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Windows Server 2008 is enjoying great reviews with its performance, stability and spot-on features while Windows Vista is getting the opposite despite having the same codebase as that of Windows Server 2008. TheRegister has an article hoping to see Microsoft platform and services division Mark Russinovich get his teeth into this. The article is saying that [...] More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

SeattlePI has an excerpt of the speech of Steve Ballmer at the MVP conference in Seattle. I agree with Steve that Vista is a work in progress; but when you are the paying customer who paid in full, it is another story. In an excerpt of the speech: Windows Vista: A work in progress. [Laughter, applause.] A [...] More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

There was big coverage about Windows 7 being released in 2008 which probably has increased the number of people who wanted to skip Vista. Benjamin Gray, analyst at Forrester, is against this thought and says: Although we applaud companies for thinking ahead, there are some harsh realities for those considering skipping Windows Vista. Ironically, one of [...] More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Microsoft has released a Vista Feature Pack supporting Bluetooth 2.1. Below are the details for it. Description of the Windows Vista Feature Pack for Wireless This article describes the Windows Vista Feature Pack for Wireless. This software update includes the following components or features that improve wireless support in Windows Vista: Bluetooth version 2.1 support Unified Pairing user interface Windows [...] More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Steve Ballmer has talked during the Microsoft MVP Summit 2008 on Vista as reported at WVW. The MVPs may not be at all satisfied (they are full paying customers as well) with the “work in progress” mantra, but they surely did make it up on this party: Tags: Microsoft, Vista, WindowsShare This More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Windows Vista Service Pack 1: Not for the Impatient (Washington Post) Could Windows Vista actually be a beta? (Blorge) Benchmarks fail to explain why Vista falters and Server 2008 succeeds (Blorge) Meet the Windows Server 2008 robot (Network World) Making the PC and Mac safer for kids (Bangkok Post) Tags: Microsoft, Vista, WindowsShare This More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

This is a compilation of the many faces of Steve Ballmer. He has some funny moments and I am sure some those pictures are reactions of the sales of Windows Vista. Tags: Microsoft, Vista, WindowsShare This More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Elimination of XP has Microsoft users rebelling Youngstown Vindicator, OH - 6 minutes ago They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft’s latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft rings alarm on Windows rights bug Computerworld, MA - Apr 18, 2008 The bug affects Windows XP Professional SP2, and all versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and the brand-new Windows Server 2008. ... Microsoft investigates new Windows zero-day flaw SearchSecurity.com all 8 news articles More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Sorry to say it but it just is... I mean where do I start? Tons of broken links to Microsoft.com, inability to remove infections it finds, inability to find many infections to begin with, along with a pretty but frankly fairly poor UI (e.g. Try and even a descriptive log outside of the overview the Event Viewer gives you). I know Microsoft purchased it from another company but I expected them to be working on it in order for it to improve but the only improvement I've seen is the ability to see the status of other computers signed up on the same account. I think the old saying is true - You /do/ get what you pay for. Live Care is cheap, there's no doubt about it, but it is also worth its low price. I am seriously considering signing up to BitDefender even though I have an active Live Care subscription. PS - Live Care or OneLive Care or Live Onecare... Whatever it is called. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Is Microsoft doing anything related to Knowledge Representation? There's more and more traction around RDF/RDFS/OWL KR, but I don't see much news, if anything, about Microsoft doing anything whatsoever in this space. Astoria did support RDF, but dropped it again (I believe). Are they "rolling their own" KR stack do you think, or will they eventually adopt the W3C SW/KR stack? What say you? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Ok, I'm at the end of my tether trying to make this work. I finally decided to move to Vista x64 and all was going well, installed SQL 2005 Developer x64 SP2, VS 2008 Team Suite and TFC and checked a project I was working on out and I get this error trying to open*the DB pro projects in the solution --------------------------- Microsoft Visual Studio --------------------------- An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server.* When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified) --------------------------- OK** Cancel** --------------------------- I've checked that I have TCP, Named Pipes etc all enabled, I've turned the firewall off, I made sure remote connections are enabled on SQL, I've turned UAC of (you never know) and nothing fixes it.* So I nstalled another machine and hit the same problem, so I went back to 32bit and followed the same steps and all worked. I have no problems connecting via SQL Manager, or via the sever manager in VS, just DBPro projects. Please someone out there tell me they know the answer to this! :s Thanks, Stephen. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Who is watching UFC fight tonight? I just noticed sports.yahoo.com has PPV streaming with 24 hour back viewing.* Never knew that before.* Seems like a good one for a ms PPV Silverlight site. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

At work I use Linux and Windows, at home I use Mac OSX...the girlfriend uses my Macbook and since her computer died no longer does she use Windows.... But the other day she asked me "What is the difference between Windows and Linux".... And while I could go on and on about OpenSource, Community, and etc...none of that means squat to her... Since MOST of us here are multiOS people, how would you explain Linux to someone that doesn't care about Kernels, Modules, and or compiling RPMs? Any videos you'd show them? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> TECH BLOG The PC of Doctor Moreau TechNewsWorld, CA - Apr 17, 2008 I found this Windows theme, dubbed "Vista OS X", on Lifehacker, a blog that features interesting downloads from around the Web as well as ideas and tips on ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

For my final project, my C++ professor has given me two options. I can either do the fifth programming assignment or propose something of similar or greater difficulty and do that instead (with my professor's approval of course). I could do the fifth programming assignment, but it is boring in comparsion to what I am considering doing. Before I describe what I am considering doing, let me describe how I arrived at the idea: A while back, I wrote a C program that searches for prime numbers of the form 2^n - 1. These are called mersenne numbers. It is very simple. It accepts either a range of exponents or a single exponent and tests their corresponding mersenne numbers for primality. To do this, it makes use of a few theorems from mathematics. The first is that if 2^n - 1 is prime, n is prime. That is to say that if n is not prime, 2^n - 1 is not prime by the law of the contrapositive. Therefore, my program implements an erathosthenes sieve, which finds all of the odd prime numbers between 2 and the largest exponent given to it. It uses a function for this, which returns an array of integers, each integer representing the primality of 32 odd numbers. It also makes use of parallelism. When given a range of exponents to test, it is designed to spawn a preset number of threads and wait for them to execute. It uses mutexes to perform syncronization between these threads. To save memory, a linked list containing the mersenne primes it finds (which are very few in number) is returned to the main function. Testing is done using something called a lucas lehmer test and arbitary precision arithmetic is implemented using the GNU Multi-Precision Library. Improvements that could be made to my C program would involve sorting the list, the automated detection of the number of processors avaliable (which is difficult to do in a cross platform manner) and the use of flat files or some sort of database to store information pertaining to what has been checked so it need not be checked again. To make it into something I could submit as my final project, I would have to rewrite it in C++ and use at least 3 classes (all hand-written, although I believe I am allowed to inherit from existing classes). Class wise, I believe I can make: A PrimeArray class that has a single constructor that takes an integer. The integer will represent its upper bound and it will perform an erathothenes sieve, storing the information in an array of integers with each integer storing information for 32 odd numbers. It will have accessor methods to check the primality of a number, even, odd or unknown, mutator methods to shrink or expand the array and a destructor. A List class. Given that C++ already has a list class, I am not sure if my class will extend it, wrap it, only use it in certain methods (e.g. a sort method) or not use it at all. I know that extending a class that lacks a virtual destructor is bad, as then the subclasses' destructor will not be run, so if I decide to use the existing list class and I want to do something like overload the [] operator without iterating through the entire list using pops and pushes, I will have to write my class as a wrapper. A Thread class to act as a wrapper for the pthreads library. After thinking about this for a while, this would be best implemented using three classes. A base threading class that encapsulates basic thread creation and destruction logic, a threadpool class that uses it (while containing logic to the detect the number of cores avaliable on a given machine) and a sub class that is specialized for the testing of mersenne prime numbers using the logic of its parent class. This would allow my program's interface to run asyncronously with my program's mathematical computations. If I do this, when the threadpool class creates a thread, it will not create a thread using some external function, but a member function and call the external function from inside that member function. The object could be initialized with (or perhaps given) a function pointer to a second external function that would be called by the last thread when it terminates, which I believe would correspond to something professional programmers call event handling. Doing that will allow me to implement a queue for the threads to which I could dynamically add additional exponents for testing as the user requests it and also allow the user to check on the status of tests being done. A data storage/access class, that will act as an interface between my program and where ever I choose to store records of what is prime and what is not so that my program need not perform the same calculations repeatily across sessions. If I use binary/flat files, this will have to be made thread safe. A mersenne class, which will contain a few private variables, a few constructors and a single static member function for primality testing. The actual lucas lehmer test could be made a private member function and the static member function could simply implements theorems that could be used to avoid some lucas lehmer tests, such as the one that states that composite exponents are composite mersenne numbers and another involving sophie germain primes. This will heavily interface with the data storage/access class such that it might be a good idea to inherit from it and perhaps use function overriding, especially since the data storage class will be restricted to storing and retrieving mersenne primes. Since this is C++ and not C, I will also be making use of the GNU Multi-Precision Library's C++ wrapper. If I am feeling particularly bold, I could use all of these classes and make a program that utilizes a graphical interface. Since I want this to be Unix compatible, I would be using GTK+, although I wonder whether or not that would matter considering that using a graphical interface will prevent my program from being run on my university's Unix server. Despite that, I could still take the classes, create a library that encapsulates them and use that library in two separate programs, a commandline program that can run on my university's unix server and a graphical user interface program that can run on Windows. Does anyone have any thoughts? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Small IT companies may get tax holiday beyond 2009 Economic Times, India - 1 hour ago The government has issued a high-security threat note against popular applications including Windows Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> TECH BLOG The PC of Doctor Moreau TechNewsWorld, CA - Apr 17, 2008 I found this Windows theme, dubbed "Vista OS X", on Lifehacker, a blog that features interesting downloads from around the Web as well as ideas and tips on ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Small IT companies may get tax holiday beyond 2009 Economic Times, India - 20 minutes ago The government has issued a high-security threat note against popular applications including Windows Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

So i have just seen a demo on VMWare fusion. The concept is EXTREMELY Interesting to say the least. The idea is that it's a virtualization which intergrates with the Mac OS, so that you can start the guest OS and drag out the applications seamlessly. I have seen quite a few people reporting that it even runs Visual Studio extremely smoothly, even faster than a normal PC in some cases. Visual Studio and Office 2007(I could probably live with iWork 08) and games are the ONLY reasons im sticking with my Windows machine. But I'm starting to think that once games works better under the mac, even with software like VMWare, people have no reason to actually stick with a normal PC, rather than buying a mac. So at this point the only reason i can't justify buying a mac is because my games simply wont work and that i have some doubts about the graphics card build in, which would even keep me from playing games if i used bootcamp.But also the cost is keeping me from doing it. But for next upgrade, i might just buy a mac. So how do i justify NOT buying a mac? What does turn me off with the mac is the developer history. Objective-C isn't my cup of tea, and to get access to the apple developer center you have to pay. And i'm still a big fan of .NET, but i will still be able to exercise my .NET muscle with Visual Studio trough VMWare fusion. So please give me reasons to not buy a mac. My faith in Microsoft is disappearing by the minute beyond the .NET paradigm, and I'm not comfortable with it. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

With Silverlight 2 & AIR getting*lots of*press, along with MS, Google, Adobe, etc. releasing more apps on the web, I'm starting to wonder about the viability of a new kind of "thin client" that is basically a machine that only has an internet browser. I don't hear anybody talking about this concept, but I'm sure I'm not the first to think of it. How much potential do you think there is create a software model where all apps run through a browser? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Any places where you can grab High Definition audio on the web (doesn't have to be free, it can also be commercial, but free is preferred ;-) So far I've found the Linn music store which sells studio master recordings in FLAC format! I'm thinking someting along the lines of Creative Commons or Internet Archive, but haven't really found much. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> TECH BLOG The PC of Doctor Moreau TechNewsWorld, CA - Apr 17, 2008 I found this Windows theme, dubbed "Vista OS X", on Lifehacker, a blog that features interesting downloads from around the Web as well as ideas and tips on ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/fix-for-special-folders-reverting-to-default-folder-icon-in-windows-vista/ A commenter mentioned that you can rename the file, and then it'll revert it back to the icon. The thing is, now it looks like you have two copies of the same folder. For me, I renamed mine to "The Music."* What I did was that I looked at the "Location" tab in the property sheet, and indeed, it said "The Music." So I simply changed it back to "Music," replaced the old Desktop.ini with the newer (and larger) Desktop.ini file, and the two Music folders merged back into one and "The Music" was nowhere to be found. After a restart/logoff (I had UAC turned off for a brief moment, then turned it back on,) sure enough my music folder was back to it's former glory. It should work for all special profile folders, so just try it. I hope that this helps a lot of people who just get annoyed with seeing special folders with plain folders. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Windows Needs A Good Pruning InformationWeek, NY - 17 hours ago Responding to last week's blog entry about the Gartner "Windows is Collapsing" Affair, one reader took me to task in calling Vista "bloated. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds