There are actually changes in Windows 7 that help with this. WiFi virtualization was added to the Windows 7 kernel allowing you to run two WiFi connections from the same hardware adapter. So you could put a PC in range of a normal access point and then share the connection by creating an access point on the second virtual adapater. With previous versions of Windows, you would need two hardware adapters, or you would be limited to sharing a LAN connection.
In order to "look in the same place", you need to have code that does the looking. The NX bit will prevent arbitrary code from executing on the stack. One way to get around NX is to overrun a buffer and replace the return address of the stack frame with a known function address that does what you want. In order for this to work, you need to know the address in advance of the attack. ASLR makes it difficult to predict this address.
To get a similar deal, a competitor would need to either be sued (so the courts could authorize a deal) or Congress would need to grant an exception to copyright. You can't create a contract with "All publishers" unless you actually get an agreement with all publishers. The class action lawsuit gets around this by allowing Google to settle with all members of the class at once (even if those class members are not aware of the litigation). What's worse is that all the publishers who have lawyers working on the settlement are actually planning to opt-out (they have better deals already in place). So this settlement will cover everybody except the publishers who brought the suit in the first place.
This isn't about IT, which is already remotely administered in datacenters around the world. Product groups generally have their own labs containing servers for running builds, tests, etc. These are also remotely administered, including things like installing OS builds. The new datacenter is a way to consolidate these small labs.
I can't speak for the OO.o prototype, but in Office 2007 you can actually minimize the ribbon: either double click on one of the tabs, or right click and select "Minimize the ribbon". After that you actually get much more space for the document than you did with previous versions of Office (unless you got rid of every toolbar, but then it would be much less usable). Once you've done this, the ribbon will drop down only when you select one of the tabs and then go away after you select an option or interact with the document. There are a couple screenshots here: http://www.lytebyte.com/2008/03/09/how-to-minimize-and-maximize-the-office-ribbon/
If you've turned off IE, you won't be able to run iexplore.exe (the executable is removed from the Program Files directory). It's just like how you can't run telnet or IIS by default, until you turn on those features.
Since that post was written, they've decided to move the default browser page out of the express settings and require users to make a choice (unless IE is already their default browser). You'll notice that the user really does have to make a choice as no option is selected by default (the 'Next' button is disabled until they choose 'Yes' or 'No'). Here's the IE blog post with screenshots of the new behavior, since Slashdot didn't link to it directly: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/07/16/changes-to-ie8-s-first-run.aspx
Morro (and OneCare) are for unmanaged computers (home users, perhaps small companies). Forefront Client Security is the anti-malware software intended for business use. Both will use the same anti-malware engine, but FCS has all of the manageability and reporting that you would expect in an enterprise.
I don't really see Morro as an attempt to compete in the home anti-virus market (in other words, Morro is not intended to take sales away from any of the other vendors). The real goal is to try to have anti-virus on all PCs worldwide. There are a number of large markets outside the US where few PCs have anti-virus software. And it wouldn't surprise me if the US market has a fair number of PCs where the trial/subscription for whatever the OEM installed has expired.
The Win7 E skus don't have iexplore.exe anywhere on them. There isn't an entry in the control panel to re-enable IE. You will have to install an additional package that contains iexplore.exe if you want IE (OEMs may choose to install this package). Regular Win7 skus allow you to enable or disable IE without downloading anything. However, these skus will not be sold in Europe.
I don't have a Vista box handy right now, but I know the Win7 help text is quite extensive compared to older versions of Windows. Typing FTP in Windows Help provides instructions on how to use Windows Explorer to access ftp sites. Though it's not much more complicated than accessing any other files, you just type the address in the address bar (and to get you started they give ftp.microsoft.com as an example).
I'm a dev on the AD RMS team and I can't imagine this being from our marketing team. RMS is designed to solve two main problems: unauthorized access and accidental leakage. The document is encrypted no matter where it goes (laptop, USB key, bittorrent, etc.). Only authorized users will be able to open the doc in the first place. Once an authorized user has opened a document, they are provided with a certain set of rights (the ability to forward, edit, print, etc.). These are meant to provide protection against accidental leakage. In other words, a user will have to actively circumvent RMS in order to leak the document (use a digital camera, re-type the document, hack Office/RMS/Windows, etc.). An example where this is important is in a long email thread. The thread may have started as a confidential discussion about two vendors. Later in the discussion, a question comes up involving one of the vendors. A careless user might forward the thread to that vendor, forgetting about the confidential discussion that started the email. If the user doesn't have the forward right, RMS would have blocked this action. Furthermore, the access control for the thread may also prevent the vendor from reading the mail ("Contoso Confidential - FTE Only" template).
An authorized malicious user will be able to circumvent RMS (at the very least by memorizing the document and recreating it later). In practice, companies find RMS to be valuable, with full knowledge of its limitations and design goals.
If you watched the keynote demo, they were showing two users collaborating. One was using the normal desktop version of Word. The other was using the web version of Word. So the web versions are meant for situations where you don't have Office installed (just like OWA gives you access to your Exchange account when you don't have Outlook). This also means that two users using the desktop version of Word will be able to collaborate in real-time.
According to the press release, there will be an ad-funded version for consumers, so you don't need to buy Office to get access to these: "We will deliver Office Web applications to consumers through Office Live, which is a consumer service with both ad-funded and subscription offerings."
I don't have a Win2k machine to test this on, but according to the Silverlight site, Win2k supports Silverlight 2.0 with IE 6 (no Firefox support, and IE 7 isn't supported on Win2k). Silverlight 1.0 was not supported on Win2k, so that might be what you're referring to (the NBC site was using 2.0).
I imagine that PowerPC is unsupported because the Silverlight team didn't want to invest in creating the just-in-time.Net compiler for PowerPC. And while PowerPC Macs may well have a majority, they are a declining percentage of the installed base. In other words, it would have been a large investment to support a relatively small and shrinking market.
I think you're referring to the Media Center content from TVTonic. This article is about the Silverlight streaming video on nbcolympics.com, which is viewable on any OS that Silverlight 2 is supported on (Win2k+, Mac OS 10.4.8+, and eventually Linux via Moonlight).
In November & December 2006, we deferred $1.67 billion in revenue for Windows Vista and Office 2007 into the 3rd quarter. This makes it hard to compare 2nd & 3rd quarters year over year, unless you look at it with the revenue moved back to the 2nd quarter. Once you take this into account, the results for this quarter were roughly what you would expect.
Sorry about that, I should have said IE (and it's plugins) have read-only access to files. You would find that a plugin will get access denied errors if it tries to modify or add any new files. This means that a bug in a plug-in, such as the one found in Adobe Flash at this contest, can't be used to store a malicious program on your system and trick you into running it as admin (say by using the icon and name of a file that you typically run as Admin, such as regedit and placing a shortcut to it in your Start Menu).
In other words a security vulnerability in IE or a plugin will result in read-only access to files that the user has access to. For most programs, a security vulnerability results in full access to all files that the user has access to (if the user can write to it, the attacker can write to it). Obviously the security vulnerability is a problem in either case, but in many situations an attacker can do far more damage by modifying files (such as the example above for gaining admin access at a later point in time).
Actually, IE on Vista runs with fewer permissions then a normal User account by default. It runs as a low-integrity process. This means that it loses access to most of the user's files (it has access to things like the temp directory for storing cookies, cache, etc.). See MSDN for details.
It's hard enough trying to explain to customers why they shouldn't waste their money on 4GB of memory and a 1GB video card only to lose a quarter of it in real life Now imagine you are running the tech support line for MS or one of the OEMs. As memory becomes cheaper and more people start upgrading their machines, more and more people will run into this situation. When these customers call in to complain about their missing memory, there is no answer from tech support that is going to be satisfactory. Now you have to spend money on lots of support calls, all of which lead to unhappy customers.
The fix is to report the physical memory installed, not the amount the OS is using. To be fair though, the dialog box that changed in SP1 already shows the specs for the hardware installed, not what is in use. On my box right now I have the power management settings to cap the CPU at 50% of its maximum frequency. Yet the "Control Panel\System and Maintenance\System" screen shows the maximum frequency of the CPU, even though the OS isn't using it. My only machine with 4GB of RAM is running 64-bit Vista, so I can't test this, but I imagine Task Manger and/or Resource Monitor will continue to show the available RAM, not the installed RAM.
As to the other possible fix (enabling PAE if it would be necessary to use all installed RAM), you run into an entirely different support issue. Customers would find that their OS becomes less stable when they install more than 3GB or so of RAM. Plenty of drivers out there aren't tested with PAE enabled, so they break when it is enabled.
On newer hardware you might try running a 64-bit OS. I've been running 64-bit Windows Server 2008 and 64-bit Vista for a while with no issues at all. But I tend to keep my machines pretty clean, so I haven't had the typical consumer experience of downloading huge numbers of applications from random sites across the web.
No it's not open source, but any company with 1500+ SA seats of Windows gets access to the source at no additional cost for debugging and security/privacy audit purposes. State and local governments appear to have access provided that they are in certain geographical areas (it's not entirely clear, but it looks like the 1500+ seat requirement doesn't apply). National governments also get zero-cost read-only access to the source code for Windows and Office.
Apple counts on customers buying multiple songs during the same day. They will group all of the tracks together over the course of a day or so and send one transaction to the credit card company. Sure, there's nothing stopping you from buying one track and waiting for the transaction to happen before buying another.
I imagine with the Xbox marketplace people tend to make small purchases here and there, not a bunch of little purchases in the same day. So you prepay and the credit card transaction happens just once.
Finally, all of the complaints seem to be very US-centric. With the point system, MS can post a piece of content globally and list the price as 400 MS Points. In the US, I know this is $5. Somebody in another country knows how much points cost in their country. So they don't need to know today's exchange rate, content stays a fixed price, and MS doesn't need to come up with dozens of local prices for each and every piece of content. Right now the only content that isn't a global point value is the video marketplace, since the licensing fees vary by country.
I'm pretty sure Media Center Extender is a separate application on the Xbox 360, delivered by a separate team. So the Xbox team has added the DivX support to the Xbox media player, but hasn't received an updated MCE with DivX support. My guess is that MCE was designed to be used on dedicated hardware, so they didn't plan for codecs to be installed outside of their app.
Personally, I wish it hadn't been the Acer Ferrari laptops. I wasn't at Microsoft at the time, but if I had to guess, I think MSFT wanted two things: reviewers would see Vista on new hardware, and reviewers would see the mobile experience. Everyone was aware that Vista wasn't really intended for the past five years' worth of hardware; it was designed for the next 5+ years. And there were significant improvements to the out-of-box experience on laptop hardware. With previous versions of Windows you absolutely had to have your manufacturers software. With Vista you can do pretty well without it.
Had we relied on bloggers to just install Vista on whatever machine they had handy, they'd probably install it on some old throw-away machine. This wouldn't be the target hardware for Vista, so the reviews would be based on an experience that is significantly different than the target consumer experience. But the Acer Ferrari was probably too flashy (to be fair though, we have a large number of those laptops in use on campus, so maybe it was just that we sent out the same models that we use here).
"Blog Reader"? Of course Microsoft employees read blogs and other tech sites. It's not like we disappear off the web once we're hired (I'm a dev in Windows Server). Sure, some people do it as part of their job: gathering customer feedback, analyzing product launch coverage, watching for security issues or other bugs, etc.
"Commenter"? Honestly, MSFT employees would be lost in the noise. Teams at Microsoft tend to be incredibly small compared to the number of people using the product or its competitors. Take Windows, for example. The number of people that are fans of Windows (yes, they exist!) and the number of people that hate Windows both far out number the number of people that actually work on Windows at MSFT. So if you're suspecting astroturfing, chances are you're just seeing a legitimate fan/supporter of the product. That said, many of us consider it part of our jobs to post online where appropriate. If I see somebody with a question on a product I work on or am familiar with, I'll answer it or point them toward somebody who can.
The OEMs can't complete by providing, say Firefox and advertising that their bundle is more secure than their competitors. Dell could chose firefox and HP could chose opera or whatever. They can't because MS is still stronarming them.
Sure they can bundle Firefox or Opera. Take a look at the Windows Principles. These principles are the same ones that mean Dell can ship Linux on PCs without affecting their business with Microsoft (except to the extent that pricing is based on volume of Windows licenses shipped). In addition, the Windows Principles are not tied to particular court rulings. For example, protocol documentation for interoperability was already part of the design process for future versions of Windows, regardless of the recent EU ruling.
Slashdot Mirror
There are actually changes in Windows 7 that help with this. WiFi virtualization was added to the Windows 7 kernel allowing you to run two WiFi connections from the same hardware adapter. So you could put a PC in range of a normal access point and then share the connection by creating an access point on the second virtual adapater. With previous versions of Windows, you would need two hardware adapters, or you would be limited to sharing a LAN connection.
In order to "look in the same place", you need to have code that does the looking. The NX bit will prevent arbitrary code from executing on the stack. One way to get around NX is to overrun a buffer and replace the return address of the stack frame with a known function address that does what you want. In order for this to work, you need to know the address in advance of the attack. ASLR makes it difficult to predict this address.
To get a similar deal, a competitor would need to either be sued (so the courts could authorize a deal) or Congress would need to grant an exception to copyright. You can't create a contract with "All publishers" unless you actually get an agreement with all publishers. The class action lawsuit gets around this by allowing Google to settle with all members of the class at once (even if those class members are not aware of the litigation). What's worse is that all the publishers who have lawyers working on the settlement are actually planning to opt-out (they have better deals already in place). So this settlement will cover everybody except the publishers who brought the suit in the first place.
This isn't about IT, which is already remotely administered in datacenters around the world. Product groups generally have their own labs containing servers for running builds, tests, etc. These are also remotely administered, including things like installing OS builds. The new datacenter is a way to consolidate these small labs.
I can't speak for the OO.o prototype, but in Office 2007 you can actually minimize the ribbon: either double click on one of the tabs, or right click and select "Minimize the ribbon". After that you actually get much more space for the document than you did with previous versions of Office (unless you got rid of every toolbar, but then it would be much less usable). Once you've done this, the ribbon will drop down only when you select one of the tabs and then go away after you select an option or interact with the document. There are a couple screenshots here: http://www.lytebyte.com/2008/03/09/how-to-minimize-and-maximize-the-office-ribbon/
If you've turned off IE, you won't be able to run iexplore.exe (the executable is removed from the Program Files directory). It's just like how you can't run telnet or IIS by default, until you turn on those features.
Under the "Use Express Settings" header it listed everything that would be set. One of the items was "Default Browser: Internet Explorer" (note that it only had this text if IE wasn't already the default). The IE blog has screenshots of this behavior: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/05/01/ie8-installation-the-user-is-in-control.aspx
Since that post was written, they've decided to move the default browser page out of the express settings and require users to make a choice (unless IE is already their default browser). You'll notice that the user really does have to make a choice as no option is selected by default (the 'Next' button is disabled until they choose 'Yes' or 'No'). Here's the IE blog post with screenshots of the new behavior, since Slashdot didn't link to it directly: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/07/16/changes-to-ie8-s-first-run.aspx
Morro (and OneCare) are for unmanaged computers (home users, perhaps small companies). Forefront Client Security is the anti-malware software intended for business use. Both will use the same anti-malware engine, but FCS has all of the manageability and reporting that you would expect in an enterprise.
I don't really see Morro as an attempt to compete in the home anti-virus market (in other words, Morro is not intended to take sales away from any of the other vendors). The real goal is to try to have anti-virus on all PCs worldwide. There are a number of large markets outside the US where few PCs have anti-virus software. And it wouldn't surprise me if the US market has a fair number of PCs where the trial/subscription for whatever the OEM installed has expired.
The Win7 E skus don't have iexplore.exe anywhere on them. There isn't an entry in the control panel to re-enable IE. You will have to install an additional package that contains iexplore.exe if you want IE (OEMs may choose to install this package). Regular Win7 skus allow you to enable or disable IE without downloading anything. However, these skus will not be sold in Europe.
I don't have a Vista box handy right now, but I know the Win7 help text is quite extensive compared to older versions of Windows. Typing FTP in Windows Help provides instructions on how to use Windows Explorer to access ftp sites. Though it's not much more complicated than accessing any other files, you just type the address in the address bar (and to get you started they give ftp.microsoft.com as an example).
If you want the terms of use for Microsoft software, here they are: http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx.
I'm a dev on the AD RMS team and I can't imagine this being from our marketing team. RMS is designed to solve two main problems: unauthorized access and accidental leakage. The document is encrypted no matter where it goes (laptop, USB key, bittorrent, etc.). Only authorized users will be able to open the doc in the first place. Once an authorized user has opened a document, they are provided with a certain set of rights (the ability to forward, edit, print, etc.). These are meant to provide protection against accidental leakage. In other words, a user will have to actively circumvent RMS in order to leak the document (use a digital camera, re-type the document, hack Office/RMS/Windows, etc.). An example where this is important is in a long email thread. The thread may have started as a confidential discussion about two vendors. Later in the discussion, a question comes up involving one of the vendors. A careless user might forward the thread to that vendor, forgetting about the confidential discussion that started the email. If the user doesn't have the forward right, RMS would have blocked this action. Furthermore, the access control for the thread may also prevent the vendor from reading the mail ("Contoso Confidential - FTE Only" template).
An authorized malicious user will be able to circumvent RMS (at the very least by memorizing the document and recreating it later). In practice, companies find RMS to be valuable, with full knowledge of its limitations and design goals.
If you watched the keynote demo, they were showing two users collaborating. One was using the normal desktop version of Word. The other was using the web version of Word. So the web versions are meant for situations where you don't have Office installed (just like OWA gives you access to your Exchange account when you don't have Outlook). This also means that two users using the desktop version of Word will be able to collaborate in real-time.
According to the press release, there will be an ad-funded version for consumers, so you don't need to buy Office to get access to these: "We will deliver Office Web applications to consumers through Office Live, which is a consumer service with both ad-funded and subscription offerings."
I don't have a Win2k machine to test this on, but according to the Silverlight site, Win2k supports Silverlight 2.0 with IE 6 (no Firefox support, and IE 7 isn't supported on Win2k). Silverlight 1.0 was not supported on Win2k, so that might be what you're referring to (the NBC site was using 2.0).
I imagine that PowerPC is unsupported because the Silverlight team didn't want to invest in creating the just-in-time .Net compiler for PowerPC. And while PowerPC Macs may well have a majority, they are a declining percentage of the installed base. In other words, it would have been a large investment to support a relatively small and shrinking market.
I think you're referring to the Media Center content from TVTonic. This article is about the Silverlight streaming video on nbcolympics.com, which is viewable on any OS that Silverlight 2 is supported on (Win2k+, Mac OS 10.4.8+, and eventually Linux via Moonlight).
In November & December 2006, we deferred $1.67 billion in revenue for Windows Vista and Office 2007 into the 3rd quarter. This makes it hard to compare 2nd & 3rd quarters year over year, unless you look at it with the revenue moved back to the 2nd quarter. Once you take this into account, the results for this quarter were roughly what you would expect.
Sorry about that, I should have said IE (and it's plugins) have read-only access to files. You would find that a plugin will get access denied errors if it tries to modify or add any new files. This means that a bug in a plug-in, such as the one found in Adobe Flash at this contest, can't be used to store a malicious program on your system and trick you into running it as admin (say by using the icon and name of a file that you typically run as Admin, such as regedit and placing a shortcut to it in your Start Menu).
In other words a security vulnerability in IE or a plugin will result in read-only access to files that the user has access to. For most programs, a security vulnerability results in full access to all files that the user has access to (if the user can write to it, the attacker can write to it). Obviously the security vulnerability is a problem in either case, but in many situations an attacker can do far more damage by modifying files (such as the example above for gaining admin access at a later point in time).
Actually, IE on Vista runs with fewer permissions then a normal User account by default. It runs as a low-integrity process. This means that it loses access to most of the user's files (it has access to things like the temp directory for storing cookies, cache, etc.). See MSDN for details.
The fix is to report the physical memory installed, not the amount the OS is using. To be fair though, the dialog box that changed in SP1 already shows the specs for the hardware installed, not what is in use. On my box right now I have the power management settings to cap the CPU at 50% of its maximum frequency. Yet the "Control Panel\System and Maintenance\System" screen shows the maximum frequency of the CPU, even though the OS isn't using it. My only machine with 4GB of RAM is running 64-bit Vista, so I can't test this, but I imagine Task Manger and/or Resource Monitor will continue to show the available RAM, not the installed RAM.
As to the other possible fix (enabling PAE if it would be necessary to use all installed RAM), you run into an entirely different support issue. Customers would find that their OS becomes less stable when they install more than 3GB or so of RAM. Plenty of drivers out there aren't tested with PAE enabled, so they break when it is enabled.
On newer hardware you might try running a 64-bit OS. I've been running 64-bit Windows Server 2008 and 64-bit Vista for a while with no issues at all. But I tend to keep my machines pretty clean, so I haven't had the typical consumer experience of downloading huge numbers of applications from random sites across the web.
No it's not open source, but any company with 1500+ SA seats of Windows gets access to the source at no additional cost for debugging and security/privacy audit purposes. State and local governments appear to have access provided that they are in certain geographical areas (it's not entirely clear, but it looks like the 1500+ seat requirement doesn't apply). National governments also get zero-cost read-only access to the source code for Windows and Office.
Apple counts on customers buying multiple songs during the same day. They will group all of the tracks together over the course of a day or so and send one transaction to the credit card company. Sure, there's nothing stopping you from buying one track and waiting for the transaction to happen before buying another.
I imagine with the Xbox marketplace people tend to make small purchases here and there, not a bunch of little purchases in the same day. So you prepay and the credit card transaction happens just once.
Finally, all of the complaints seem to be very US-centric. With the point system, MS can post a piece of content globally and list the price as 400 MS Points. In the US, I know this is $5. Somebody in another country knows how much points cost in their country. So they don't need to know today's exchange rate, content stays a fixed price, and MS doesn't need to come up with dozens of local prices for each and every piece of content. Right now the only content that isn't a global point value is the video marketplace, since the licensing fees vary by country.
I'm pretty sure Media Center Extender is a separate application on the Xbox 360, delivered by a separate team. So the Xbox team has added the DivX support to the Xbox media player, but hasn't received an updated MCE with DivX support. My guess is that MCE was designed to be used on dedicated hardware, so they didn't plan for codecs to be installed outside of their app.
Personally, I wish it hadn't been the Acer Ferrari laptops. I wasn't at Microsoft at the time, but if I had to guess, I think MSFT wanted two things: reviewers would see Vista on new hardware, and reviewers would see the mobile experience. Everyone was aware that Vista wasn't really intended for the past five years' worth of hardware; it was designed for the next 5+ years. And there were significant improvements to the out-of-box experience on laptop hardware. With previous versions of Windows you absolutely had to have your manufacturers software. With Vista you can do pretty well without it.
Had we relied on bloggers to just install Vista on whatever machine they had handy, they'd probably install it on some old throw-away machine. This wouldn't be the target hardware for Vista, so the reviews would be based on an experience that is significantly different than the target consumer experience. But the Acer Ferrari was probably too flashy (to be fair though, we have a large number of those laptops in use on campus, so maybe it was just that we sent out the same models that we use here).
"Blog Reader"? Of course Microsoft employees read blogs and other tech sites. It's not like we disappear off the web once we're hired (I'm a dev in Windows Server). Sure, some people do it as part of their job: gathering customer feedback, analyzing product launch coverage, watching for security issues or other bugs, etc.
"Commenter"? Honestly, MSFT employees would be lost in the noise. Teams at Microsoft tend to be incredibly small compared to the number of people using the product or its competitors. Take Windows, for example. The number of people that are fans of Windows (yes, they exist!) and the number of people that hate Windows both far out number the number of people that actually work on Windows at MSFT. So if you're suspecting astroturfing, chances are you're just seeing a legitimate fan/supporter of the product. That said, many of us consider it part of our jobs to post online where appropriate. If I see somebody with a question on a product I work on or am familiar with, I'll answer it or point them toward somebody who can.
The OEMs can't complete by providing, say Firefox and advertising that their bundle is more secure than their competitors. Dell could chose firefox and HP could chose opera or whatever. They can't because MS is still stronarming them.
Sure they can bundle Firefox or Opera. Take a look at the Windows Principles. These principles are the same ones that mean Dell can ship Linux on PCs without affecting their business with Microsoft (except to the extent that pricing is based on volume of Windows licenses shipped). In addition, the Windows Principles are not tied to particular court rulings. For example, protocol documentation for interoperability was already part of the design process for future versions of Windows, regardless of the recent EU ruling.