Incorrect. The ribbon, when pinned, takes up more room than a menu bar when the menus aren't being used. However, the ribbon collapses down to a single bar, no thicker than a menu bar. Double-click on the active tab to collapse the ribbon. Single-click on a tab to temporarily reveal it (like a menu). Double-click on a tab to pin the ribbon again.
On the flip side, you have people like me - a CS student who used MS office for over a decade before first trying OO.o, and found OO.o to be similar enough that it was easy to learn. Great, right? Why change what works? Well, because after trying Office 2007, trying to access anywhere near the feature-set of a modern word processor (I don't use Excel or Powerpoint much, and OneNote doesn't have a ribbon yet) via menus and tiny little toolbar icons feels like an incredibly painful waste of time.
Mind you, they should have better advertised how to hide the ribbon, and how to add to the quick-access toolbar that is still present, but from my pserspective the ribbon is what got me to switch *back* to Microsoft Office. I'm not sure how useful it will be on a browser, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
Since you mention it... about a year ago, a friend built a new gaming PC and put a Radeon 4850 (basically 1 generation older than this) in it with 1GB of VRAM. His "test app" for the new system was Crysis... enabled DX10, maxxed every setting, and played through the whole thing. At 1280x1024 his display isn't exactly super-high-res, but the framerate was high enough to be completley unnoticeable in almost every part of the game. A 4870 (same GPU at a faster clock speed) could probably have handled the whole thing easily. Both cards are under $200 (probably less now that the Radeon 5xxx series is out).
It took a while from release, but "Crysis with all the eye candy turned on" is possible on a pretty modest budget these days. It was also a surprisingly fun game; clearly some effort went into other parts of the game besides graphics.
Wine and CrossOver are pretty sweet, but pretending that either one is anywhere close to 100% compatible (especially with new releases) is ridiculous. For that matter, even if they do work, some other thing - like the video driver not doing hardware accel for no discernable reason (I've seen this three times, on three different versions of Linux across two different hardware configurations) - may prevent you from gaming. Sure, usually there's a solution out there, but when two CS students with five years of Linux expecerience between them can't figure it out in the first hour, the average computer user who is switching for the first time doesn't have a chance
Quite a few people still use dial-up connections. Broadband isn't even available in much of the US, outside of cities. Even where it is available, dial-up is a lot cheaper.
I personally know at least seven people, across three different households, who have no choice but dial-up, and I live near Seattle. One of those people is both a professional and hobbiest Linux/BSD hacker. One of the others uses a data compression Internet "SpeedBoost" on their Windows PC.
How is the 89 suited to taking notes? I mean, sure it's posible, but I thought even the 83 had an Alpha key... I used to keep handy formulas (notes, I guess) on my 86 in the form of "scripts" that didn't do anything.
Only the TI-9x calculators actually had a Qwerty keyboard, which was definitely suited to note-taking.
The concept of using signed binaries on a calculator seems more than a little whacked to begin with. I mean, I suppose the TI-89 (and maybe the 83, although its hardware is far less impressive) has the ability to do asymmetric crypto, but why bother?
I'm pretty sure my TI-86 has a bunch of games written in assembly on it. I never learned to write them myself, or even what the architecture was, but there's a command (something like "asm()" ) that you had to use to run them.
Maemo uses a fairly standard apt-based package management system. I'm pretty sure that if a package from one of the repositories had a serious problem, the repo maintainer could push a "critical update" that disabled a misbehaving program. Of course, if the user wasn't updating (I forget if it updates by default or not) then nothing would happen.
Two reasons. First, the vast majority of users don't *want* to deal with this - they just want their (computer|phone|car|whatever) to work. In this case, respecting their wishes involves making it so they don't have to see this. Second, computer users (and smartphones are computers, just small ones that happen to use ARM chips) are, by and large, idiots when it comes to computers. They're ignorant, but they don't even WANT to learn. Leaving something with the capability to spread malware or launch a DoS attack at their discretion is a bad idea.
Mind you, I think the OP's idea *COULD* work, if there were some way to ensure that the user has at least some idea what they're doing (basically, a reverse-Turing-test: is the human smart enough to interact with the computer?) An example of this is the Red Pill mode in Maemo (a Smartphone/PDA Linux distro). It's published how to enter it, but the user has to look it up, then do some things that a normal user would probably never attempt. In return, you get a lot of safety features (which occasionally don't do what you wnat them to do) disabled. http://wiki.maemo.org/Red_Pill_mode
Question: what if you alter the User-Agent string in Opera? Pretend to be Firefox or something, then try to edit. If it's just checking the User Agent string, that should fix the issue (unless Opera really is incompatible). If it's doing JS functionality tests, then it's not really browser sniffing at all (and nothing you can do, save for hope Opera gets updated, will fix it).
"Natural right" is a ridiculous argument for something like this, and given how many people disgree with you I don't think it helps your case any to make such a claim without backing it up.
"Anyone can legally give a digital copy of the Bible or any other work that's out of copyright to anyone else." Emphasis added. Windows is not out of copyright, so your point is irrelevant. <sarcasm>Who cares, though? It's a natural right!</sarcasm>
Out of curiosity, would you make the same arguments in my defense if I were your lawyer and had access to, for example, a digital copy of your medical and tax records, and decided to forward them to anybody I felt like (ad agencies, insurance companies, whatever)? Legally I don't have the right to do so, but the data is already in digital form, and no matter how badly certain individuals want me to keep their information confidential, they can't stop me from copying!
An interesting note: you can configure UAC to require a Ctrl-Alt-Del before it shows you the prompt. Obviously this is a level of paranoia that most users don't want to deal with (similar to the way that in in XP they made it so home accounts don't need to press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reach the login screen anymore) which is why it's not the default, but it's intended to protect against exactly this situation. Ctrl-Alt-Del triggers a software interrupt, so unless your kernel has been tampered with (by which time you're already totally fucked) you know the next propmpt you see will be a real one.
Ironically, this option for UAC doesn't even add any security in the default UAC mode (where you only need to OK the elevation). It's for people who are either standard users or have UAC configured to ask their password even though they're members of the Administrators group. It just prevents a malicious program from presenting a false UAC dialog and getting you to reveal an Administrator's password.
Yes, slightly OT. The secure desktop is used by a couple other high-integrity components besides UAC, but I'd be highly suspicious of anything that displayed the SD unexpectedly. If I had this setting on, I wouldn't even wonder. That said, the kind of person who would make UAC more secure, never mind would actually know how, isn't the intended target of that kind of scam anyhow.
Ironically enough, IE has support for a form of whitelist-by-site. Basically, use the "Security Zones" feature (Security tab of Internet Options, or just double-click where it says "Internet | Protected Mode" in the status bar) and turn the permissions on the Internet zone way down. Like, no scripting, no plugins, no redirects, no downloads, etc. Disable unencrypted form submissions and turn on every signature check, or however you want to do it - just lock it down. No Flash or any other ActiveX (they're plugins), no.NET or Java (there might be a vulnerability), no JavaScript or VBScript, etc. In essence, make the Internet Zone act like the Restricted Sites Zone.
Then, go to the Trusted Sites Zone and put the settings where you want them to be (probably a little more secure than the default, depending on how paranoid you are about sites that you know) and put sites that you trust in that Zone. It's a bit more work, sure, but maintaining a whitelist always is. Besides, of the sites that you actually want to execute scripts and plugins, you probably have a handful that you visit regularly, and the rest can default to lock-down mode until you check them out. It might even be possible to use the Restricted Sites Zone as a "greylist" of sorts, if you set its security options similar to the default for Internet Zone. This would give you three tiers of trust, with the important point being that the default security Zone is the most-locked one.
As an extra benefit, this will function as a form of phishing protection - a URL that looks like it's legit (due to Unicode characters above 0x007F that have the same appearance as ASCII characters) will get thrown into the locked-down zone.
Interesting, I wonder where you're from that your situation is so different. We (myself and the interns I spoke to) most certainly do not get health insurance from MS; the recruiter was very clear on that. In addition, it was definitley not on my list of things we could expense.
In any case, it would be stupid for Microsoft to use a third-party insurance company for interns. They self-insure, and offer one of the best policies around - health, dental, vision, all sorts of operations are covered, there's no deductible, no co-pay, and to the best of my knowledge no limit. The only reason I can think of for using an external company would be to let us keep our coverage after leaving the company, which there was definitley no mention of.
It would take a pretty major change to add process integrity into WinXP. Basically, integrity is another type of security characteristic (along with owner and group) found in every process. Whenever a process wants to do something, Windows checks whether it has permission to do that thing, based on the security descriptors and access controls. For example, suppose your Windows process wants to open a file for writing. On XP, the ACL of the file is checked against the user and group of the process. On Vista and up, the integrity characteristic is also checked. This is how IE7/8's Protected Mode sandbox works - the browser runs as a Low Integrity process, and can't write to locations that aren't also marked as Low Integrity.
In the context of shatter attacks, Windows permits any window to pass messages to any other window, regardless of the traditional ACLs. However, on Vista and above, a Low Integrity process can't send messages to a window owned by a process with Medium, High, or System Integrity. Similarly, a process with Medium Integrity (most programs a user opens) can't send messages to windows owned by High Integrity processes (typically set by starting a process using UAC elevation). You get the idea.
Don't forget the other benefits, too. We get a free bike, or subsidized long-term car rental (the rental runs something like $385/month, which when you consider that most of the interns are 20 or 21, is a damn good deal). We get subsidized housing (it's still more expensive than the average dorm, but they provide furniture, all utilities including Internet, and it's mostly walking distance to MS campus - places like that usually run well over $1000/month even for 1 person) or a debit card with $2500 (ostensibly for housing, but you can spend it or withdraw it as you please, and the card lasts a year). There's also free membership to one of two local gyms, plus all the events they set up for us (free Baseball tickets, for example).
Adding it all up, and ignoring relocation (which they provide for free), pre-tax I got about $17,500 for three months of both working hard and playing hard. After taxes (low, since my annual income is actually quite low and there are tax breaks for being a student) and living expenses for the summer, that's maybe $14,000 which is just about the right amount to get me through my last year of university, barring any major unforseen expenses. I don't deny that it sounds like a lot of money for an intern to make, but to a guy paying his own way through college, it's barely enough, maybe, to avoid taking out a loan this year.
In fairness, at any given time it seems that at least one third of those Macs will be running Windows. Chances are they got it through the school, but I'm pretty sure that just about every student in the program at least has a Windows install (including the hardcore Linux types, incidentally). The chances are very good that they (the Mac users, not so much the Linux types) also have a copy of MS Office (which, unlike Windows, they can't legally get for free).
Based on chatting with other interns, and reading comments on our internal mailing list, your experience sounds pretty unique. Granted, I (and almost everybody I met) worked at the main campus in Redmond, but the most commonly-heard description was "this has been the best summer of my life." I am absolutely serious about that. Guy or girl, undregraduate or graduate, American or just here for the summer, no matter their role in the company (SDE, SDET, PM, business administration, research, etc), even regardless of whether or not they got a good final review (and the offer that comes with it)... every single said they'd had a great time. Not everybody said they wanted to come back after they graduated (although most did) but nobody said that the intern program had been a bad experience.
I say this not to make you feel bad, but to point out to the rest of the Slashdot readers that your case was very much an exception, not the rule.
Come, now, it was only one other performer (Ben Folds, if you're curious, doing a sweet solo gig). I'll grant you that MSR interns sound like they get a pretty different summer than the rest of us, but on the flip side you also work in much nicer buildings (OK, I'm sure we weren't all in the oldest part of campus, but I sure was).
I am somewhat surprised you didn't do the Intern Summer Celebration thing, though - they flew interns in from other campuses for that one.
This is especially true because Microsoft isn't the only company looking for people like this. In today's job market, Google, Amazon, and a few others (IBM prbably qualifies) all compete for those same individuals. When those individuals are students, the competition is a matter of their intern programs - each company tries to make a better offer in terms of salary, benefits, perks, and interesting work. I've received offers from other companies for internships with the same pay as Microsoft offers its interns, but MS really goes out of their way to make the Intern program *fun* as well. The reason is simple - they want to be absolutely sure that if they extend an offer to a former intern, that former interns takes it and comes back full-time.
Take the raw numbers with a grain of salt - we (interns) don't get health insurance or stock offers, and most certainly don't have any job security. The seemingly high offers are simply what the industry values us at - Microsoft is far from the only company making internship offers like that, and they all have to compete with one another to get us. I can get cheap insurance through my university now, but in a year that kind of thing will be a big deal.
* While I don't deny that interns typically don't have a lot of experience, we pretty much all had some. It might be previous internships at other companies, or high school internships, or volunteer work, or research, or even something like a significant contribution to open source or something you'd developed independently, but I think we all had something. As for lack of credentials, I think one could argue that simply getting into the university programs we were in says something.
To be honest, it's simply what the industry supports. Basic economics, really - when you have two or more companies fighting over the same interns, offers get pretty good in a hurry. After my Junior year, I had internship offers from both Microsoft and Amazon. Both were in this price range, and were in fact only $100/month (less than 2%) different. At the time, I too thought it was a ton of money - over twice what I'd made the previous summer - but as a student working my ass off to pay my own way through college, I needed it. Even those $300 (over a full summer) influenced my choice to a small degree. If the difference between the offers had been much more than that, I may have decided on the basis of the salary (and benefits, such as housing) offer alone.
It's worth pointing out that this isn't an offer that you're likely to get without some experince (probably at a much lower pay scale) earlier. I'd done software development internships for each fo the previous three summers, and while none had paid so well I certainly got a lot of experience those summers.
In general good advice (except for the pot club thing), but for a company like Microsoft (or Google, or to a lesser extent Amazon, and probably others of similar size) the initial interview is barely a foot in the door. It's usually under an hour long, conducted on your campus or over the phone, and pretty general - you're talking with recruiter types, not with the people who you would actually work with.
*IF* you do well in that inital interview, you get a second one on site with the business. Many of the larger companies will fly potential interns out to their location for this second interview. The second-round interview itself it pretty grueling - 4 hours (it varies by company; I've seen as short as 2 or as long as 6.5) of constantly being grilled by people who want to test not only your knowledge and experience, but also your intelligence and approach to problem-solving. The people you'll talk to are engineers, usually the ones who you may end up working with directly. The interview may take place long before the job begins (for example, interviewing during the fall for an internship that wont start until the next summer).
If you get the offer, and accept it, they'll fly you out again when the summer starts. Some companies (including Microsoft) also reserve and subsidize housing and transportation for their interns, who come not only from around the country but even from overseas.
Console DRM seems to work fairly well. Pirating games on a Xbox 360 is technically possible, but requires substantial effort on your part (it can't be done by "some hacker somewhere" and work for everybody without further effort) and playing online with a modded console is a good way to get your account banned. This also helps prevent cheating, a not-inconsequential benefit that PC games are constantly struggling with.
Slashdot Mirror
Incorrect. The ribbon, when pinned, takes up more room than a menu bar when the menus aren't being used. However, the ribbon collapses down to a single bar, no thicker than a menu bar. Double-click on the active tab to collapse the ribbon. Single-click on a tab to temporarily reveal it (like a menu). Double-click on a tab to pin the ribbon again.
On the flip side, you have people like me - a CS student who used MS office for over a decade before first trying OO.o, and found OO.o to be similar enough that it was easy to learn. Great, right? Why change what works? Well, because after trying Office 2007, trying to access anywhere near the feature-set of a modern word processor (I don't use Excel or Powerpoint much, and OneNote doesn't have a ribbon yet) via menus and tiny little toolbar icons feels like an incredibly painful waste of time.
Mind you, they should have better advertised how to hide the ribbon, and how to add to the quick-access toolbar that is still present, but from my pserspective the ribbon is what got me to switch *back* to Microsoft Office. I'm not sure how useful it will be on a browser, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
Since you mention it... about a year ago, a friend built a new gaming PC and put a Radeon 4850 (basically 1 generation older than this) in it with 1GB of VRAM. His "test app" for the new system was Crysis... enabled DX10, maxxed every setting, and played through the whole thing. At 1280x1024 his display isn't exactly super-high-res, but the framerate was high enough to be completley unnoticeable in almost every part of the game. A 4870 (same GPU at a faster clock speed) could probably have handled the whole thing easily. Both cards are under $200 (probably less now that the Radeon 5xxx series is out).
It took a while from release, but "Crysis with all the eye candy turned on" is possible on a pretty modest budget these days. It was also a surprisingly fun game; clearly some effort went into other parts of the game besides graphics.
Wine and CrossOver are pretty sweet, but pretending that either one is anywhere close to 100% compatible (especially with new releases) is ridiculous. For that matter, even if they do work, some other thing - like the video driver not doing hardware accel for no discernable reason (I've seen this three times, on three different versions of Linux across two different hardware configurations) - may prevent you from gaming. Sure, usually there's a solution out there, but when two CS students with five years of Linux expecerience between them can't figure it out in the first hour, the average computer user who is switching for the first time doesn't have a chance
Quite a few people still use dial-up connections. Broadband isn't even available in much of the US, outside of cities. Even where it is available, dial-up is a lot cheaper.
I personally know at least seven people, across three different households, who have no choice but dial-up, and I live near Seattle. One of those people is both a professional and hobbiest Linux/BSD hacker. One of the others uses a data compression Internet "SpeedBoost" on their Windows PC.
How is the 89 suited to taking notes? I mean, sure it's posible, but I thought even the 83 had an Alpha key... I used to keep handy formulas (notes, I guess) on my 86 in the form of "scripts" that didn't do anything.
Only the TI-9x calculators actually had a Qwerty keyboard, which was definitely suited to note-taking.
The concept of using signed binaries on a calculator seems more than a little whacked to begin with. I mean, I suppose the TI-89 (and maybe the 83, although its hardware is far less impressive) has the ability to do asymmetric crypto, but why bother?
I'm pretty sure my TI-86 has a bunch of games written in assembly on it. I never learned to write them myself, or even what the architecture was, but there's a command (something like "asm()" ) that you had to use to run them.
Maemo uses a fairly standard apt-based package management system. I'm pretty sure that if a package from one of the repositories had a serious problem, the repo maintainer could push a "critical update" that disabled a misbehaving program. Of course, if the user wasn't updating (I forget if it updates by default or not) then nothing would happen.
Two reasons. First, the vast majority of users don't *want* to deal with this - they just want their (computer|phone|car|whatever) to work. In this case, respecting their wishes involves making it so they don't have to see this. Second, computer users (and smartphones are computers, just small ones that happen to use ARM chips) are, by and large, idiots when it comes to computers. They're ignorant, but they don't even WANT to learn. Leaving something with the capability to spread malware or launch a DoS attack at their discretion is a bad idea.
Mind you, I think the OP's idea *COULD* work, if there were some way to ensure that the user has at least some idea what they're doing (basically, a reverse-Turing-test: is the human smart enough to interact with the computer?) An example of this is the Red Pill mode in Maemo (a Smartphone/PDA Linux distro). It's published how to enter it, but the user has to look it up, then do some things that a normal user would probably never attempt. In return, you get a lot of safety features (which occasionally don't do what you wnat them to do) disabled. http://wiki.maemo.org/Red_Pill_mode
Question: what if you alter the User-Agent string in Opera? Pretend to be Firefox or something, then try to edit. If it's just checking the User Agent string, that should fix the issue (unless Opera really is incompatible). If it's doing JS functionality tests, then it's not really browser sniffing at all (and nothing you can do, save for hope Opera gets updated, will fix it).
"Natural right" is a ridiculous argument for something like this, and given how many people disgree with you I don't think it helps your case any to make such a claim without backing it up.
"Anyone can legally give a digital copy of the Bible or any other work that's out of copyright to anyone else." Emphasis added. Windows is not out of copyright, so your point is irrelevant. <sarcasm>Who cares, though? It's a natural right!</sarcasm>
Out of curiosity, would you make the same arguments in my defense if I were your lawyer and had access to, for example, a digital copy of your medical and tax records, and decided to forward them to anybody I felt like (ad agencies, insurance companies, whatever)? Legally I don't have the right to do so, but the data is already in digital form, and no matter how badly certain individuals want me to keep their information confidential, they can't stop me from copying!
An interesting note: you can configure UAC to require a Ctrl-Alt-Del before it shows you the prompt. Obviously this is a level of paranoia that most users don't want to deal with (similar to the way that in in XP they made it so home accounts don't need to press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reach the login screen anymore) which is why it's not the default, but it's intended to protect against exactly this situation. Ctrl-Alt-Del triggers a software interrupt, so unless your kernel has been tampered with (by which time you're already totally fucked) you know the next propmpt you see will be a real one.
Ironically, this option for UAC doesn't even add any security in the default UAC mode (where you only need to OK the elevation). It's for people who are either standard users or have UAC configured to ask their password even though they're members of the Administrators group. It just prevents a malicious program from presenting a false UAC dialog and getting you to reveal an Administrator's password.
Yes, slightly OT. The secure desktop is used by a couple other high-integrity components besides UAC, but I'd be highly suspicious of anything that displayed the SD unexpectedly. If I had this setting on, I wouldn't even wonder. That said, the kind of person who would make UAC more secure, never mind would actually know how, isn't the intended target of that kind of scam anyhow.
Ironically enough, IE has support for a form of whitelist-by-site. Basically, use the "Security Zones" feature (Security tab of Internet Options, or just double-click where it says "Internet | Protected Mode" in the status bar) and turn the permissions on the Internet zone way down. Like, no scripting, no plugins, no redirects, no downloads, etc. Disable unencrypted form submissions and turn on every signature check, or however you want to do it - just lock it down. No Flash or any other ActiveX (they're plugins), no .NET or Java (there might be a vulnerability), no JavaScript or VBScript, etc. In essence, make the Internet Zone act like the Restricted Sites Zone.
Then, go to the Trusted Sites Zone and put the settings where you want them to be (probably a little more secure than the default, depending on how paranoid you are about sites that you know) and put sites that you trust in that Zone. It's a bit more work, sure, but maintaining a whitelist always is. Besides, of the sites that you actually want to execute scripts and plugins, you probably have a handful that you visit regularly, and the rest can default to lock-down mode until you check them out. It might even be possible to use the Restricted Sites Zone as a "greylist" of sorts, if you set its security options similar to the default for Internet Zone. This would give you three tiers of trust, with the important point being that the default security Zone is the most-locked one.
As an extra benefit, this will function as a form of phishing protection - a URL that looks like it's legit (due to Unicode characters above 0x007F that have the same appearance as ASCII characters) will get thrown into the locked-down zone.
Interesting, I wonder where you're from that your situation is so different. We (myself and the interns I spoke to) most certainly do not get health insurance from MS; the recruiter was very clear on that. In addition, it was definitley not on my list of things we could expense.
In any case, it would be stupid for Microsoft to use a third-party insurance company for interns. They self-insure, and offer one of the best policies around - health, dental, vision, all sorts of operations are covered, there's no deductible, no co-pay, and to the best of my knowledge no limit. The only reason I can think of for using an external company would be to let us keep our coverage after leaving the company, which there was definitley no mention of.
It would take a pretty major change to add process integrity into WinXP. Basically, integrity is another type of security characteristic (along with owner and group) found in every process. Whenever a process wants to do something, Windows checks whether it has permission to do that thing, based on the security descriptors and access controls. For example, suppose your Windows process wants to open a file for writing. On XP, the ACL of the file is checked against the user and group of the process. On Vista and up, the integrity characteristic is also checked. This is how IE7/8's Protected Mode sandbox works - the browser runs as a Low Integrity process, and can't write to locations that aren't also marked as Low Integrity.
In the context of shatter attacks, Windows permits any window to pass messages to any other window, regardless of the traditional ACLs. However, on Vista and above, a Low Integrity process can't send messages to a window owned by a process with Medium, High, or System Integrity. Similarly, a process with Medium Integrity (most programs a user opens) can't send messages to windows owned by High Integrity processes (typically set by starting a process using UAC elevation). You get the idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Integrity_Control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Interface_Privilege_Isolation
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb625963.aspx
Don't forget the other benefits, too. We get a free bike, or subsidized long-term car rental (the rental runs something like $385/month, which when you consider that most of the interns are 20 or 21, is a damn good deal). We get subsidized housing (it's still more expensive than the average dorm, but they provide furniture, all utilities including Internet, and it's mostly walking distance to MS campus - places like that usually run well over $1000/month even for 1 person) or a debit card with $2500 (ostensibly for housing, but you can spend it or withdraw it as you please, and the card lasts a year). There's also free membership to one of two local gyms, plus all the events they set up for us (free Baseball tickets, for example).
Adding it all up, and ignoring relocation (which they provide for free), pre-tax I got about $17,500 for three months of both working hard and playing hard. After taxes (low, since my annual income is actually quite low and there are tax breaks for being a student) and living expenses for the summer, that's maybe $14,000 which is just about the right amount to get me through my last year of university, barring any major unforseen expenses. I don't deny that it sounds like a lot of money for an intern to make, but to a guy paying his own way through college, it's barely enough, maybe, to avoid taking out a loan this year.
In fairness, at any given time it seems that at least one third of those Macs will be running Windows. Chances are they got it through the school, but I'm pretty sure that just about every student in the program at least has a Windows install (including the hardcore Linux types, incidentally). The chances are very good that they (the Mac users, not so much the Linux types) also have a copy of MS Office (which, unlike Windows, they can't legally get for free).
Based on chatting with other interns, and reading comments on our internal mailing list, your experience sounds pretty unique. Granted, I (and almost everybody I met) worked at the main campus in Redmond, but the most commonly-heard description was "this has been the best summer of my life." I am absolutely serious about that. Guy or girl, undregraduate or graduate, American or just here for the summer, no matter their role in the company (SDE, SDET, PM, business administration, research, etc), even regardless of whether or not they got a good final review (and the offer that comes with it)... every single said they'd had a great time. Not everybody said they wanted to come back after they graduated (although most did) but nobody said that the intern program had been a bad experience.
I say this not to make you feel bad, but to point out to the rest of the Slashdot readers that your case was very much an exception, not the rule.
Come, now, it was only one other performer (Ben Folds, if you're curious, doing a sweet solo gig). I'll grant you that MSR interns sound like they get a pretty different summer than the rest of us, but on the flip side you also work in much nicer buildings (OK, I'm sure we weren't all in the oldest part of campus, but I sure was).
I am somewhat surprised you didn't do the Intern Summer Celebration thing, though - they flew interns in from other campuses for that one.
This is especially true because Microsoft isn't the only company looking for people like this. In today's job market, Google, Amazon, and a few others (IBM prbably qualifies) all compete for those same individuals. When those individuals are students, the competition is a matter of their intern programs - each company tries to make a better offer in terms of salary, benefits, perks, and interesting work. I've received offers from other companies for internships with the same pay as Microsoft offers its interns, but MS really goes out of their way to make the Intern program *fun* as well. The reason is simple - they want to be absolutely sure that if they extend an offer to a former intern, that former interns takes it and comes back full-time.
Take the raw numbers with a grain of salt - we (interns) don't get health insurance or stock offers, and most certainly don't have any job security. The seemingly high offers are simply what the industry values us at - Microsoft is far from the only company making internship offers like that, and they all have to compete with one another to get us. I can get cheap insurance through my university now, but in a year that kind of thing will be a big deal.
As for the salaries that Microsoft pays in general, that information isn't terribly hard to find online. If you've got experience* and preferably a degree (not strictly required, but most employees seem to have at least one), go ahead an apply. https://careers.microsoft.com/ (or https://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/collegembahome.aspx for internships).
* While I don't deny that interns typically don't have a lot of experience, we pretty much all had some. It might be previous internships at other companies, or high school internships, or volunteer work, or research, or even something like a significant contribution to open source or something you'd developed independently, but I think we all had something. As for lack of credentials, I think one could argue that simply getting into the university programs we were in says something.
To be honest, it's simply what the industry supports. Basic economics, really - when you have two or more companies fighting over the same interns, offers get pretty good in a hurry. After my Junior year, I had internship offers from both Microsoft and Amazon. Both were in this price range, and were in fact only $100/month (less than 2%) different. At the time, I too thought it was a ton of money - over twice what I'd made the previous summer - but as a student working my ass off to pay my own way through college, I needed it. Even those $300 (over a full summer) influenced my choice to a small degree. If the difference between the offers had been much more than that, I may have decided on the basis of the salary (and benefits, such as housing) offer alone.
It's worth pointing out that this isn't an offer that you're likely to get without some experince (probably at a much lower pay scale) earlier. I'd done software development internships for each fo the previous three summers, and while none had paid so well I certainly got a lot of experience those summers.
In general good advice (except for the pot club thing), but for a company like Microsoft (or Google, or to a lesser extent Amazon, and probably others of similar size) the initial interview is barely a foot in the door. It's usually under an hour long, conducted on your campus or over the phone, and pretty general - you're talking with recruiter types, not with the people who you would actually work with.
*IF* you do well in that inital interview, you get a second one on site with the business. Many of the larger companies will fly potential interns out to their location for this second interview. The second-round interview itself it pretty grueling - 4 hours (it varies by company; I've seen as short as 2 or as long as 6.5) of constantly being grilled by people who want to test not only your knowledge and experience, but also your intelligence and approach to problem-solving. The people you'll talk to are engineers, usually the ones who you may end up working with directly. The interview may take place long before the job begins (for example, interviewing during the fall for an internship that wont start until the next summer).
If you get the offer, and accept it, they'll fly you out again when the summer starts. Some companies (including Microsoft) also reserve and subsidize housing and transportation for their interns, who come not only from around the country but even from overseas.
Console DRM seems to work fairly well. Pirating games on a Xbox 360 is technically possible, but requires substantial effort on your part (it can't be done by "some hacker somewhere" and work for everybody without further effort) and playing online with a modded console is a good way to get your account banned. This also helps prevent cheating, a not-inconsequential benefit that PC games are constantly struggling with.