The one vulnerability that does affect SP2 cannot be remotely exploited. So clicking on a link to a.hlp file on web page or email does nothing much. You have to explicitly save the file and then execute it. Check it out yourself here -
http://www.xfocus.net/flashsky/icoExp/
(Do it at your own risk)
That's so much user interaction that its a low risk issue. If you can convince the user to do that then you might as well send him an exe file and tell him to save and execute that. How about sending a gun with instructions - "point at foot and press trigger"...
Not everyone knows or has tools to make.HLP files. So yes that one exploit is worrysome but not much. Just block.HLP files on the mail server for the dumb users who will shoot themselves in the foot no matter what. Also its not like there are tons of sites out there having.HLP files linked in web pages. And even if they are, the user needs to make significant interaction to get exploited. So end result, you are pretty okay on SP2 with sensible users.
As per the Windows XP SP2 RTM press release this is how they are going to do it -
The timing for customers to receive the Service Pack 2 download through Automatic Updates depends on a number of factors, including the customer's Internet usage, location, language and the level of Internet demand for Service Pack 2. Automatic Updates uses spare Internet capacity to progressively download updates without interfering with daily PC use. Microsoft expects to distribute Service Pack 2 to approximately 100 million PCs through Automatic Updates over the next two months.
The progresive download feature being talked about refers to the "Background Intelligent Transfer Service" BITS. BITS transfers files using leftover bandwidth. For example, if you are currently using 60 percent of your bandwidth, BITS will only use the remaining 40 percent. BITS also maintains file transfers when a network disconnection occurs, or a computer needs to be restarted: When the network connection is re-established, BITS will continue where it left off.
I know its a joke, but it seems to work in IE as well, or at least an example PNG crashes it, i suppose one could be crafted for IE to exploit it.
Well using XP SP2 RC2 build 2162 it does nothing in IE other show a broken image link. Whatever Microsoft did in SP2, it seems to have mitigated it. They did recompile major parts of the OS for SP2 with the/GS VC++ stack checking compiler flag. That could have caught it. Or it could be that they were informed about it before full disclosure and they fixed it in SP2. Or that they don't use libpng and their library does it correctly or they fixed the issue by themselves. Whatever be it they seem to have taken care of it. BTW the built-in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer also doesn't crash (nor does mspaint). You can test this out yourself if you have SP2 (don't know if builds earlier than 2162 fix it though) using this image link (Warning! Will crash non patched browsers!) from the original disclosure.
Its reassuring that for once MS has already taken care of some security issue (for XP SP2 at least).
Because it's pronounced the same either way you spell it. Also, the pronunciation of the 'a' is more evocative of 'ghan' than 'gan'. To an english speakr "Gandhi" looks like it should rhyme with "candy"
No its not pronounced the same way. The only correct way writing Gandhi is "Gandhi". There is no 'h' sound in the G part of Gandhi. OTOH the 'h' in "dh" is pronounced. So it makes all the difference in the world where you put the 'h'.
In any case this is all moot. Its a famous person's name and you should learn to spell it correctly if you know about the person. It looks silly and uncouth when people make mistakes like this.
Remember how Linux advocates, real early on, used to love to quote Ghandi?
For heaven's sake get the name correct. Its Gandhi and not Ghandi. Its not like the rest of the world goes about calling Lincoln as Lilconn so why is that Non Indians can't get the name of another great person correctly?
Ease of use has always been Windows' strong point. In linux you'd have to open up a file and change something; that's unexceptable for the casual user.
Actually the joke's on you. Windows does make it easy to do it. See my reply here for the trivially simple and easy way to do it.
But this is slashdot and people have to give a really complicated way to do something even on Windows.
It's pretty well hidden in Windows XP. You have to use the group policies manager to disable it.
What are you talking about?! There's a much easier way to do it Windows XP than your convoluted method. Right click on your CD/DVD drive in Windows Explorer (or My Computer), select the "Auto Play" tab, choose "Music CD" and then select "Take no action". Thats all.
I've been surprised how far ReactOS has come along. I didn't expect them to progress this much by now. I could actually install the last release on real hardware and it installed and ran AbiWord just fine!
BTW a lot of people seem to have problems with the install CD.iso based installation of ReactOS. There is a simpler way to run it if you have a FAT16 or FAT32 C:\ boot partition, just download the binaries and unzip them to C:\ReactOS\. Then just boot from a DOS floppy and run aboot.bat within C:\ReactOS. Works like a charm everytime (for the past half dozen releases anyway). BTW if you insatall the VESA mode VBE driver (search the kernel mailing list) then you can get AbiWord working in true color. Its impressive to see it working considering how far ReactOS has yet to go.
I don't know about Kansas, but at least in California AT&T GSM is one of the worse choices you could make -
http://nordicgroup.us/ssub/sfbaratings.htm http://nordicgroup.us/ssub/scaratings.htm
(look at the overall coverage numbers in that table)
Generally Verizon is considered to have the best coverage and service. SprintPCS would be second and they have much cooler phones (but only one BlueTooth phone). Overall CDMA has a technical edge over GSM in terms of spectral efficiency and the carriers ability to upgrade to newer technologies. However I would advise you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Don't go by everything the GSM camp is telling you. You will find many interesting resources about cell phones and their technologies if you explore the other links on the site I linked to above.
In true slashdot fashion, you did not even skim the article linked to but rushed to post some irrelevant reply. Good job.
Actually my reply is very relevant in the sense that it gives concrete proof and information about the existence of the $2 bill. And I know very well that the said article was a joke but it did not present much by way of proof of existence of the $2 bill other than some images which could be interpreted by some as a Photoshop job. It was evident from the replies that many here thought that the joke was that the $2 bill does not really exist. So I just wanted to clear that up with some proof. Unfortunately you didn't get that, but then I didn't expect many would get the real reason for my reply.
According to CNN.com in a story dated June 12, 2003 - "Moneymakers in Washington are contemplating printing a new series of the $2 bill, which is by far the least-used small note in circulation. The last time the notes were issued was in 1996 (it bears a 1995 series stamp), when about 164 million were made."
Funny how so many of the tech savvy alphageeks on slashdot don't have basic researching skills to find out facts on their but rather follow others like sheep and just assume what the other guy is saying is true
Exactly. People seem to have forgotten the fact that many applications will have problems without a media player. A media player is basic functionality that has been included since Windows 3.1 days for heavens sake. How will the various applications that issue an audible alert using the PlaySound API work for example if you remove the media player and all its drivers? What you are going to force every application that does anything with sound to ship with a media player of some sort? Heaven help people with the 15 different media players you'll end up with in that case. This is absolute nuts I tell you. Next people will have Microsoft remove access to the builtin in WordPad since that is competition to OpenOffice.org? If no one could convince the courts to remove IE from the OS then why is the bar lower this time to remove MediaPlayer from the OS? Only because the other so called free players like the pathetic intrusiveware called RealPlayer cannot stand real competition.
Of course they are mutually exclusive. One is used to create generic system images and the other is used to create system backups. By definition a system backup is unique to a system but images can be generic. I don't see why there should be a probelm due to that.
ASR doesn't work if there if the hardware to which you restore is different than that from which you made a backup
Again who told you this? Did you ever try it? (I doubt it) There should be no problem if the hardware changes, Windows plug and play will detect the new hardware. In fact I have taken a hard disk from an older system and attached it to a completly new system with new motherboard, CPU, optical drives, video card etc and still Windows booted off the old systems disk and detected all the new hardware, installing drivers it had and asking for ones it didn't. I don't see why restoring from ASR would have any problems. In fact this would be the same no matter what backup tool you use since the hardware could still change under you. The point of a backup is to save your data so you don't care if the device drivers are different when your hardware changes since the OS can handle that.
There should be a large, large protest about this. The copy protection built into Windows (the registry) prevents saving all your installation and configuration work.
"Large, large" protest about what? Microsoft provides tools to make images and backups and if you haven't ever tried to use or understand them then its not Microsoft't problem. And what registry copy protection are you talking about?! You can take a backup of a registry all you want. The ASR tools makes a backup if the registry quite fine. See this KB article on how to backup the registry fully. At this point I have my serious doubts as to how well you really know about Windows technologies. You just want to believe that things are hard on Windows do you without looking for answers and trying anything?
Why do you have to rely on Microsoft technical support people for everything? You can find out a lot of things about Windows on your own. Why do I get the feeling that you admin a Windows machine only half heartedly and just want to believe that things aren't possible on Windows without really looking for solutions. If you had even bothered to do a simple search on google for sysprep you would have found that its freely avalable. In fact I just checked that even Win2K CD comes with sysprep in exactly the same location. You didn't even bother to check those CDs. As for 3rd party tools for backup being available. Well there are lot of tools that come builtin into Windows that offer the basic functionality and if you want more sophisticated functionality then you look for 3rd party tools. ASR could be quite okay as a simple backup tool and yet leave a market for more sophisticated ones. That doesn't change anything.
He apparently doesn't realize that Sysprep is not available to most users of Windows XP
Huh? Who said everyone cannot get sysprep?
Look here to download the Win2K sysprep and here for the Windows XP sysprep (part of XP support tools). It is also available on each and every Windows XP CD at \SUPPORT\TOOLS\DEPLOY.CAB\sysprep.exe. BTW I thought the question was about creating Windows images so sysprep is quite useful since anyone can use it. I'm now wondering how much you have really explored these aspects of Windows.
As regards the complete system backup, well have you tried using the bultin Windows backup utility to do an Automated System Restore? From what I can gather it allows you to do a complete automated system restore from a backup by booting off the Windows CD and it actually writes partition layout and other information to a seperate floppy (or some other media) and the system part of the backup can be written out to a network/external disk or DVD etc. I haven't tried it but I have heard some people talk about it. I'm assuming they were able to use it to good effect. You might want to check it out. AFAIK that should do what you are looking for.
BTW just because that person was angry or he had an attitude problem doesn't mean that everything he said was wrong.
Even if you have Bart's Windows XP is still crippled: "Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have crippled file systems." The file system cannot copy some of the files that are necessary to the operating system.
Huh? Did you read this answer as part of the old slashdot article you are quoting? There is nothing crippled about the Windows File Systems. The SID's are security identifiers working in the way they are meant to be.
Yes it uses a RAM Drive as well the support built into Windows XP onwards for booting of readonly media as part of the components in Windows XP used in XP Embedded. XP Embedded basically just uses the same XP components but with different config (registry, ini file etc). See this - http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/xpehelp/ht ml/xetbswindowspreinstallationenvironment.asp for more information about WinPE and its related XP Embedded technologies.
No its definetly not limited to 6 processes (both WinPE and BartPE). Also you can use a commandline resolution utility like SetRes.exe to set a higher resolution. Basically it will set it to the highest possible VESA mode that your video card supports. There is however a limitation of 24 hours with WinPE. If you use XPE plugin with BartPE it almost allows you to have quite a Windows like environment with a working browser and all. If you take the time to cusomise your BartPE with all the app plugins you need then it can a quite useful thing.
And Oh yes I submitted this story so I should know something:)
If any of you were wondering how to do something similar with Windows then now you can! I realise that this being slashdot there are going to be flames about why would you do this etc? For the simple reason that not all porgrams are available on Linux.
Anyway coming back to the topic of how to do this for Windows. Well first of all there is this thing called Windows PE (Pre-installtion Environment) which is basically a Microsoft created bootable Windows CD for computer OEMs. Its basically a very stripped down version of Windows XP (or Win2K3) with just a command prompt and the ability to run some simple GUI programs. But this WinPE is normally only available to OEMs and system builders (but it isn't hard to find online retailers for it). However WinPE isn't very useful from a full usable system point of view. So someone has come up with a way to make your own customized WinPE like bootable Windows CD. All you need is the instructions and your own Windows CD to do it. Here's where you can find more information -
has no one else noticed the surname of the author?
By Sandeep Dikshit
I would almost say a this is a troll article if it wasn't so positive
Well I can understand how a surname like Dikshit would sound strange to an American, but its a common surname in India and pronounced quite differently from what it might appear. Its not pronounced as Dick Shit but rather as Deekshit where the 'd' and 't' are soft (The 'd' is pronounced like the word "thee" as in the old English thou) so it would be like "thee kshith". Quite a few Indians prefer the alternative spelling Dixit. I suppose the ancestor of one of those Indians knew enough English and foresight to choose an alternative way of spelling it:)
You know the whole issue of tying WMP to Windows being an issue is silly. Hello!, Windows Media Player has been included with Windows for free since Windows 3.1 days (yeah go ahead and check it if you don't believe it). So for many many years MS was including WMP with Windows and Real did not have a problem with it? Suddenly one fine day Real has issues with it? What has happened is that MS came up with a superior product ever since Windows Media 8 and started kicking Real's *ss. Who would want to use Real's intrusive annoying player when a better alternative was available?
With Windows Media 9 Microsoft really started shining in the Media Player arena and Real instead of competing wants to run crying to momma. Get a clue Real! If you hadn't abused your users with the intrusive crap of player you had then no one would have looked for alternatives. As long as WMP was inferior, Real was in fact the one abusing its dominant position by shoving a pathetically intrusive player on its users. Guess what they did when they had an alternative? Real squandered away its lead when real (pun intended) competition was coming its way. I guess it was sheer haughtiness on its part that it thought no one could beat it. When it has finally woken up and realised that no one is going to give it a second chance, then guess what happens. WMP9 is what decimated Real since its a much superior product overall compared to Real. Now the irony is that WMP9 is not bundled with any OS but is a separate download. Yet inspite of that its usage is skyrocketing.
The other story in all this is how Apple has been able to keep QuickTime alive and not face Real's fate. Well the QuickTime player also does some bad things (like adding itself to runonce reg key) but overall it respects its users a lot more. QuickTime and Windows Media are now the most dominant Media technologies on the net. So how come Apple is not complaining about Windows Media? How are they able to hold on to the market? Clue to Real: They actually compete. They care about their users and make a better player or better codecs (Apple has very good support for MPEG4). This whole media player tying issue looks like some kind of EU vendetta against a large US company. In fact the original case wasn't even about this till Real went crying to the EU comission. Makes me sick. What next? Tying of WordPad to Windows will become illegal since that hurts AbiWord? How silly can people get really.
and a profit-making division at Microsoft is getting be something of a rarity what with the company loosing money through the nose in countless divisions. In fact, I believe there's only one division more profitable- the OS division.
What utter nonsense are you talking about? Don't go about inventing facts when you don't know what the real facts are. Out of Microsoft's 7 divisions, 4 make a profit. Three of those 4 divisions make a huge profits: Client (OS), Info Worker (Office), and Server & Tools. The Business Solutions and Mobile & Embedded Devices divisions are small and incubating businesses so they don't make much of a profit now. The really big division that makes a loss is Home & Entertainment and thats primarily due to XBox. So no you are totally wrong about Microsoft having only one division that makes a profit. Next time don't spout your own imagination as facts. You can check the Microsoft profit and loss figures for each division in the Form 10Q SEC filings that Microsoft makes. Here are the relevant numbers from that report -
(In millions) Operating Income/Loss Three Months Ended Sept.30 2003
Client 2,264 Server and Tools 370 Information Worker 1,591 Microsoft Business Solutions -79
MSN 58 Mobile and Embedded Devices -32 Home and Entertainment -273
Would you mind telling us what benchmarks those were in which AMD won? Also so you happen to have in your browser cache any of the benchmark images and if you could put them up somewhere?
Yeah spoken numbers in Hindi are wierd and not very orthogonal unlike lets say some other Indian languages like Tamil. There its quite logical and like English in the sense that if you know the base tenner (30,40,50 etc) and the suffixes for one the series (say 30s) then you can say numbers for any series. Also the fractions are more consistent in Tamil (always number+part). Thats why many native Hindi speakers also have trouble with Hindi numbers due to too much inconsistency like for example the 99 exception that you pointed out (in fact its also there for 89). Well anyway I attribute it to the fact that after all Indians invented the decimal system so it can be forgiven that they did not quite perfect the way to speak it out (languages/cultures that did it later got it right). But the actual written numeric form has never had any ambiguities though.
Slashdot Mirror
The one vulnerability that does affect SP2 cannot be remotely exploited. So clicking on a link to a .hlp file on web page or email does nothing much. You have to explicitly save the file and then execute it. Check it out yourself here -
...
Not everyone knows or has tools to make .HLP files. So yes that one exploit is worrysome but not much. Just block .HLP files on the mail server for the dumb users who will shoot themselves in the foot no matter what. Also its not like there are tons of sites out there having .HLP files linked in web pages. And even if they are, the user needs to make significant interaction to get exploited. So end result, you are pretty okay on SP2 with sensible users.
http://www.xfocus.net/flashsky/icoExp/ (Do it at your own risk)
That's so much user interaction that its a low risk issue. If you can convince the user to do that then you might as well send him an exe file and tell him to save and execute that. How about sending a gun with instructions - "point at foot and press trigger"
As per the Windows XP SP2 RTM press release this is how they are going to do it -
The timing for customers to receive the Service Pack 2 download through Automatic Updates depends on a number of factors, including the customer's Internet usage, location, language and the level of Internet demand for Service Pack 2. Automatic Updates uses spare Internet capacity to progressively download updates without interfering with daily PC use. Microsoft expects to distribute Service Pack 2 to approximately 100 million PCs through Automatic Updates over the next two months.
The progresive download feature being talked about refers to the "Background Intelligent Transfer Service" BITS. BITS transfers files using leftover bandwidth. For example, if you are currently using 60 percent of your bandwidth, BITS will only use the remaining 40 percent. BITS also maintains file transfers when a network disconnection occurs, or a computer needs to be restarted: When the network connection is re-established, BITS will continue where it left off.
I got the link from the original full disclosure over here. See near the end of section 1. That link is given in the CERT alert.
Its reassuring that for once MS has already taken care of some security issue (for XP SP2 at least).
In any case this is all moot. Its a famous person's name and you should learn to spell it correctly if you know about the person. It looks silly and uncouth when people make mistakes like this.
For heaven's sake get the name correct. Its Gandhi and not Ghandi. Its not like the rest of the world goes about calling Lincoln as Lilconn so why is that Non Indians can't get the name of another great person correctly?
What are you talking about?! There's a much easier way to do it Windows XP than your convoluted method. Right click on your CD/DVD drive in Windows Explorer (or My Computer), select the "Auto Play" tab, choose "Music CD" and then select "Take no action". Thats all.
I've been surprised how far ReactOS has come along. I didn't expect them to progress this much by now. I could actually install the last release on real hardware and it installed and ran AbiWord just fine! BTW a lot of people seem to have problems with the install CD .iso based installation of ReactOS. There is a simpler way to run it if you have a FAT16 or FAT32 C:\ boot partition, just download the binaries and unzip them to C:\ReactOS\. Then just boot from a DOS floppy and run aboot.bat within C:\ReactOS. Works like a charm everytime (for the past half dozen releases anyway). BTW if you insatall the VESA mode VBE driver (search the kernel mailing list) then you can get AbiWord working in true color. Its impressive to see it working considering how far ReactOS has yet to go.
I don't know about Kansas, but at least in California AT&T GSM is one of the worse choices you could make -
http://nordicgroup.us/ssub/sfbaratings.htm
http://nordicgroup.us/ssub/scaratings.htm
(look at the overall coverage numbers in that table)
Generally Verizon is considered to have the best coverage and service. SprintPCS would be second and they have much cooler phones (but only one BlueTooth phone). Overall CDMA has a technical edge over GSM in terms of spectral efficiency and the carriers ability to upgrade to newer technologies. However I would advise you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Don't go by everything the GSM camp is telling you. You will find many interesting resources about cell phones and their technologies if you explore the other links on the site I linked to above.
According to CNN.com in a story dated June 12, 2003 - "Moneymakers in Washington are contemplating printing a new series of the $2 bill, which is by far the least-used small note in circulation. The last time the notes were issued was in 1996 (it bears a 1995 series stamp), when about 164 million were made."
The US Dept. of Treasury confirms that the $2 bill does indeed exist.
Funny how so many of the tech savvy alphageeks on slashdot don't have basic researching skills to find out facts on their but rather follow others like sheep and just assume what the other guy is saying is true
Exactly. People seem to have forgotten the fact that many applications will have problems without a media player. A media player is basic functionality that has been included since Windows 3.1 days for heavens sake. How will the various applications that issue an audible alert using the PlaySound API work for example if you remove the media player and all its drivers? What you are going to force every application that does anything with sound to ship with a media player of some sort? Heaven help people with the 15 different media players you'll end up with in that case. This is absolute nuts I tell you. Next people will have Microsoft remove access to the builtin in WordPad since that is competition to OpenOffice.org? If no one could convince the courts to remove IE from the OS then why is the bar lower this time to remove MediaPlayer from the OS? Only because the other so called free players like the pathetic intrusiveware called RealPlayer cannot stand real competition.
Why do you have to rely on Microsoft technical support people for everything? You can find out a lot of things about Windows on your own. Why do I get the feeling that you admin a Windows machine only half heartedly and just want to believe that things aren't possible on Windows without really looking for solutions. If you had even bothered to do a simple search on google for sysprep you would have found that its freely avalable. In fact I just checked that even Win2K CD comes with sysprep in exactly the same location. You didn't even bother to check those CDs. As for 3rd party tools for backup being available. Well there are lot of tools that come builtin into Windows that offer the basic functionality and if you want more sophisticated functionality then you look for 3rd party tools. ASR could be quite okay as a simple backup tool and yet leave a market for more sophisticated ones. That doesn't change anything.
As regards the complete system backup, well have you tried using the bultin Windows backup utility to do an Automated System Restore? From what I can gather it allows you to do a complete automated system restore from a backup by booting off the Windows CD and it actually writes partition layout and other information to a seperate floppy (or some other media) and the system part of the backup can be written out to a network/external disk or DVD etc. I haven't tried it but I have heard some people talk about it. I'm assuming they were able to use it to good effect. You might want to check it out. AFAIK that should do what you are looking for.
BTW just because that person was angry or he had an attitude problem doesn't mean that everything he said was wrong.
Yes it uses a RAM Drive as well the support built into Windows XP onwards for booting of readonly media as part of the components in Windows XP used in XP Embedded. XP Embedded basically just uses the same XP components but with different config (registry, ini file etc). See this -t ml/xetbswindowspreinstallationenvironment.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/xpehelp/h
for more information about WinPE and its related XP Embedded technologies.
No its definetly not limited to 6 processes (both WinPE and BartPE). Also you can use a commandline resolution utility like SetRes.exe to set a higher resolution. Basically it will set it to the highest possible VESA mode that your video card supports. There is however a limitation of 24 hours with WinPE. If you use XPE plugin with BartPE it almost allows you to have quite a Windows like environment with a working browser and all. If you take the time to cusomise your BartPE with all the app plugins you need then it can a quite useful thing.
:)
And Oh yes I submitted this story so I should know something
If any of you were wondering how to do something similar with Windows then now you can! I realise that this being slashdot there are going to be flames about why would you do this etc? For the simple reason that not all porgrams are available on Linux.
Anyway coming back to the topic of how to do this for Windows. Well first of all there is this thing called Windows PE (Pre-installtion Environment) which is basically a Microsoft created bootable Windows CD for computer OEMs. Its basically a very stripped down version of Windows XP (or Win2K3) with just a command prompt and the ability to run some simple GUI programs. But this WinPE is normally only available to OEMs and system builders (but it isn't hard to find online retailers for it). However WinPE isn't very useful from a full usable system point of view. So someone has come up with a way to make your own customized WinPE like bootable Windows CD. All you need is the instructions and your own Windows CD to do it. Here's where you can find more information -
Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD
You know the whole issue of tying WMP to Windows being an issue is silly. Hello!, Windows Media Player has been included with Windows for free since Windows 3.1 days (yeah go ahead and check it if you don't believe it). So for many many years MS was including WMP with Windows and Real did not have a problem with it? Suddenly one fine day Real has issues with it? What has happened is that MS came up with a superior product ever since Windows Media 8 and started kicking Real's *ss. Who would want to use Real's intrusive annoying player when a better alternative was available?
With Windows Media 9 Microsoft really started shining in the Media Player arena and Real instead of competing wants to run crying to momma. Get a clue Real! If you hadn't abused your users with the intrusive crap of player you had then no one would have looked for alternatives. As long as WMP was inferior, Real was in fact the one abusing its dominant position by shoving a pathetically intrusive player on its users. Guess what they did when they had an alternative? Real squandered away its lead when real (pun intended) competition was coming its way. I guess it was sheer haughtiness on its part that it thought no one could beat it. When it has finally woken up and realised that no one is going to give it a second chance, then guess what happens. WMP9 is what decimated Real since its a much superior product overall compared to Real. Now the irony is that WMP9 is not bundled with any OS but is a separate download. Yet inspite of that its usage is skyrocketing.
The other story in all this is how Apple has been able to keep QuickTime alive and not face Real's fate. Well the QuickTime player also does some bad things (like adding itself to runonce reg key) but overall it respects its users a lot more. QuickTime and Windows Media are now the most dominant Media technologies on the net. So how come Apple is not complaining about Windows Media? How are they able to hold on to the market? Clue to Real: They actually compete. They care about their users and make a better player or better codecs (Apple has very good support for MPEG4). This whole media player tying issue looks like some kind of EU vendetta against a large US company. In fact the original case wasn't even about this till Real went crying to the EU comission. Makes me sick. What next? Tying of WordPad to Windows will become illegal since that hurts AbiWord? How silly can people get really.
(In millions) Operating Income/Loss Three Months Ended Sept.30 2003
Client 2,264
Server and Tools 370
Information Worker 1,591
Microsoft Business Solutions -79
MSN 58
Mobile and Embedded Devices -32
Home and Entertainment -273
Would you mind telling us what benchmarks those were in which AMD won? Also so you happen to have in your browser cache any of the benchmark images and if you could put them up somewhere?
Yeah spoken numbers in Hindi are wierd and not very orthogonal unlike lets say some other Indian languages like Tamil. There its quite logical and like English in the sense that if you know the base tenner (30,40,50 etc) and the suffixes for one the series (say 30s) then you can say numbers for any series. Also the fractions are more consistent in Tamil (always number+part). Thats why many native Hindi speakers also have trouble with Hindi numbers due to too much inconsistency like for example the 99 exception that you pointed out (in fact its also there for 89). Well anyway I attribute it to the fact that after all Indians invented the decimal system so it can be forgiven that they did not quite perfect the way to speak it out (languages/cultures that did it later got it right). But the actual written numeric form has never had any ambiguities though.