Actually, all indications are that Microsoft is embracing open document formats - just open formats they invented, not from OASIS. The Office 2003 formats are freely available on MSDN as, are the future formats for Office 12.
Honestly, I don't think Microsoft is too worried about people downloading OO for free and switching just because of the document format. Consider that a copy of Office sold is a copy of Office that Microsoft won't directly make money off of in the future.
Microsoft needs to make money three ways - If your organization uses Office, as your organization grows, you'll need new copies of Office. Small firms with high growth rates might find it advantageous to switch to OO for this reason, and that's why Microsoft is getting very aggressive with their Small Business liscensing costs. Larger firms with huge numbers of Office installations will find the cost of switching everyone significantly more than the cost of buying new liscense for growth, especially considering these organizations are often partners with preferred pricing plans.
Microsoft also makes money selling Office server, and I have to be honest, Office Server frickin' rocks. There's nothing like it in the OO world. If you don't need it, that's fine, but it carries substantial value to a large number of firms, and for many companies is a selling point for Windows and MS Office by itself.
Lastly, Microsoft makes money selling Office upgrades - this is the hard sell for them. They have to add enough value into future versions of their product to make it attractive to people who have already invested in a MS Office liscenses for their enterprise. The thing is, these groups aren't very likely to switch to OO. They already have an Office suite that works and is bought and paid for. Now, OO could present a problem to Microsoft in this area in several years as the quality of OO begins to offer significant value over their existing products, and then they might switch. You can see this right now in the companies that were running Office 98 beginning to consider OO seriously. That said, obviously Microsoft isn't going to make any more money off that crowd anyway.
The last problem Microsoft has is governments who DO care about open standards. For that reason, Microsoft has opened its formats. Only time will tell if that strategy will work for them.
You forgot my favorite feature of Vista, transactional NTFS. NTFS has always been atomic, but the ability to group changes to a group of multiple files into a transaction that can be rolled back or commited as a single atomic unit will make software deployments and patching infinitely easier. Start installing a piece of software and an error occurs? Just rollback the entire install and not a trace of the install attempt will remain.
I don't know if transactional NTFS will require the WinFS service pack yet, but I know it will be an absolute godsend to IT departments.
Microsoft isn't requiring you to upgrade your graphics card at all - if you want to use the Aero Glass theme, you'll need a more powerful card, but if you don't have one, you can run Aero or a classic Windows theme just as easily.
The DRM stuff will require an upgrade in order to function with new media formats, but given that no vendor is legally allowed to let the HD content run on current hardware, you can't pin that one on Microsoft. Additionally, since it will take a long while before a healthy number of consumers have access to HD-compatible hardware, I suspect it will be some time before real quantities of content are available in those formats.
Beta 1 doesn't include any new "features" in the user space outside the new shell and a very old build of IE7. Vista beta has plenty of placeholders for things like their sync and backup utilities which will show up in beta2 (or maybe the PDC bits). They also aren't including all of the sideapps that will ship with Vista, like Windows Media Player 11 (Vista beta 1 contains WMP10) or Outlook Express 7. As mentioned by the OP, it contains only developer features.
The new LDDM (Longhorn Device Driver Model) and Metro support are very large items that a number of developers will need to pay attention to. The Avalon and Indigo subsystems are both present in the Vista beta. I also think transactional NTFS is in there.
Of particular note is the new LUA security model that application developers are going to have to start targetting. Also, most of the new hardware DRM libraries are in Vista beta 1.
.NET developers targetting Vista can pull down the WinFX, Avalon, Indigo and WinFS beta bits onto XP and work with them there, or they could start working on the Vista beta. Developers who work closer to the hardware or on media extensions have alot of new stuff to work with (or around, in some cases) on Vista beta 1.
A number of applications actually do run faster on Vista beta 1 - In my case, WoW runs about 6 frames per second higher on Vista than it does with identical configuration on XP on the same hardware. Windows Media 10 on Vista performs noticeably better - even in periods of extremely high disk IO and CPU activity, it audio and video "stutter" substantially less.
A number of applications have a noticable improvement in load times. Also, if you run a.NET 1.1 application on Vista, you'll see a very noticeable speed improvement coupled with a dramatic reduction in private bytes used. Granted, that's an issue with the.NET 2.0 framework which will be available before Vista, but it is the standard on Vista.
I've heard from others but not observed personally that applications with large amounts of thread synchronization perform markedly better as well.
WinFS is backwards compatible to NTFS, not too surprising when you figure that WinFS is just an extension on top of a transactional variant of NTFS - all normal file operations will still be available, you just won't be able to search.
One of the efforts in the next generation Intel / Windows hardware (and probably Mac as well) is Secure Path Audio. Basically, when an audio source that contains a Secure Path Audio signature is found, the audio stream is left encrypted and sent to the soundcard directly. The soundcard decrypts the stream in the hardware and then the audio stream plays regularly.
Secure Path Audio contains a clear-stream channel in it, which allows outside applications to read-only snoop on the feed. This channel is a reduced data rate, and is about telephone quality. If you wanted to make a copy of the recording, you would either need to set up a loopback on this channel and get an inferior copy of the original, or you would need to physically wire the output into your audio input device (which in my experience results in horribly sound quality).
It goes without saying that if your audio card and drivers aren't SAP-compliant, they will not be able to play audio sources flagged as SAP-only. This technology is already in place in Windows, but the only place I've seen it used today is in the federal government controlling access to sensitive audio feeds.
What the hell does offshoring have to do with it - we live in a global market. Microsoft does business in most of the countries in the world. Do you think its possible they might on occasion send sales and support personnel to the countries they are trying to sell their software in?
That doesn't count the volume of companies that might send people to Redmond in order to discuss sales, contracts, or technical matters with Microsoft.
You're also kidding yourself if you think major corporations don't have experience with the occasional mass illness. Companies have been sending staff globally for decades now, so worrying about stuff like this is hardly new. Ignoring imported illnesses, have you ever heard of flu season?
Get off your high horse. FOX reported on every single infinitesimal rumor or innuendo on the bride much more heavily than CNN, or anyone else, did.
Because I defended religion and bashed CNN, you seem to have missed the point of what I was saying altogether. Where did I say I liked Fox? This isn't one of those "the liberal media sux" posts - I agree wholeheartedly that Fox is horrible. CNN is too. I just mentioned CNN by name. You're right that on occasion, CNN will carry thoughtful coverage of a subject, but its almost always in the middle of the night or on a weekend - when they aren't targetting their principal viewer base. That said, compare the best of CNN's coverage to the BBC, or American print media against the Economist and you'll see the discrepency in the level of quality I'm talking about. Also consider that for all of the bashing I'm doing of CNN and FOX, how many people get their news from "News Channel 5 at 5" right on before the Simpsons.
How many billions of dollars have been thrown into the system and nothing changes? How many times have taxes been raised by school districts claiming they need more money. Money isn't the problem. It's stuffing 50 kids in a classroom instead of 20. It's about teaching the scientific principle and how to use deductive reasoning, not some fantasy about supreme beings.
You can throw a trillion dollars at a problem and still leave it underfunded - its particularly easy for top-heavy institutions with massive management costs. Why do you think they jam 50 kids in a class instead of 20? Fun? The schools themselves don't have the funding to split the classes up to their correct sizes. Want to teach deductive reasoning and science correctly in the classroom - how about starting by requiring that science teachers have a degree the science they're teaching, or heck, any science! Of course, all over the country teachers with degrees in art history and other liberal arts are stuck teaching sciences because the school districts don't have the budget to come close to competing with industry salaries for qualified technical and scientific minds.
You're right, though that throwing more money at it won't solve the problem. But there is definitely a shortage of funding at the part of the education system that actually, like, educates.
However, after Pat Robertsons comments, blaming religion seems to be the thing to do.
Instead of blaming "religion" for Pat Robertson's comments, how about we do something revolutionary and blame Pat Robertson. I'll join on that bandwagon. But his ramblings don't represent the opinions of any other religious groups in the United States besides his own, and while the rest of us may not agree on much, Catholics, Mormons, Jews and Muslims can all come together and agree that Pat Robertson is a raving loon.
I think its shortsighted to blame religion on these cultural changes, when religion has been a critical part of the American culture since its inception. In fact, one could overtrivialize and look at the percentage of Americans who go to church now, compare it to fifty years ago, and say that the decline of religion in America is causing our recent problems - but of course, that's not the case either.
The problem has nothing to do with religion - its about lowered standards of quality in American culture. Does the religious right let Bush get away with anything he wants? Sure. But religion only happens to fit into the model because that's Bush's demographic. Nixon's demographic let him get away with anything he wanted, just like Clinton's, Reagan's and Johnson's did. Voters rarely turn on the guy they put into office. Bad Presidents always reflect poorly on the individuals who support them, but that doesn't mean that the ideas that bind the demographic are neccesarily invalid simply for that reason.
Stem cell research is a relgious / science overlap. Intelligent Design is a ridiculous idea from a very very small minority in Kansas. Past that, I don't see much overlap from religion in science in America. Sure, the conservative party is playing down environmental research, but that has nothing to do with religion - that's a culture of corporate profits interfering with science.
You blame religion for the decrease in American science - I blame the media. I blame CNN for undercovering important issues, and spending two weeks on a runaway bride. I blame Disney for making a movie about a girl who is interested in science and math and is unpopular until she decides to drop it all and become an ice skater. I blame television networks that make 10,000 reality tv shows and 5,000 Ally McBeal spinoffs for every one Numbers or... well, I can't think of another show I like on network tv. How about the fact that TLC found it was much more profitable to stop showing documentaries and focus on home decorating shows? I also blame underfunded schools and a corporate culture that has dropped R&D in favor of easier methods of reducing profits.
Simply blaming religion is insulting to those of us who are thoughtfully religious, and worse than that, its wrong.
On the contrary, there are substantial other changes to SP2 which impact security. See
the complete list of changes.
In particular, permissions changes to the RPC service and the entire DCOM surface are finally correcting a pox upon the world. In the SP2 world, an Administrator can override an application's CoInitializeSecurity request - this was not possible before, and there are a substantial number of networked applications installed on top of windows that an admin simply can't lock down correctly without this ability. Additionally, the ability to restrict remote clients to the RPC service at a level lower than the firewall is a substantial add.
Above and beyond NX, having all the windows binaries compiled with the buffer overflow check option (I forget offhand what the option's flag is and I'm too lazy to look it up) is useful by itself.
No technology can replace a smart user - but smart users just can't plug all the legacy holes in older versions of Windows. Microsoft is finally on the right path, and denying the proven security that comes with SP2 for no real reason just doesn't seem very wise.
If you don't mind my asking, why don't you install SP2?
I know that alot of XP home users who aren't tech savvy haven't upgraded to SP2. I know there are still a couple enterprise environments that have legacy software problems, and I know that high end sound engineers who are using Windows and not OSX(???) are having problems with some of the changes to the device driver security model... but why would you choose to not use SP2? A look at the security profile for the last year is proof that Service Pack 2 has done a fantastic job in improving the overall security of Windows desktops. The same core system changes to Win2k3 have resulted in a server operating system with a damned fine security track record. Why would you choose to ignore that?
Other people have responded that beta1 is a 0 active bug release of the full developer libraries expected in Vista with limitted user features, but also beta1 is not XP with anything - Vista used to be based of XP but Microsoft threw that version out with the bathwater and moved over everything to a codebase resting on Win2k3 sometime last year. Its one of the reasons Vista's release was so delayed, but ultimately, is going to produce a much better product.
My understanding is that a hollowpoint round mashes its tip evenly and does damage based on the increased surface area of the tip of the round after impact. M-16 rounds begin rotating on a completely new axis after impact. I'm not 100% sure how it works, but I know that its only possible in part because the weapon itself imparts a specific force of rotation perpendicular to the vector the bullet is travelling in into the bullet that is not present when a similar bullet is fired from other weapons.
I'm not an expert in the subject - I hate guns. I just remember a discussion on the weapon a couple years back when I was doing defense contracting work. I do know there is something particular to the barrel of an M16 that augments the effectiveness of the truly cruel types of ammo, and that such ammo is the default with a standard "M16 installation".
I'm not sure I believe that - the rounds currently deployed to the US Army for their M16s are intended to tear an opponent apart, since an opponent who dies instantly can't continue to fight injured, or worse, charge and set off a bomb. They're also built to knock the target off their feet to prevent a charging enemy.
M-16 rounds are nasty - they have a hollowed out section on one side so that upon a collision, they drastically change shape. This causes them to travel through the body with an increased angular velocity spinning the way though the targets internals. If you've ever seen a target dummy shot with an M-16 round, the hole going in is the size you'd expect it to be - you can fit your hand in the hole on the other side. People who get shot in the arms with an M-16 will lose the arm, go into shock (and thus completely exit the battle) and almost certainly die shortly thereafter.
Keep in mind that the United States and European armies are the only military forces that don't use disposable regiments and therefor have large support structures for injured troops. The Chinese army is beginning to move this direction, but historically have no problem with wars of attrition.
XP SP2 allows blocks all incoming ports by default - it opens a series of ports if joined to a domain, depending on the group security policy of the domain. Most AD setups I've seen use the default group security policies, which leaves open TCP ports 139,445 for file sharing, and 3389 for Remote Desktop and two more UDP ports I can't remember off the top of my head for Windows file and printer sharing. By default on a domain, Windows Messenger has authority to use UPnP to temporarily open other ports for file trading, shared whiteboards and remote assistance.
All of these data was released by Microsoft to the Windows Server / AD crowd months before SP2 came out. The default options were chosen to allow enterprises to upgrade to SP2 without causing their IT infrastructure to melt, and like I said, you can change those settings through the AD group policy. Also, local administrators on those boxes can override the AD defaults and close the ports.
The thing is, Microsoft isn't a Ford Taurus - its a 747. And you can bet your ass it'll outrun the Ferrari and go places the Ferrari couldn't dream of, if only the pilot could manage to get the thing off the ground.
btw, a Ferrari F430 Spider gets an average of 13 miles per gallon with a 25.1 gallon tank. A Ford Taurus gets 24mpg with an 18 gallon tank. No one disputes the Ferrari would kick the Taurus' ass for the first 326 miles, but depending how long the race is, the tortoise might just win in the end.
It looks alot more like sql when you start playing with the join operator - I forget the exact syntax (I haven't played with it for a year), but msh allows the equivelant of
select ps.pid, count(*) from ps inner join netstat on ps.pid = netstat.pid group by ps.pid order by count(*) desc
There actually is a Windows Amnesty - google for "Microsoft Amnesty" and it'll pop up a couple articles near the top.
The basic summary is that anyone who bought a computer with a pirated copy of Windows that the user legitimately believed was legal will get up to five legal liscense key from Microsoft.
I agree with your opinion on the Apple / IBM fallout.
That said, I don't think Apple picked Intel based on AMD's capacity. I'm convinced its about Centrino. AMD might be rocking the desktop world, but the Turion's power consumption is too high and I suspect that Apple is rightfully suspecting that x64 will show up on the Pentium Ms before AMD can come up with a power-efficient end-to-end solution like Centrino. AMD just doesn't have the cash or partnerships to stay in the lead in desktops and laptops.
Intel on the other hand has a good roadmap that is heavily targetting mobile computers, something near and dear to Apple's heart.
I think Cringely is a moron - if Intel bought Apple, Microsoft would buy AMD and then Dell and a couple of the other vendors would announce a 5 year migration plan to AMD after a call from Redmond. AMD begins to ramp up their production, with Intel chips filling the steadily shrinking gap. Apple and HP have problems increasing their own production for the rest of the box and enterprises are slow to throw out their entire IT infrastructure in exchange for a brand new one with no real enterprise experience, so their market share doesn't raise much. If things go sour for Redmond, they sweeten the deal by lowering the cost of Enterprise upgrades to Longhorn (or heck, giving it away entirely to "Gold Customers").
Microsoft keeps the enterprise customers, especially when everyone gets spooked as Intel's revenue drops like crazy. With substantial growth and deep pockets, along with being the "safe bet", Microsoft/AMD finds itself in a position of greater revenues then they've ever had. With Microsoft's backing, Turion beats Centrino over several years, Intel collapses under its own weight, Intel/Apple dies.
Now not only does Microsoft own the software market, but they own the hardware market as well.
Only Sony could get away with the gambit of buying Apple on the business side, but wouldn't survive the culture shock. I'm confident Apple will be under the leadership of solitary Jobs for some time to come.
Microsoft has had Terraserver since the 90s, and I don't remember when MS Maps and Streets came out, but it was quite some time ago. Granted, Google Maps is a much more polished web interface, but Google is hardly the first entry into the mapping space. Microsoft isn't either - ESRI's been around longer than my grandparents I think.
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Honestly, I don't think Microsoft is too worried about people downloading OO for free and switching just because of the document format. Consider that a copy of Office sold is a copy of Office that Microsoft won't directly make money off of in the future.
Microsoft needs to make money three ways - If your organization uses Office, as your organization grows, you'll need new copies of Office. Small firms with high growth rates might find it advantageous to switch to OO for this reason, and that's why Microsoft is getting very aggressive with their Small Business liscensing costs. Larger firms with huge numbers of Office installations will find the cost of switching everyone significantly more than the cost of buying new liscense for growth, especially considering these organizations are often partners with preferred pricing plans.
Microsoft also makes money selling Office server, and I have to be honest, Office Server frickin' rocks. There's nothing like it in the OO world. If you don't need it, that's fine, but it carries substantial value to a large number of firms, and for many companies is a selling point for Windows and MS Office by itself.
Lastly, Microsoft makes money selling Office upgrades - this is the hard sell for them. They have to add enough value into future versions of their product to make it attractive to people who have already invested in a MS Office liscenses for their enterprise. The thing is, these groups aren't very likely to switch to OO. They already have an Office suite that works and is bought and paid for. Now, OO could present a problem to Microsoft in this area in several years as the quality of OO begins to offer significant value over their existing products, and then they might switch. You can see this right now in the companies that were running Office 98 beginning to consider OO seriously. That said, obviously Microsoft isn't going to make any more money off that crowd anyway.
The last problem Microsoft has is governments who DO care about open standards. For that reason, Microsoft has opened its formats. Only time will tell if that strategy will work for them.
I don't know if transactional NTFS will require the WinFS service pack yet, but I know it will be an absolute godsend to IT departments.
The DRM stuff will require an upgrade in order to function with new media formats, but given that no vendor is legally allowed to let the HD content run on current hardware, you can't pin that one on Microsoft. Additionally, since it will take a long while before a healthy number of consumers have access to HD-compatible hardware, I suspect it will be some time before real quantities of content are available in those formats.
The new LDDM (Longhorn Device Driver Model) and Metro support are very large items that a number of developers will need to pay attention to. The Avalon and Indigo subsystems are both present in the Vista beta. I also think transactional NTFS is in there.
Of particular note is the new LUA security model that application developers are going to have to start targetting. Also, most of the new hardware DRM libraries are in Vista beta 1.
A number of applications have a noticable improvement in load times. Also, if you run a .NET 1.1 application on Vista, you'll see a very noticeable speed improvement coupled with a dramatic reduction in private bytes used. Granted, that's an issue with the .NET 2.0 framework which will be available before Vista, but it is the standard on Vista.
I've heard from others but not observed personally that applications with large amounts of thread synchronization perform markedly better as well.
WinFS is backwards compatible to NTFS, not too surprising when you figure that WinFS is just an extension on top of a transactional variant of NTFS - all normal file operations will still be available, you just won't be able to search.
One of the efforts in the next generation Intel / Windows hardware (and probably Mac as well) is Secure Path Audio. Basically, when an audio source that contains a Secure Path Audio signature is found, the audio stream is left encrypted and sent to the soundcard directly. The soundcard decrypts the stream in the hardware and then the audio stream plays regularly.
Secure Path Audio contains a clear-stream channel in it, which allows outside applications to read-only snoop on the feed. This channel is a reduced data rate, and is about telephone quality. If you wanted to make a copy of the recording, you would either need to set up a loopback on this channel and get an inferior copy of the original, or you would need to physically wire the output into your audio input device (which in my experience results in horribly sound quality).
It goes without saying that if your audio card and drivers aren't SAP-compliant, they will not be able to play audio sources flagged as SAP-only. This technology is already in place in Windows, but the only place I've seen it used today is in the federal government controlling access to sensitive audio feeds.
That doesn't count the volume of companies that might send people to Redmond in order to discuss sales, contracts, or technical matters with Microsoft.
You're also kidding yourself if you think major corporations don't have experience with the occasional mass illness. Companies have been sending staff globally for decades now, so worrying about stuff like this is hardly new. Ignoring imported illnesses, have you ever heard of flu season?
Because I defended religion and bashed CNN, you seem to have missed the point of what I was saying altogether. Where did I say I liked Fox? This isn't one of those "the liberal media sux" posts - I agree wholeheartedly that Fox is horrible. CNN is too. I just mentioned CNN by name. You're right that on occasion, CNN will carry thoughtful coverage of a subject, but its almost always in the middle of the night or on a weekend - when they aren't targetting their principal viewer base. That said, compare the best of CNN's coverage to the BBC, or American print media against the Economist and you'll see the discrepency in the level of quality I'm talking about. Also consider that for all of the bashing I'm doing of CNN and FOX, how many people get their news from "News Channel 5 at 5" right on before the Simpsons.
How many billions of dollars have been thrown into the system and nothing changes? How many times have taxes been raised by school districts claiming they need more money. Money isn't the problem. It's stuffing 50 kids in a classroom instead of 20. It's about teaching the scientific principle and how to use deductive reasoning, not some fantasy about supreme beings.
You can throw a trillion dollars at a problem and still leave it underfunded - its particularly easy for top-heavy institutions with massive management costs. Why do you think they jam 50 kids in a class instead of 20? Fun? The schools themselves don't have the funding to split the classes up to their correct sizes. Want to teach deductive reasoning and science correctly in the classroom - how about starting by requiring that science teachers have a degree the science they're teaching, or heck, any science! Of course, all over the country teachers with degrees in art history and other liberal arts are stuck teaching sciences because the school districts don't have the budget to come close to competing with industry salaries for qualified technical and scientific minds.
You're right, though that throwing more money at it won't solve the problem. But there is definitely a shortage of funding at the part of the education system that actually, like, educates.
However, after Pat Robertsons comments, blaming religion seems to be the thing to do.
Instead of blaming "religion" for Pat Robertson's comments, how about we do something revolutionary and blame Pat Robertson. I'll join on that bandwagon. But his ramblings don't represent the opinions of any other religious groups in the United States besides his own, and while the rest of us may not agree on much, Catholics, Mormons, Jews and Muslims can all come together and agree that Pat Robertson is a raving loon.
The problem has nothing to do with religion - its about lowered standards of quality in American culture. Does the religious right let Bush get away with anything he wants? Sure. But religion only happens to fit into the model because that's Bush's demographic. Nixon's demographic let him get away with anything he wanted, just like Clinton's, Reagan's and Johnson's did. Voters rarely turn on the guy they put into office. Bad Presidents always reflect poorly on the individuals who support them, but that doesn't mean that the ideas that bind the demographic are neccesarily invalid simply for that reason.
Stem cell research is a relgious / science overlap. Intelligent Design is a ridiculous idea from a very very small minority in Kansas. Past that, I don't see much overlap from religion in science in America. Sure, the conservative party is playing down environmental research, but that has nothing to do with religion - that's a culture of corporate profits interfering with science.
You blame religion for the decrease in American science - I blame the media. I blame CNN for undercovering important issues, and spending two weeks on a runaway bride. I blame Disney for making a movie about a girl who is interested in science and math and is unpopular until she decides to drop it all and become an ice skater. I blame television networks that make 10,000 reality tv shows and 5,000 Ally McBeal spinoffs for every one Numbers or... well, I can't think of another show I like on network tv. How about the fact that TLC found it was much more profitable to stop showing documentaries and focus on home decorating shows? I also blame underfunded schools and a corporate culture that has dropped R&D in favor of easier methods of reducing profits.
Simply blaming religion is insulting to those of us who are thoughtfully religious, and worse than that, its wrong.
In particular, permissions changes to the RPC service and the entire DCOM surface are finally correcting a pox upon the world. In the SP2 world, an Administrator can override an application's CoInitializeSecurity request - this was not possible before, and there are a substantial number of networked applications installed on top of windows that an admin simply can't lock down correctly without this ability. Additionally, the ability to restrict remote clients to the RPC service at a level lower than the firewall is a substantial add.
Above and beyond NX, having all the windows binaries compiled with the buffer overflow check option (I forget offhand what the option's flag is and I'm too lazy to look it up) is useful by itself.
No technology can replace a smart user - but smart users just can't plug all the legacy holes in older versions of Windows. Microsoft is finally on the right path, and denying the proven security that comes with SP2 for no real reason just doesn't seem very wise.
I know that alot of XP home users who aren't tech savvy haven't upgraded to SP2. I know there are still a couple enterprise environments that have legacy software problems, and I know that high end sound engineers who are using Windows and not OSX(???) are having problems with some of the changes to the device driver security model... but why would you choose to not use SP2? A look at the security profile for the last year is proof that Service Pack 2 has done a fantastic job in improving the overall security of Windows desktops. The same core system changes to Win2k3 have resulted in a server operating system with a damned fine security track record. Why would you choose to ignore that?
Hiro Protagonist is the XboxLive username for J Allard, the Corporate Vice President of the Xbox360 development.
Other people have responded that beta1 is a 0 active bug release of the full developer libraries expected in Vista with limitted user features, but also beta1 is not XP with anything - Vista used to be based of XP but Microsoft threw that version out with the bathwater and moved over everything to a codebase resting on Win2k3 sometime last year. Its one of the reasons Vista's release was so delayed, but ultimately, is going to produce a much better product.
I'm not an expert in the subject - I hate guns. I just remember a discussion on the weapon a couple years back when I was doing defense contracting work. I do know there is something particular to the barrel of an M16 that augments the effectiveness of the truly cruel types of ammo, and that such ammo is the default with a standard "M16 installation".
5 - They spent four billion dollars researching how to make the bandage and need to recoup their research costs.
Granted, I don't think 5 is the case here, but be fair and include it.
M-16 rounds are nasty - they have a hollowed out section on one side so that upon a collision, they drastically change shape. This causes them to travel through the body with an increased angular velocity spinning the way though the targets internals. If you've ever seen a target dummy shot with an M-16 round, the hole going in is the size you'd expect it to be - you can fit your hand in the hole on the other side. People who get shot in the arms with an M-16 will lose the arm, go into shock (and thus completely exit the battle) and almost certainly die shortly thereafter.
Keep in mind that the United States and European armies are the only military forces that don't use disposable regiments and therefor have large support structures for injured troops. The Chinese army is beginning to move this direction, but historically have no problem with wars of attrition.
I just dropped a little over two grand on my dream gaming laptop - for me, its not a matter of buying a new monitor. I'd need a whole new laptop.
All of these data was released by Microsoft to the Windows Server / AD crowd months before SP2 came out. The default options were chosen to allow enterprises to upgrade to SP2 without causing their IT infrastructure to melt, and like I said, you can change those settings through the AD group policy. Also, local administrators on those boxes can override the AD defaults and close the ports.
You just reminded me of an old comic from Rory Blyth.
btw, a Ferrari F430 Spider gets an average of 13 miles per gallon with a 25.1 gallon tank. A Ford Taurus gets 24mpg with an 18 gallon tank. No one disputes the Ferrari would kick the Taurus' ass for the first 326 miles, but depending how long the race is, the tortoise might just win in the end.
It looks alot more like sql when you start playing with the join operator - I forget the exact syntax (I haven't played with it for a year), but msh allows the equivelant of
select ps.pid, count(*)
from ps
inner join netstat on ps.pid = netstat.pid
group by ps.pid
order by count(*) desc
The basic summary is that anyone who bought a computer with a pirated copy of Windows that the user legitimately believed was legal will get up to five legal liscense key from Microsoft.
That said, I don't think Apple picked Intel based on AMD's capacity. I'm convinced its about Centrino. AMD might be rocking the desktop world, but the Turion's power consumption is too high and I suspect that Apple is rightfully suspecting that x64 will show up on the Pentium Ms before AMD can come up with a power-efficient end-to-end solution like Centrino. AMD just doesn't have the cash or partnerships to stay in the lead in desktops and laptops.
Intel on the other hand has a good roadmap that is heavily targetting mobile computers, something near and dear to Apple's heart.
I think Cringely is a moron - if Intel bought Apple, Microsoft would buy AMD and then Dell and a couple of the other vendors would announce a 5 year migration plan to AMD after a call from Redmond. AMD begins to ramp up their production, with Intel chips filling the steadily shrinking gap. Apple and HP have problems increasing their own production for the rest of the box and enterprises are slow to throw out their entire IT infrastructure in exchange for a brand new one with no real enterprise experience, so their market share doesn't raise much. If things go sour for Redmond, they sweeten the deal by lowering the cost of Enterprise upgrades to Longhorn (or heck, giving it away entirely to "Gold Customers").
Microsoft keeps the enterprise customers, especially when everyone gets spooked as Intel's revenue drops like crazy. With substantial growth and deep pockets, along with being the "safe bet", Microsoft/AMD finds itself in a position of greater revenues then they've ever had. With Microsoft's backing, Turion beats Centrino over several years, Intel collapses under its own weight, Intel/Apple dies.
Now not only does Microsoft own the software market, but they own the hardware market as well.
Only Sony could get away with the gambit of buying Apple on the business side, but wouldn't survive the culture shock. I'm confident Apple will be under the leadership of solitary Jobs for some time to come.
Microsoft has had Terraserver since the 90s, and I don't remember when MS Maps and Streets came out, but it was quite some time ago. Granted, Google Maps is a much more polished web interface, but Google is hardly the first entry into the mapping space. Microsoft isn't either - ESRI's been around longer than my grandparents I think.