Aside from taking this opportunity to mention that anybody seriously considering removing OEM crapware manually would be FAR better off reformatting (it's faster, there's no risk of something left behind, and shouldn't cost anything - the media is essentially free, all that matters is the license key conveniently printed on a sticker) I'm sure that this will be removable. Office (in all its flavors) has always been pretty easy to uninstall, and there's no particular reason they'd do differently here. It's not like the copies of Works, or trial versions of Office, that currently come from OEMs can't be removed.
There's been a TON of info on the web about this, which makes it surprising that you would ask, but yes, you can remove IE from Win7. It doesn't remove the Trident engine (which many 1st- or 3rd-party software relies on, much like Webkit on OS X) but the browser application is optional.
As for the rest... it doesn't come with any AntiVirus per se, although it does have Windows Defender. This can be disabled, but I'm not sure whether it's easily removable. Disabling it and removing the install location might work, though. Removing Windows Update from a Internet-connected system would be absolutely retarded - you can manually patch but you'd probably waste more space downloading all the patches rather then just the incremental stuff - but I suppose the same approach as Defender might work. No way that I know of to remove WGA (assuming that's what you meant by "big-brother") short of seriously extensive hackery.
I really doubt you want it back to looking like Windows 2000 (and I know I don't miss the startup time on that thing) but I suppose by going though and removing every feature you can find (most can be deactivated through some registry edit or similar) less than 9 years old, you could get close. Nothing you can do will turn a NT-based system into a 9x-based one, though - they're completely different operating systems that happen to share an ABI and nearly-identical UI.
While not available on every model, virtually every major OEM offers either a pre-installed Linux or FreeDOS (upon which you might be able to run Windows 3.1 - do you still have disks for that?) on some of their computers. You could also build your own (cheap and pretty easy with a desktop, tricky but possible with a laptop), buy a used model without a Windows license, or buy new, refuse the Windows EULA, and get a refund for the cost of the OEM license (which isn't a ton, but it counts in principle).
If you can get past the somewhat dated graphics, it is indeed a really awesome game. I actually played it back when it was a commercial product, and only returned to it a few years ago when I discovered that it lives on in open-sourced reincarnation. You should definitely try it; the community is small but very welcoming of newbies, and the gameplay is a *lot* of fun.
Another game that featured this idea to an extent is/was Allegiance. Teams of players (20 or more per side wasn't uncommon) with one commander for each team. The individual players flew ships (not much like the EVE ships; it's space-based combat flight sim with dogfighting and minefields and such) and would attempt to carry out tasks (hopefully) as the team needed them. The commander meanwhile spent his or her time in a top-down view of explored space, ordering NPC miners or mobile repair carriers, purchasing technologies, building stations and defensive batteries, and issuing orders (which were usually more of an objective, such as "get in bombers and repair ships, we're going to take out their garrison station"). The commander could join the fight directly (and in small games often does) but in a large game there may be enough to keep track of that the commander delegates the investor role (buying technologies and ships) to another player, to focus on command.
For those interested, the game was originally released by Microsoft, didn't do well commercially (possibly because Internet connections were typically not really good enough at the time), and was eventually discontinued, then open-sourced. The community picked up the game, took over maintenance on the codebase, set up their own servers, and provide it for free today. A quick warning: the game is complex and has a substantial learning curve, although the community is very welcoming of newbies. http://freeallegiance.org/
I said the Compaq uses a modified chip, not that I (or any other user) had modded it. It's the OEM chipset, it's just not exactly the same as the normal BCom chipset. I last tried to get this working about 2 years ago, and tried both ndiswrapper and the b43xx driver.
Another laptop with a OEM Broadcom chipset (but one that I thought was un-modified) didn't work either as recently as a year ago.
A Broadcom PCMCIA card might work in Linux, but the Atheros-based one (which was old enough I don't think it even did 802.11g) wouldn't detect when using ndiswrapper. Madwifi didn't work (and would cause the system to hang if I tried for too long). I don't think ath5k was available yet - this was probably 2.5 years ago.
I've seen both ndiswrapper and the native Broadcom driver work exactly once, and it wasn't my hardware. I follower the other guy's steps exactly, to no avail.
Intel Pro Wireless, so long as the chipset isn't newer than the distro I'm trying to use it with, is the only one that's worked reliably for me (and even then it doesn't always work out of the box, depending on how seriously the distro in question is about avoiding non-free binary blobs). These days, I am just very careful about what WiFi a new computer uses.
There are also a number of charitable organizations (the two that immediately come to mind are Child's Play and Children International) that provide games to sick kids. Donate the console to one of them if you want to take the easy route - they'll make sure it ends up in a hospital or similar somewhere, complete with games, controllers, and TV.
To be fair, the Xbox 360 is also an excellent platform for watching videos. They just have to be either downloaded from the 'net (Netflix, Xbox Live), stored on external media (the 360 has 3 USB ports, and you can connect a drive containing a movie and play it easily), or stored on a computer (easier with Media Center, but possible without). Media Center further opens the possibility to use your PC as a DVR, and from there it's possible t watch the recorded shows on your TV via the console.
However, to the best of my knowledge nobody has yet managed to turn the 360 into a media center itself, and frankly if you're not going to use it for gaming at all, then you really might as well sell/give/donate it to somebody who will. If you don't desperately need the cash, I second another poster's suggestion of the Child's Play charity - if you're not a gamer you may not have heard of Penny Arcade (the webcomic) but those guys started a very awesome charity project. Hospitals are a terrible combination of boring and scary, and if a sick kid can spend some time playing games instead of lying around with nothing to do but be afraid, that's a wonderful thing to provide.
Linux is working on it, but they're not there yet.
For example, I have an older Compaq laptop that uses a slightly modified Broadcom chipset that the "native" driver specifically does not support, and that ndiswrapper doesn't really support (you can see networks, but not connect). Were I to bother trying again to get the WiFi working in something non-Windows, I'd try FreeBSD next.
In fact, across 4 different attempts (on different hardware), I've gotten ndiswrapper to work once, and am 1 for 3 trying to get the Broadcom driver to work. Granted some of those were using older versions of the software, but outside of Intel chipsets, I've yet to actually see WiFi "just work" under Linux. That said, I haven't tried Ralink - but one older Atheros-based card (yes, removable card) never worked at all for me in Linux.
To be fair, the original Xbox had online gaming capability superior to that found in some PC games that ship today. Xbox Live had its share fo problems, and the hardware wasn't anythign to write home about even by the standards of its day, but it wasn't bad. The pay-to-play is the most annoying portion of the system, but on the flip side, cheating is somewhat less of a problem than it is on many PC games.
The 360 and PS3 are both very impressive, spec-wise. For example, the 360 has support for 6 hardware threads running at 3.2 GHz - that's WAY above the typical PC even today, never mind when it was released (OK, PPC vs. x86 ISA plus the capabilities of the CPU means you can't simply compare clock speed, but still - that's a lot of CPU power).
No no no, haven't you ever worked anywhere that you had Admin capabilities? The trick is to make yourself indespensible!
Oh, wait...
Seriously though, He probably didn't have access to their entire system. You can cripple a system for its intended use (by adding security restrictions to everything that you have access to) while still lacking acces to, for example, the prisoner info database.
Permanently seems unlikely, especially since Linux still has more users and developers (AFAIK) than FreeBSD. That said, if they maintain FreeBSD as a supported kernel, then more of the software packages that are normally run on Linux will be tested and supported on FreeBSD. This is a good thing. One problem that *BSD has faced historically is that a lot of software isn't actually written for a UNIX-like OS (i.e. written to the POSIX API) but is instead written for Linux specifically. Not only does that make it less portable, it makes it less maintainable - Linux sometimes dumps things when it discovers a better alternative to its current way of doing this. Coding against the common API puts you at less risk of finding the API you use getting deprecated.
A lot of wireless hardware still doesn't have drivers (at least, not working ones) on Linux (or FreeBSD). For obvious reasons, NT drivers do exist. FreeBSD's kernel supports directly loading those NT drivers. Linux has ndiswrapper, a project to allow the same thing (ndiswrapper itself is a Linux kernel module that attempts to load the NT driver binary) but the FreeBSD NDIS support is a feature of the kernel itself, and supported as such.
For TL;DR folks: if you've ever had trouble making WiFi work in Linux, this might help.
At a public (state-funded, meaning you pay only a medium-sized crapload of money, rather than a large one) university, it's pretty hard. At best, you'll have no better chance than any other out-of-state student. The standards of admission for in-stats are usually MUCH lower than for out-of-state (at public schools). Note that this doesn't mean it's not possible at all, though; I attend the University of Washington in Seattle, and there are a reasonable handful of international students.
For a private school, it shouldn't be any harder at all (admissions-wise). In fact, you may get a small advantage, since most universities value diversity (I had no idea how homogenous the US populace was until I spent a few years travelling). Many (though certainly not all) of the best American universities are private, and their admissions standards are accordingly strict, but being from another country shouldn't count against you in any way.
All this is assuming you actually get to the point of an admissions decision, of course. There's a handful of standardized tests that are used (for graduate school, you need the GREs, which are probably available if you do a little research), plus things like your transcripts from previous schools and so forth. At grad school, recommendations are also apparently a big deal (it's a topic I'm currently looking into but haven't really experienced first-hand yet) so it would probably help a lot to have professors with American colleagues who could write you a really good recommendation for the programs those colleagues work in.
Having interned at Microsoft, I can assure you that there are LOTS of international students in CS programs, especially at the graduate level. I'd estimate that perhaps 10% of the interns were international students.
Assuming Windows is actually getting the full certificate name (including the \0 and the stuff that follows) then the question is whether the UnicodeString APIs (which permit in-string NULLs) or the standard C string-handling functions (which obviously don't) are used to do the comparison. The UnicodeString functions (used in the very core parts of Windows, such as drivers, where you'll almost never see a C-style string in kernel mode) are more annoying to work with, but undeniably safer.
This might be patchable as part of the Crypto API, but it might also be an application-by-application behavior - I don't know, my experience with Windows CAPI is essentially none. Application-by-application would make it harder to patch *everything* (and third party code would still be vulnerable) but they could still patch Internet Explorer, Outlook, Windows Update (which is a stand-alone app in recent Windows versions) and so forth.
Seems to me that a really short script or C file would do the trick...? I mean, if you can create a script that creates it, deleting it shouldn't be hard. What I'm seeing is that the CreateDirectory() function accepts names with un-trimmed whitespace, but that the Windows shell proams automatically trim names anyhow.
Still damn silly. I mean, I can see why they wouldn't WANT an un-trimmed name, but you'd think they'd make it reasoanbly easy to delete if one got created. Win32 programs generally ignore filesystem case sensitivity too, but if you create two files with the same name but different case (using something like the POSIX subsystem, which allows this), Windows will cope fairly well.
I suspect that if/when (hopefully when) this gets fixed, it will be fixed across all of the Crypto API. Part of the problem may be that the original CAPI is mostly deprecated now; it's present and theoretically supported for backward compatibility purposes, but the Cryptography: Next Generation API (CNG) is slowly replacing it. CNG already provides the majority of CAPI's functionality (plus a lot more) and I've heard that when they finish it, they'll deprecate CAPI and route the calls through CNG instead.
Unfortunately, I have no idea when this will happen. I would have thought Win7 and/or Vista SP2 would be the logical milestone (CNG has been present since Vista RTM, although MSDN mentions improvements that require SP1 or Win7) but it seems like that didn't happen.
Mind you, I have no idea whether CNG is vulnerable to this exploit as well. I've spoken to people who work on CNG and even specifically on the public key infrastructure (which handles certificates), and none of them mentioned it - but neither did I. I'd expect there to be people who are still responsible for maintaining the legacy CAPI, though...
Maemo (the OS that runs on the N800/N810) is still under real development, and has gotten a lot better over the last few years (as Linux in general has done). Heck, the differences between Maemo in 2008 and 2009 are quie impressive. If you haven't yet, you might want to take a look at a new build of Maemo, and see if it fits what you're looking for in terms of smooth UI.
That said, the N810 is a little long in the tooth, technology wise. Its CPU is still pretty good (for an ARM chip) but its RAM and internal storage are both smaller than I'd prefer, and as you mention, it's a bit bulky (fits in a pocket, but makes a noticeable bulge). I'd say wait for the N900, except that's a phone too... you don't have to buy a service plan for it, but if you want a Maemo device *without* phone hardware, the N810 is probably your best bet for now.
Different schools (or at my university, different departments) decide for themselves how they want to handle MSDNAA accounts (or whether they even want to have them).
However, for all students and for free, there's DreamSpark (https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx) which interestinly enough doesn't carry Win7 (client) but has Win Server 2008 R2 (the server build of the same OS, which offers considerably more features at the cost a few home-user type things like Media Center).
This isn't universally true... some games have virtual monopolies (this actually used to be a HUGE problem in EVE Online, where a small number of people used to control the blueprints to make some of the most valuable ships) and while everybody has *some* ability to make money in all of these games, it amounts to what a kid could make cutting neighbors' lawns - irrelevant compared to what people who've actually made opportunities for themselves have.
Honestly, EVE's in-game economy is a better simulator of real-world economies than some "economic simulators" I've seen. There's rent, there's monopolies, there's trade (between relevant economic entities, for substantial amounts), the economy is largely based on supply and demand, people who can create and exploit artificial scarcity can become hugely wealthy, etc.
On the newer versions of IE (7 or 8) there's a Add-On manager tools that allows you to remove Quicktime's hooks in the browser. It's still annoying, but it beats manual registry edits. Quicktime might still open a PNG from somewhere else (like if you double-click it in Explorer - not sure since I don't have it installed, but this wouldn't surprise me) but the browser will use its own rendering engine which is a lot quicker.
Boots OS, logs in user, loads desktop environment (including all its background processes) and is ready to use in 10 seconds? Highly doubtful (theoretically possible, but I won't believe it until I see it).
Loading kernel / drivers, running init (including loading the libraries that it and its child processes need), starting the X server, and even reaching a login screen in 10 seconds would be impressive.
Vista and Win7 are much better about responsiveness during that initial phase right after log-in, where background applications start. I won't deny that the system still slows down, but it's nothing near so bad as XP where if you didn't wait until the system was DONE with loading, it would actually take *even longer* before you could do anything useful.
Multi-core helps too, but a lot of it is differences in the OS. Both the kernel's scheduler and the background process initialization were improved (although some would certainly argue that on the whole, Vista's scheduler was worse... they fixed those issues well before Win7 shipped, though).
If a plugin installs with Administrator privileges, it can add exemptions to the sandboxing for itself. Flashplayer used to do this, for example - added an un-sandboxed broker process, and added an exemption to the Protected Mode boundary that allowed sandboxed applications to interact with the broker. Thus, while the Flash plugin itself was technically sandboxed, it actually had access to anything its broker process could be made to do. (I went looking for the registry key that adds this expemtion on a recent system, and couldn't find it, so perhaps they've stopped doing this... still serves to illustrate that if an installer is launched as Admin, it can open a hole in Protected Mode.)
That said, if a plugin simply registers itself with IE (a task that requires Admin privileges, but which doesn't give any chance to add Protected Mode exemptions) then yes, plugins are fully sandboxed.
Depends on implementation (for some time, Flash installed an exemption for itself that let it use a broker process to get out of Protected Mode without letting the user know) but by default, yes, IE plugins have the same sandboxing as the browser itself.
I think there's a version of Chromium (the open-source base of Chrome) with ad filtering... some quick web searching can probably find it for you. For IE, there's a plug-in called IE7Pro (http://ie7pro.com). Despite the name, it runs fine on IE8 too (although some of the features, such as inline search, are included in IE8 out of the box). Ad blocking and spell checking are probably the main value it has on IE8, although you may like its tab session manager (as opposed to the builtin one), GreaseMonkey-like script capability, mouse gesture support, download manager, or any of the many other things it provides. Honestly, they basically took the best user-experience features of Firefox and Opera and put them into IE.
Not affiliated in any way, but back before IE8 came out it it made 7 tolerable.
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Aside from taking this opportunity to mention that anybody seriously considering removing OEM crapware manually would be FAR better off reformatting (it's faster, there's no risk of something left behind, and shouldn't cost anything - the media is essentially free, all that matters is the license key conveniently printed on a sticker) I'm sure that this will be removable. Office (in all its flavors) has always been pretty easy to uninstall, and there's no particular reason they'd do differently here. It's not like the copies of Works, or trial versions of Office, that currently come from OEMs can't be removed.
There's been a TON of info on the web about this, which makes it surprising that you would ask, but yes, you can remove IE from Win7. It doesn't remove the Trident engine (which many 1st- or 3rd-party software relies on, much like Webkit on OS X) but the browser application is optional.
As for the rest... it doesn't come with any AntiVirus per se, although it does have Windows Defender. This can be disabled, but I'm not sure whether it's easily removable. Disabling it and removing the install location might work, though. Removing Windows Update from a Internet-connected system would be absolutely retarded - you can manually patch but you'd probably waste more space downloading all the patches rather then just the incremental stuff - but I suppose the same approach as Defender might work. No way that I know of to remove WGA (assuming that's what you meant by "big-brother") short of seriously extensive hackery.
I really doubt you want it back to looking like Windows 2000 (and I know I don't miss the startup time on that thing) but I suppose by going though and removing every feature you can find (most can be deactivated through some registry edit or similar) less than 9 years old, you could get close. Nothing you can do will turn a NT-based system into a 9x-based one, though - they're completely different operating systems that happen to share an ABI and nearly-identical UI.
While not available on every model, virtually every major OEM offers either a pre-installed Linux or FreeDOS (upon which you might be able to run Windows 3.1 - do you still have disks for that?) on some of their computers. You could also build your own (cheap and pretty easy with a desktop, tricky but possible with a laptop), buy a used model without a Windows license, or buy new, refuse the Windows EULA, and get a refund for the cost of the OEM license (which isn't a ton, but it counts in principle).
If you can get past the somewhat dated graphics, it is indeed a really awesome game. I actually played it back when it was a commercial product, and only returned to it a few years ago when I discovered that it lives on in open-sourced reincarnation. You should definitely try it; the community is small but very welcoming of newbies, and the gameplay is a *lot* of fun.
Another game that featured this idea to an extent is/was Allegiance. Teams of players (20 or more per side wasn't uncommon) with one commander for each team. The individual players flew ships (not much like the EVE ships; it's space-based combat flight sim with dogfighting and minefields and such) and would attempt to carry out tasks (hopefully) as the team needed them. The commander meanwhile spent his or her time in a top-down view of explored space, ordering NPC miners or mobile repair carriers, purchasing technologies, building stations and defensive batteries, and issuing orders (which were usually more of an objective, such as "get in bombers and repair ships, we're going to take out their garrison station"). The commander could join the fight directly (and in small games often does) but in a large game there may be enough to keep track of that the commander delegates the investor role (buying technologies and ships) to another player, to focus on command.
For those interested, the game was originally released by Microsoft, didn't do well commercially (possibly because Internet connections were typically not really good enough at the time), and was eventually discontinued, then open-sourced. The community picked up the game, took over maintenance on the codebase, set up their own servers, and provide it for free today. A quick warning: the game is complex and has a substantial learning curve, although the community is very welcoming of newbies. http://freeallegiance.org/
I said the Compaq uses a modified chip, not that I (or any other user) had modded it. It's the OEM chipset, it's just not exactly the same as the normal BCom chipset. I last tried to get this working about 2 years ago, and tried both ndiswrapper and the b43xx driver.
Another laptop with a OEM Broadcom chipset (but one that I thought was un-modified) didn't work either as recently as a year ago.
A Broadcom PCMCIA card might work in Linux, but the Atheros-based one (which was old enough I don't think it even did 802.11g) wouldn't detect when using ndiswrapper. Madwifi didn't work (and would cause the system to hang if I tried for too long). I don't think ath5k was available yet - this was probably 2.5 years ago.
I've seen both ndiswrapper and the native Broadcom driver work exactly once, and it wasn't my hardware. I follower the other guy's steps exactly, to no avail.
Intel Pro Wireless, so long as the chipset isn't newer than the distro I'm trying to use it with, is the only one that's worked reliably for me (and even then it doesn't always work out of the box, depending on how seriously the distro in question is about avoiding non-free binary blobs). These days, I am just very careful about what WiFi a new computer uses.
There are also a number of charitable organizations (the two that immediately come to mind are Child's Play and Children International) that provide games to sick kids. Donate the console to one of them if you want to take the easy route - they'll make sure it ends up in a hospital or similar somewhere, complete with games, controllers, and TV.
To be fair, the Xbox 360 is also an excellent platform for watching videos. They just have to be either downloaded from the 'net (Netflix, Xbox Live), stored on external media (the 360 has 3 USB ports, and you can connect a drive containing a movie and play it easily), or stored on a computer (easier with Media Center, but possible without). Media Center further opens the possibility to use your PC as a DVR, and from there it's possible t watch the recorded shows on your TV via the console.
However, to the best of my knowledge nobody has yet managed to turn the 360 into a media center itself, and frankly if you're not going to use it for gaming at all, then you really might as well sell/give/donate it to somebody who will. If you don't desperately need the cash, I second another poster's suggestion of the Child's Play charity - if you're not a gamer you may not have heard of Penny Arcade (the webcomic) but those guys started a very awesome charity project. Hospitals are a terrible combination of boring and scary, and if a sick kid can spend some time playing games instead of lying around with nothing to do but be afraid, that's a wonderful thing to provide.
Linux is working on it, but they're not there yet.
For example, I have an older Compaq laptop that uses a slightly modified Broadcom chipset that the "native" driver specifically does not support, and that ndiswrapper doesn't really support (you can see networks, but not connect). Were I to bother trying again to get the WiFi working in something non-Windows, I'd try FreeBSD next.
In fact, across 4 different attempts (on different hardware), I've gotten ndiswrapper to work once, and am 1 for 3 trying to get the Broadcom driver to work. Granted some of those were using older versions of the software, but outside of Intel chipsets, I've yet to actually see WiFi "just work" under Linux. That said, I haven't tried Ralink - but one older Atheros-based card (yes, removable card) never worked at all for me in Linux.
To be fair, the original Xbox had online gaming capability superior to that found in some PC games that ship today. Xbox Live had its share fo problems, and the hardware wasn't anythign to write home about even by the standards of its day, but it wasn't bad. The pay-to-play is the most annoying portion of the system, but on the flip side, cheating is somewhat less of a problem than it is on many PC games.
The 360 and PS3 are both very impressive, spec-wise. For example, the 360 has support for 6 hardware threads running at 3.2 GHz - that's WAY above the typical PC even today, never mind when it was released (OK, PPC vs. x86 ISA plus the capabilities of the CPU means you can't simply compare clock speed, but still - that's a lot of CPU power).
No no no, haven't you ever worked anywhere that you had Admin capabilities? The trick is to make yourself indespensible!
Oh, wait...
Seriously though, He probably didn't have access to their entire system. You can cripple a system for its intended use (by adding security restrictions to everything that you have access to) while still lacking acces to, for example, the prisoner info database.
Permanently seems unlikely, especially since Linux still has more users and developers (AFAIK) than FreeBSD. That said, if they maintain FreeBSD as a supported kernel, then more of the software packages that are normally run on Linux will be tested and supported on FreeBSD. This is a good thing. One problem that *BSD has faced historically is that a lot of software isn't actually written for a UNIX-like OS (i.e. written to the POSIX API) but is instead written for Linux specifically. Not only does that make it less portable, it makes it less maintainable - Linux sometimes dumps things when it discovers a better alternative to its current way of doing this. Coding against the common API puts you at less risk of finding the API you use getting deprecated.
A lot of wireless hardware still doesn't have drivers (at least, not working ones) on Linux (or FreeBSD). For obvious reasons, NT drivers do exist. FreeBSD's kernel supports directly loading those NT drivers. Linux has ndiswrapper, a project to allow the same thing (ndiswrapper itself is a Linux kernel module that attempts to load the NT driver binary) but the FreeBSD NDIS support is a feature of the kernel itself, and supported as such.
For TL;DR folks: if you've ever had trouble making WiFi work in Linux, this might help.
At a public (state-funded, meaning you pay only a medium-sized crapload of money, rather than a large one) university, it's pretty hard. At best, you'll have no better chance than any other out-of-state student. The standards of admission for in-stats are usually MUCH lower than for out-of-state (at public schools). Note that this doesn't mean it's not possible at all, though; I attend the University of Washington in Seattle, and there are a reasonable handful of international students.
For a private school, it shouldn't be any harder at all (admissions-wise). In fact, you may get a small advantage, since most universities value diversity (I had no idea how homogenous the US populace was until I spent a few years travelling). Many (though certainly not all) of the best American universities are private, and their admissions standards are accordingly strict, but being from another country shouldn't count against you in any way.
All this is assuming you actually get to the point of an admissions decision, of course. There's a handful of standardized tests that are used (for graduate school, you need the GREs, which are probably available if you do a little research), plus things like your transcripts from previous schools and so forth. At grad school, recommendations are also apparently a big deal (it's a topic I'm currently looking into but haven't really experienced first-hand yet) so it would probably help a lot to have professors with American colleagues who could write you a really good recommendation for the programs those colleagues work in.
Having interned at Microsoft, I can assure you that there are LOTS of international students in CS programs, especially at the graduate level. I'd estimate that perhaps 10% of the interns were international students.
Assuming Windows is actually getting the full certificate name (including the \0 and the stuff that follows) then the question is whether the UnicodeString APIs (which permit in-string NULLs) or the standard C string-handling functions (which obviously don't) are used to do the comparison. The UnicodeString functions (used in the very core parts of Windows, such as drivers, where you'll almost never see a C-style string in kernel mode) are more annoying to work with, but undeniably safer.
This might be patchable as part of the Crypto API, but it might also be an application-by-application behavior - I don't know, my experience with Windows CAPI is essentially none. Application-by-application would make it harder to patch *everything* (and third party code would still be vulnerable) but they could still patch Internet Explorer, Outlook, Windows Update (which is a stand-alone app in recent Windows versions) and so forth.
Seems to me that a really short script or C file would do the trick...? I mean, if you can create a script that creates it, deleting it shouldn't be hard. What I'm seeing is that the CreateDirectory() function accepts names with un-trimmed whitespace, but that the Windows shell proams automatically trim names anyhow.
Still damn silly. I mean, I can see why they wouldn't WANT an un-trimmed name, but you'd think they'd make it reasoanbly easy to delete if one got created. Win32 programs generally ignore filesystem case sensitivity too, but if you create two files with the same name but different case (using something like the POSIX subsystem, which allows this), Windows will cope fairly well.
I suspect that if/when (hopefully when) this gets fixed, it will be fixed across all of the Crypto API. Part of the problem may be that the original CAPI is mostly deprecated now; it's present and theoretically supported for backward compatibility purposes, but the Cryptography: Next Generation API (CNG) is slowly replacing it. CNG already provides the majority of CAPI's functionality (plus a lot more) and I've heard that when they finish it, they'll deprecate CAPI and route the calls through CNG instead.
Unfortunately, I have no idea when this will happen. I would have thought Win7 and/or Vista SP2 would be the logical milestone (CNG has been present since Vista RTM, although MSDN mentions improvements that require SP1 or Win7) but it seems like that didn't happen.
Mind you, I have no idea whether CNG is vulnerable to this exploit as well. I've spoken to people who work on CNG and even specifically on the public key infrastructure (which handles certificates), and none of them mentioned it - but neither did I. I'd expect there to be people who are still responsible for maintaining the legacy CAPI, though...
Maemo (the OS that runs on the N800/N810) is still under real development, and has gotten a lot better over the last few years (as Linux in general has done). Heck, the differences between Maemo in 2008 and 2009 are quie impressive. If you haven't yet, you might want to take a look at a new build of Maemo, and see if it fits what you're looking for in terms of smooth UI.
That said, the N810 is a little long in the tooth, technology wise. Its CPU is still pretty good (for an ARM chip) but its RAM and internal storage are both smaller than I'd prefer, and as you mention, it's a bit bulky (fits in a pocket, but makes a noticeable bulge). I'd say wait for the N900, except that's a phone too... you don't have to buy a service plan for it, but if you want a Maemo device *without* phone hardware, the N810 is probably your best bet for now.
Different schools (or at my university, different departments) decide for themselves how they want to handle MSDNAA accounts (or whether they even want to have them).
However, for all students and for free, there's DreamSpark (https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx) which interestinly enough doesn't carry Win7 (client) but has Win Server 2008 R2 (the server build of the same OS, which offers considerably more features at the cost a few home-user type things like Media Center).
FYI, Microsoft already follows this model (with Office, which is Microsoft's other main cash-cow).
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/FX100487411033.aspx?pid=CL100571081033 (weird URL, but it points to the Office dowload page - explicitly mentions that it's a trial copy, but it's fully functional within the time limit and all you need to do to unlock it is enter a license key).
This isn't universally true... some games have virtual monopolies (this actually used to be a HUGE problem in EVE Online, where a small number of people used to control the blueprints to make some of the most valuable ships) and while everybody has *some* ability to make money in all of these games, it amounts to what a kid could make cutting neighbors' lawns - irrelevant compared to what people who've actually made opportunities for themselves have.
Honestly, EVE's in-game economy is a better simulator of real-world economies than some "economic simulators" I've seen. There's rent, there's monopolies, there's trade (between relevant economic entities, for substantial amounts), the economy is largely based on supply and demand, people who can create and exploit artificial scarcity can become hugely wealthy, etc.
On the newer versions of IE (7 or 8) there's a Add-On manager tools that allows you to remove Quicktime's hooks in the browser. It's still annoying, but it beats manual registry edits. Quicktime might still open a PNG from somewhere else (like if you double-click it in Explorer - not sure since I don't have it installed, but this wouldn't surprise me) but the browser will use its own rendering engine which is a lot quicker.
Boots OS, logs in user, loads desktop environment (including all its background processes) and is ready to use in 10 seconds? Highly doubtful (theoretically possible, but I won't believe it until I see it).
Loading kernel / drivers, running init (including loading the libraries that it and its child processes need), starting the X server, and even reaching a login screen in 10 seconds would be impressive.
Vista and Win7 are much better about responsiveness during that initial phase right after log-in, where background applications start. I won't deny that the system still slows down, but it's nothing near so bad as XP where if you didn't wait until the system was DONE with loading, it would actually take *even longer* before you could do anything useful.
Multi-core helps too, but a lot of it is differences in the OS. Both the kernel's scheduler and the background process initialization were improved (although some would certainly argue that on the whole, Vista's scheduler was worse... they fixed those issues well before Win7 shipped, though).
If a plugin installs with Administrator privileges, it can add exemptions to the sandboxing for itself. Flashplayer used to do this, for example - added an un-sandboxed broker process, and added an exemption to the Protected Mode boundary that allowed sandboxed applications to interact with the broker. Thus, while the Flash plugin itself was technically sandboxed, it actually had access to anything its broker process could be made to do. (I went looking for the registry key that adds this expemtion on a recent system, and couldn't find it, so perhaps they've stopped doing this... still serves to illustrate that if an installer is launched as Admin, it can open a hole in Protected Mode.)
That said, if a plugin simply registers itself with IE (a task that requires Admin privileges, but which doesn't give any chance to add Protected Mode exemptions) then yes, plugins are fully sandboxed.
Depends on implementation (for some time, Flash installed an exemption for itself that let it use a broker process to get out of Protected Mode without letting the user know) but by default, yes, IE plugins have the same sandboxing as the browser itself.
I think there's a version of Chromium (the open-source base of Chrome) with ad filtering... some quick web searching can probably find it for you.
For IE, there's a plug-in called IE7Pro (http://ie7pro.com). Despite the name, it runs fine on IE8 too (although some of the features, such as inline search, are included in IE8 out of the box). Ad blocking and spell checking are probably the main value it has on IE8, although you may like its tab session manager (as opposed to the builtin one), GreaseMonkey-like script capability, mouse gesture support, download manager, or any of the many other things it provides. Honestly, they basically took the best user-experience features of Firefox and Opera and put them into IE.
Not affiliated in any way, but back before IE8 came out it it made 7 tolerable.