Center, twice as many games (good ones, too, like Chess and Majongg), backup software that doesn't suck, a bunch of extra software and add-ons analogous to the XP Plus! Pack, and even a friggin' UNIX stack to boot -- and that's not even going into
I know you meant that as a joke, but something very close actually exists! Have a look at Phalanger, the PHP Language Compiler for .NET Framework.
With the resource overhead I've seen in the beta version of Vista "hardcore gamers" would have to be retarded to make the switch. It'll only decrease the performance of your games, and all games for the next 3-4 years at least will keep running on XP.
Really? My Athlon XP 1800+ with 1GB of memory and a Radeon 9600XT is able to run the games I play just great with Vista RC2... I've even run Eve Online and Heroes of Might & Magic V at the same time with no problems. Granted, neither game was really smooth on XP given my old hardware. I also played through the entirety of Thief 3 on Beta 2 (it didn't crash even once, and performance and audio were solid), and Civilization 4 works as well as always (ie. not great; it really lags in modern eras, but that was the case in XP too).
The performance delta can't possibly be significant enough for most people to notice. I've heard people say 5-15%... I haven't noticed it. Actually, it reminds me of Windows 98 -> XP where people talked about how XP was so much slower.
The benefits of Vista's new audio and video stacks (being able to upgrade/downgrade drivers without a reboot, for example, as well as the OS's ability to restart a crashed driver without a blue-screen), are things I think gamers will appreciate a lot. Being able to control the volume of applications individually, no more bizarre "flickering" behaviour in full-screen DirectX applications when other applications display toast-style popup windows (Messenger, Outlook, notification balloons, etc.)....
Once ATI, nVidia, Microsoft, Creative, Turtle Beach, and others shake out the remaining major bugs (give it 3-6 months), Vista's will be a good platform to play games on. Better than XP, for sure.
I'm an a large site that's running XP SP1 on all of quite a few thousand machines and I'd just like to say that one week notice of termination of support is ridiculous.
p ort.mspx
You're right, one week is totally ridiculous and unnacceptable.
Of course, ehm... they announced this a long time ago -- January, to be precise.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean19
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/support/endofsup
I'm not really sure why you chose to quote the Windows NT 4 Resource Kit documentation as a basis for your opinion on the Windows' UNIX support. That documentation is going on 10 years old!
x components/
:-)
How about you look at something a lot more modern, like the "Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications":
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/R2/uni
That's what is shipped with Windows Server 2003 R2, and most of the same stuff is included with Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions. The POSIX support is quite a lot better... and the environment in general is good enough that they're able to support the entire GNU toolchain, Perl, curses, and a lot of other things. It even comes with vi. Yeah... Microsoft vi, wrap your head around that one.
One of my degrees is in comp sci. I've taken a GUI design theory classes. It took me > 3 minutes to figure out how to add something to the new start menu (right click, create shortcut isn't there... explore (all) user(s) and I don't have permission to write. I can't drag a shortcut in... hmmm)
I really want to make a snarky comment about how comp-sci majors tend to know jack shit about user interface design, while also thinking that they know *everything* about computers because they have a comp sci degree.... but, ehhh, I'll digress. But I will say this: If you don't understand how to use Vista, RTFM. The help system in Vista works pretty well, just type in a question and it'll give you some answers.
On to your nits:
Battery:
Have you checked to see what power plan the computer is running on? There are three plans that ship with Vista by default: High performance, Power saver, and Balanced. Click the battery icon to see which one you've chosen, or to change it. Personally I've found that my laptop runs -significantly- cooler on Balanced and Power saver than it does on High performance. This is because Windows will throttle the CPU, reduce power to the wireless network card, prevent the content indexer from running, and so on. You can make your own plans, too.
Aero (with transparency disabled) doesn't use significantly more battery power than having it turned off. It offloads some work to the GPU, yes, but it's work that would otherwise be done by the CPU. You should get a much better understanding of what the Desktop Window Manager does (and doesn't do) before committing yourself to a claim along the lines of "Aero halves battery power".
Networking:
Vista has the notion of "Public" networks and "Private" networks. Private networks are generally trustworthy, and public ones aren't. When you configure a new connection (wireless, VPN, dial-up, or wired... ad-hoc or infrastructured... ipv4 or ipv6... doesn't matter), it gives you the opportunity to choose between two types of private networks (Home and Work), and a Public network. There are two kinds of private networks because a great many people have laptops that they shuttle between work and home.
That's one of the major differences in networking between XP and Vista: Vista understands the concept of "Locations", and it will automatically reconfigure your firewall / sharing / discovery settings to suit the network you're on. Once it's been configured, you don't have to do anything other than connect to the network. You can make as many locations as you like, too... multiple workplaces, multiple wireless networks, etc.
This totally blows away anything XP has, and is a solid step up from what OS X Tiger offers (and believe me, I've done a lot of commuting with Panther & Tiger over the last few years, so I know what's what).
Start menu:
If you want to add a shortcut to the start menu, right-click on it and choose "Pin to start menu". Or, drag the icon onto the start button. Or, right-click the start button, choose "Open", and you can work with it as an Explorer folder. None of this has changed from Windows XP.
The "All users" is only writable by administrators, yes -- but that's logical because you don't want one standard user being able to change what's on the Start menu of other standard users, right? If you want to share files between users, use the Public folder and its many children.
Too bad such a beast will never exist...
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Really? I guess you haven't heard about Windows Server Longhorn's "Server Core" installation mode, then, which is essentially a command-line driven version of Windows. No GUI shell, no applications, no server services, nothing. They've been busy with untangling the dependency hell of Windows so that it can be a lot more modular. That work won't be done for Server Longhorn, but that's their long-term goal.
One of the developers working on Server Core has a blog, more details are there:
http://blogs.technet.com/server_core/default.aspx
or you can watch a Channel 9 video on it here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=196
It's strange how Radiohead have chosen to do this, considering they were one of the first major bands to offer MP3 downloads to the public. Kid A was released for free online before in stores, and they found it advantageous. This was at the same time as their refusal to release singles or advertise the album in order to sell it purely on its merits.
Uhhh, no, you've got that completely wrong. Kid A was *leaked* onto the Internet in its entirety a few months before the album's release, and bootlegs of performances from the band's summer 2000 tour in Europe were being traded about on Napster. Radiohead benefitted from something they really didn't have much control over, and the result was that Kid A opened on the US and UK charts at #1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_A
MS products are easy to use but I wouldn't be to happy for them to be used for my apps as they aren't secure or stable enough, common requirements for enterprise products.
... 32 advisories since January 2003, including multiple remote access vulnerabilities. most recently, a system access vulnerability was found with mod_rewrite. 2 vulns still unpatched.
... 3 advisories since April 2003, with one remote access vulnerability that was discovered last month, and actually requires an attacker to have a valid logon to the system, and ASP needs to be enabled (it isn't by default). none unpatched.
You say that, but have you looked at the stats? IIS 6.0 is has had -far- fewer vulnerabilities in its lifetime than Apache 2.0.
Apache 2.0: http://secunia.com/product/73/
IIS 6.0: http://secunia.com/product/1438/
So really, if you're choosing between Apache and IIS on the basis of security, it's hard to argue in favour of Apache these days. IIS 4 and 5 were rightly scoffed at for poor security (and it didn't help that Windows 2000 had IIS enabled by default), but that's long since changed, and even if you don't ever plan on using Microsoft products, they should at least be credited for making IIS a lot more secure.
Just so you know, the Malicious Software Removal Tool doesn't actually install anything on your machine. All it does is look around for some common types of malware, remove them if they're present, and then exit and leave no trace of itself.
More information here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890830
Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why Windows Installer takes a lot longer than NSIS:
1) It creates a System Restore point before every install. That way, if something goes horribly wrong (e.g. it changes some registry setting that prevents booting), you can roll back your Windows install to a prior restore point using safe mode.
2) During an install operation, it creates records of everything it does, so if the installer crashes, or there is a power failure, or you lose a connection to the source files or destination directory, or who knows what else, Windows can recover from it gracefully.
Vista's disk partition utility in Setup (as well as in the OS itself) also lets you resize existing partitions downwards. That's a pretty handy new feature.
FAT32 is unsupported on a Vista boot partition because they're really pushing the security angle, now, and they also use new NTFS 6 features like symbolic links in the Windows directory structure... formatting drives in FAT32 is still possible, of course.