Vista Ultimate plays DVDs out of the box. Other editions may as well (quite possibly Home Premium), but I have not tried them yet. For anything that MS has to pay a license fee, I imagine they work out how many users are going to actually use the feature. DVD playback is much more common now (esp on laptops) than it was when XP shipped, so it now comes with the OS.
I've been using Office 2007 almost exclusively for the last six months. Every now and then I do something in Word 2003 and it is a painful transition. There are features that I started using in Word 2007 that are in older versions, but I spend five minutes trying to find each one. Most users don't have a clue about the things Word 2003 is capable of, because they are hidden in obscure menu options and dialog boxes.
The transition from 2003 to 2007 is probably an initial five minutes to look around the ribbon and see what's on each of them. In my experience, you find the vast majority of features you've ever used pretty quickly. Then you start seeing other features that you might start using (whereas you never saw them in 2003, so you never thought to start using them).
The summary completley mixes up the resolutions involved. The problem occurs when a game supports 720p but not 1080i and the TV supports 480i/480p/1080i (but not 720p) as many older HDTVs do. In this situation, the PS3 doesn't scale the game's 720p to 1080i, but rather forces the game to output 480p. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, uses a chip in the hardware to scale the 720p from the game to 1080i for the TV. Any TV that supports 720p won't have this problem. Neither will games that can output 1080i.
The first thing the Zune installer does is check to see if there is updated Zune software available. It does this before it does the OS check, so the CD installer will work as soon as Vista-compatible software is released.
From what I read they will be releasing a beta version of the Zune software that is compatible with Vista RTM sometime relatively soon (hopefully by the Nov 30 business release). The non-beta version will be available by the time Vista is released to consumers (Jan 30)
Is there any evidence that Microsoft's security products have a higher degree of access to Windows? AFAIK any Microsoft product outside of Windows is forbidden from using undocumented APIs. From what I've ready even the IE and WMP teams follow this (despite technically being part of Windows).
The Xbox 360 lets you set the MAC address to be whatever you want. This was quite useful when I was staying at a hotel that required you to login with a web browser before using your network connection. I logged in with my laptop and then used my laptop's MAC address on the 360.
Windows Vista has a new app in the Control Panel called "Problem Reports and Solutions". This keeps track of all problem reports that have been submitted and what the response is from Microsoft. If there is a fix from MS, it will tell you (right now this tends to be a message saying the issue is fixed in pre-RTM builds). If it's a third-party application, you might get a message like "An analyst at Microsoft has investigated this problem and determined that an unkown error occurred in Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader. This software was created by Adobe Systems Incorporated.", along with a link to the appropriate product support page on Adobe's website.
By gathering these in one place for a user to keep track of, I imagine Microsoft will be encouraged to make better use of the solution reporting aspects of the system.
If I had to guess, the protected mode thing is a result of complaints about UAC showing up too much. Since it basically protects everything that needed to be protected, the only real way to reduce the prompts is to have applications not give up permissions. Protected Mode is basically a way to install and run certain add-ons without needing to be an admin. So once you run IE as an admin you aren't being protected anymore.
If you're running Vista you can verify this by right clicking IE and choosing Run as Administrator. You'll notice that it says Protected Mode: Off. Closing IE and starting it as usual will have Protected Mode: On.
The thing to remember is that everytime you click allow on a UAC prompt, you are giving the process admin privileges. Anything it does from there is the same as if it had told you to run it as root. This tends to be more obvious if you are doing what I do: always use a standard user account, not an administrator. UAC prompts will then require a password for an administrator account. The user can't simply click through. I've never run previous versions of Windows like this, but I haven't had any problems at all using Vista this way (in part because admin accounts have the same behavior, they just don't require you to type a password).
The point was that they would have sold out in Japan at the higher price anyway. So cutting the price results in a loss with no real benefit. If losing more money on the consoles resulted in more units being sold then they may make up the difference in extra game sales (difference between the two sale prices, not the discount from manufacturing cost).
Windows Vista RC1 lets you create XPS in any application, using a printer that saves to XPS. So Office 2007 will need the plug-in to add it to the Save menu, but you can use the printer to work around this. Obviously this doesn't apply to Windows XP/2k/2k3, unless Microsoft releases an update to add this printer.
Why does everyone assume it will be sold at a loss? It's based on Toshiba's Gigabeat player, which you can get online for $249. I'll go out on a limb and say that Toshiba has very little reason to be selling an MP3 player at a loss, so the actual cost must be lower than that. Of course, the store selling them takes a chunk out too.
There's no evidence supporting this story about Zune not being compatible with PlaysForSure. There's a suggestion that the Zune software (ie PC component) may not be able to import protected WMA files (but what does import mean in that context? and do you need the Zune PC software to transfer files in the first place?). Secondly, there's the fact that Zune is not developed by the same division as PlaysForSure. This argument is like saying Windows won't run Office because they are developed by independent divisions (I imagine PlaysForSure is associated with Windows Media Player, which is in the Windows division, whereas Zune is in Home and Entertainment - ie Xbox).
There is nothing fundamentally insecure about DRM except for the fact that it needs to be decrypted on the client. So a tool like this is taking advantage of the insecure aspect of DRM by waiting until the client decrypts the audio. Cracking the encryption algorithm just shows that there is a weakness in the algorithm (or in the protection of the keys, as seen in the WMA case).
The solution to stopping pure digital copies (ie not digitial -> analog -> digital) is to do all of the DRM and audio/video decoding in hardware (your private key is generated and stored in the sound card and can't be retrieved). Portable devices can use schemes like this, but computers won't unless somebody decides to break backward compatibility.
It appears that Microsoft agrees hiding unused menu items was a poor way of solving the UI problem. If you haven't seen Office 2007 yet, you should take a look at its UI.
It's essentially very toolbar oriented, but organizes them based on the task they are associated with (page layout, document reviewing, etc.).
Re:Some slight FUD in the summary...
on
Vista Upgrade Matrix
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you do a clean install of Vista, all of your old programs and documents will be in c:\windows.old (or c:\windows.old.000, etc, if you do another clean install of Vista on top of itself). That directory will have your old Documents and Settings, Program Files, and Windows directories.
If your programs don't require anything outside of their program directory, they'll run just fine from windows.old. So even if you choose to do something strange like Pro -> Home, you could always copy things back and run setup.exe for each program again (choosing repair and let the installer fix registry settings, etc).
This should change with Vista, since all users in Vista are limited users. If you belong to the Administrators group, your programs will not run with Administrative permissions unless you use runas. Programs that know they need higher permissions will cause a password prompt to appear asking for administrative permissions (no password needed if you are an admin, but you still get the prompt).
So any developers who have been lazy about this will get a rude awakening with Vista. The typical application should only need admin privileges to install. Since the devs will be getting the prompts too, hopefully they fix all of the annoyances themselves.
It discusses the history of WGA, the licensing, the server-side communication, etc, as well as what they changed in the update that was released on the 27th.
It's worth pointing out that you can write programs that know whether or not they are running inside VMWare, besides looking at hardware ids or names. You can read/write to one of the i/o ports on the CPU and it will behave differently on VMWare. They provide this as a mechanism for communicated with the host machine. You might choose to use this as a means to prevent a strictly licensed application from running on VMWare (this strikes me as pretty fragile and untrusting of your customer, but it does come up from time to time on the message boards).
Obviously if your virtual machine was trying to hide its existance, you wouldn't do something like this, but commercial VM's have no reason to hide.
That isn't the purpose of the hidden volume. You only need the hidden volume password to access that volume. The actual purpose is so that if you are compelled to give access to the encrypted data you can just give out the outer volume's password. Used properly, there's no way to tell if there is a hidden volume or not, so no one can compel you to give the password for that volume. So basically, store some semi-sensitive data in the outer volume and your very sensitive data in the hidden volume. Maybe also create some volumes without hidden sections so you have plausible deniability.
I would assume the idea is to use the simplest designation possible for the 64-bit processors that consumers are likely to see. Saying AMD64 will confuse some consumers who have an Intel box that runs compatible code. Saying x86-64 is likely to just get shortened back to x86. EM64T is just too many letters and numbers with no obvious meaning. So x64 is simple and gets across the 64-bit aspect (so MS uses the term IA64 to refer to Itanium support in its server releases, where you can expect your customer might understand the difference between the two 64-bit systems).
I've been using Office 2007 on Vista and I can tell you that "Save to PDF" was definitely included in the build. I don't know if Microsoft has released an updated build of beta 2 removing this feature, but it was there and it worked quite well. From what I read in the Seattle newspaper, it looks like Microsoft is planning on releasing some sort of free download to add PDF support (maybe MS can't sell PDF writing capability, but they can make a free add-on just like anyone else?).
With Vista, even admin users don't run with elevated permissions. I'm logged in as an administrator right now. If I try to create a new text file at C:\ I get an access denied message. If I click the button to continue with the operation, I get a second dialog box warning me that a program is about to do something that requires higher permissions. This then gives me the option to continue or block the operation.
I assume with a limited account, you would have a similar experience, but would need to type in an admin password to continue.
The point is that programs do NOT automatically have permission to do admin operations. Admin or not, the user experience will be quite similar, forcing programs to work without elevated permissions.
This is an extension of the abstration of the chevron menus... alter the user's environment based on usage. It doesn't work. I've used environments like this and it takes getting used to. You think it was confusing trying to show people how to use Microsoft products when the pulldown menus changed seemingly randomly? Wait until their "ribbons" change based on cursor position.
I just gave this a try in Word 12. It is a lot less drastic than you imply. If I have a word document with a bunch of text and a table in the middle, changing the cursor position does not change the current tab (where each tab is basically a set of toolbars grouped by task). All that changes is a little section of the window is highlighted indicating which tabs are related to table design. It's not intrusive, but conveys the point very clearly.
Office 12 does a lot to expose existing functionality to the typical user. Things that used to be buried deep in menus and dialog boxes are presented in a much more intuitive way. Try it out some time if you get a chance. Yes, the UI is different from most other applications, but it seems to be a model worthy of consideration for other applications.
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Vista Ultimate plays DVDs out of the box. Other editions may as well (quite possibly Home Premium), but I have not tried them yet. For anything that MS has to pay a license fee, I imagine they work out how many users are going to actually use the feature. DVD playback is much more common now (esp on laptops) than it was when XP shipped, so it now comes with the OS.
I've been using Office 2007 almost exclusively for the last six months. Every now and then I do something in Word 2003 and it is a painful transition. There are features that I started using in Word 2007 that are in older versions, but I spend five minutes trying to find each one. Most users don't have a clue about the things Word 2003 is capable of, because they are hidden in obscure menu options and dialog boxes.
The transition from 2003 to 2007 is probably an initial five minutes to look around the ribbon and see what's on each of them. In my experience, you find the vast majority of features you've ever used pretty quickly. Then you start seeing other features that you might start using (whereas you never saw them in 2003, so you never thought to start using them).
The summary completley mixes up the resolutions involved. The problem occurs when a game supports 720p but not 1080i and the TV supports 480i/480p/1080i (but not 720p) as many older HDTVs do. In this situation, the PS3 doesn't scale the game's 720p to 1080i, but rather forces the game to output 480p. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, uses a chip in the hardware to scale the 720p from the game to 1080i for the TV. Any TV that supports 720p won't have this problem. Neither will games that can output 1080i.
The first thing the Zune installer does is check to see if there is updated Zune software available. It does this before it does the OS check, so the CD installer will work as soon as Vista-compatible software is released.
From what I read they will be releasing a beta version of the Zune software that is compatible with Vista RTM sometime relatively soon (hopefully by the Nov 30 business release). The non-beta version will be available by the time Vista is released to consumers (Jan 30)
Is there any evidence that Microsoft's security products have a higher degree of access to Windows? AFAIK any Microsoft product outside of Windows is forbidden from using undocumented APIs. From what I've ready even the IE and WMP teams follow this (despite technically being part of Windows).
/ 26/361033.aspx
Here's a reference to the policy:
http://blogs.msdn.com/calvin_hsia/archive/2005/01
The Xbox 360 lets you set the MAC address to be whatever you want. This was quite useful when I was staying at a hotel that required you to login with a web browser before using your network connection. I logged in with my laptop and then used my laptop's MAC address on the 360.
In case anyone wants to do the same on IE 7, the shortcuts are:
Switch between tabs
CTRL+TAB or CTRL+SHIFT+TAB
Switch to a specific tab number
CTRL+n (where n is a number between 1 and 8)
Switch to the last tab
CTRL+9
Windows Vista has a new app in the Control Panel called "Problem Reports and Solutions". This keeps track of all problem reports that have been submitted and what the response is from Microsoft. If there is a fix from MS, it will tell you (right now this tends to be a message saying the issue is fixed in pre-RTM builds). If it's a third-party application, you might get a message like "An analyst at Microsoft has investigated this problem and determined that an unkown error occurred in Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader. This software was created by Adobe Systems Incorporated.", along with a link to the appropriate product support page on Adobe's website.
By gathering these in one place for a user to keep track of, I imagine Microsoft will be encouraged to make better use of the solution reporting aspects of the system.
If I had to guess, the protected mode thing is a result of complaints about UAC showing up too much. Since it basically protects everything that needed to be protected, the only real way to reduce the prompts is to have applications not give up permissions. Protected Mode is basically a way to install and run certain add-ons without needing to be an admin. So once you run IE as an admin you aren't being protected anymore.
If you're running Vista you can verify this by right clicking IE and choosing Run as Administrator. You'll notice that it says Protected Mode: Off. Closing IE and starting it as usual will have Protected Mode: On.
The thing to remember is that everytime you click allow on a UAC prompt, you are giving the process admin privileges. Anything it does from there is the same as if it had told you to run it as root. This tends to be more obvious if you are doing what I do: always use a standard user account, not an administrator. UAC prompts will then require a password for an administrator account. The user can't simply click through. I've never run previous versions of Windows like this, but I haven't had any problems at all using Vista this way (in part because admin accounts have the same behavior, they just don't require you to type a password).
The point was that they would have sold out in Japan at the higher price anyway. So cutting the price results in a loss with no real benefit. If losing more money on the consoles resulted in more units being sold then they may make up the difference in extra game sales (difference between the two sale prices, not the discount from manufacturing cost).
Windows Vista RC1 lets you create XPS in any application, using a printer that saves to XPS. So Office 2007 will need the plug-in to add it to the Save menu, but you can use the printer to work around this. Obviously this doesn't apply to Windows XP/2k/2k3, unless Microsoft releases an update to add this printer.
Why does everyone assume it will be sold at a loss? It's based on Toshiba's Gigabeat player, which you can get online for $249. I'll go out on a limb and say that Toshiba has very little reason to be selling an MP3 player at a loss, so the actual cost must be lower than that. Of course, the store selling them takes a chunk out too.
There's no evidence supporting this story about Zune not being compatible with PlaysForSure. There's a suggestion that the Zune software (ie PC component) may not be able to import protected WMA files (but what does import mean in that context? and do you need the Zune PC software to transfer files in the first place?). Secondly, there's the fact that Zune is not developed by the same division as PlaysForSure. This argument is like saying Windows won't run Office because they are developed by independent divisions (I imagine PlaysForSure is associated with Windows Media Player, which is in the Windows division, whereas Zune is in Home and Entertainment - ie Xbox).
There is nothing fundamentally insecure about DRM except for the fact that it needs to be decrypted on the client. So a tool like this is taking advantage of the insecure aspect of DRM by waiting until the client decrypts the audio. Cracking the encryption algorithm just shows that there is a weakness in the algorithm (or in the protection of the keys, as seen in the WMA case).
The solution to stopping pure digital copies (ie not digitial -> analog -> digital) is to do all of the DRM and audio/video decoding in hardware (your private key is generated and stored in the sound card and can't be retrieved). Portable devices can use schemes like this, but computers won't unless somebody decides to break backward compatibility.
It appears that Microsoft agrees hiding unused menu items was a poor way of solving the UI problem. If you haven't seen Office 2007 yet, you should take a look at its UI.
e w.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ui/overvi
It's essentially very toolbar oriented, but organizes them based on the task they are associated with (page layout, document reviewing, etc.).
If you do a clean install of Vista, all of your old programs and documents will be in c:\windows.old (or c:\windows.old.000, etc, if you do another clean install of Vista on top of itself). That directory will have your old Documents and Settings, Program Files, and Windows directories.
If your programs don't require anything outside of their program directory, they'll run just fine from windows.old. So even if you choose to do something strange like Pro -> Home, you could always copy things back and run setup.exe for each program again (choosing repair and let the installer fix registry settings, etc).
refused to give them early builds that hte other oem's enjoy
It's not like it's particularly difficult to get early builds of Vista. The July EDW build (5472) was released on the 17th to MSDN subscribers.
This should change with Vista, since all users in Vista are limited users. If you belong to the Administrators group, your programs will not run with Administrative permissions unless you use runas. Programs that know they need higher permissions will cause a password prompt to appear asking for administrative permissions (no password needed if you are an admin, but you still get the prompt).
So any developers who have been lazy about this will get a rude awakening with Vista. The typical application should only need admin privileges to install. Since the devs will be getting the prompts too, hopefully they fix all of the annoyances themselves.
You might find this press release from a couple days ago kind of interesting.
j un06/06-27WGA.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/
It discusses the history of WGA, the licensing, the server-side communication, etc, as well as what they changed in the update that was released on the 27th.
It's worth pointing out that you can write programs that know whether or not they are running inside VMWare, besides looking at hardware ids or names. You can read/write to one of the i/o ports on the CPU and it will behave differently on VMWare. They provide this as a mechanism for communicated with the host machine. You might choose to use this as a means to prevent a strictly licensed application from running on VMWare (this strikes me as pretty fragile and untrusting of your customer, but it does come up from time to time on the message boards).
Obviously if your virtual machine was trying to hide its existance, you wouldn't do something like this, but commercial VM's have no reason to hide.
That isn't the purpose of the hidden volume. You only need the hidden volume password to access that volume. The actual purpose is so that if you are compelled to give access to the encrypted data you can just give out the outer volume's password. Used properly, there's no way to tell if there is a hidden volume or not, so no one can compel you to give the password for that volume. So basically, store some semi-sensitive data in the outer volume and your very sensitive data in the hidden volume. Maybe also create some volumes without hidden sections so you have plausible deniability.
I would assume the idea is to use the simplest designation possible for the 64-bit processors that consumers are likely to see. Saying AMD64 will confuse some consumers who have an Intel box that runs compatible code. Saying x86-64 is likely to just get shortened back to x86. EM64T is just too many letters and numbers with no obvious meaning. So x64 is simple and gets across the 64-bit aspect (so MS uses the term IA64 to refer to Itanium support in its server releases, where you can expect your customer might understand the difference between the two 64-bit systems).
I've been using Office 2007 on Vista and I can tell you that "Save to PDF" was definitely included in the build. I don't know if Microsoft has released an updated build of beta 2 removing this feature, but it was there and it worked quite well. From what I read in the Seattle newspaper, it looks like Microsoft is planning on releasing some sort of free download to add PDF support (maybe MS can't sell PDF writing capability, but they can make a free add-on just like anyone else?).
With Vista, even admin users don't run with elevated permissions. I'm logged in as an administrator right now. If I try to create a new text file at C:\ I get an access denied message. If I click the button to continue with the operation, I get a second dialog box warning me that a program is about to do something that requires higher permissions. This then gives me the option to continue or block the operation.
I assume with a limited account, you would have a similar experience, but would need to type in an admin password to continue.
The point is that programs do NOT automatically have permission to do admin operations. Admin or not, the user experience will be quite similar, forcing programs to work without elevated permissions.
This is an extension of the abstration of the chevron menus... alter the user's environment based on usage. It doesn't work. I've used environments like this and it takes getting used to. You think it was confusing trying to show people how to use Microsoft products when the pulldown menus changed seemingly randomly? Wait until their "ribbons" change based on cursor position.
I just gave this a try in Word 12. It is a lot less drastic than you imply. If I have a word document with a bunch of text and a table in the middle, changing the cursor position does not change the current tab (where each tab is basically a set of toolbars grouped by task). All that changes is a little section of the window is highlighted indicating which tabs are related to table design. It's not intrusive, but conveys the point very clearly.
Office 12 does a lot to expose existing functionality to the typical user. Things that used to be buried deep in menus and dialog boxes are presented in a much more intuitive way. Try it out some time if you get a chance. Yes, the UI is different from most other applications, but it seems to be a model worthy of consideration for other applications.