Windows

Not only has Microsoft refused to come to the aid of a Russian teacher who's being threatened with (Russian!) jail for having unlicensed Microsoft software, despite appeals by Mikhail Gorbachev and even Putin, I had a horrible experience last night trying to upgrade from Open Office to MS Office.

I was walking home from work last night when I saw a Vista promotion projected on the floor of the MTR (subway in Hong Kong)...

This does not bode well for Windows-oriented Open Source, and goes a long way to explain why even 5 years after the release of the framework, .NET-based Open Source has never taken off in a significant way. Projects like NDoc and Dot Net Nuke have been the exception, and now one wonders if independent, non-Microsoft-sponsored projects of any size can make it long term.

Microsoft set out with a "business" vision alone, to own the software running the desktop. It didn't define an "operating system" as a resource manager. From a marketing standpoint, this would have been an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how fast the computer, resources are limited.

The following script can be used to swap a Windows hosts file (located in System32\drivers\etc). For example, if you need to have different hosts files for different situations (for example, when logged onto a certain network that is using split brain DNS) then you can use this script to swap them out.

I haven't seen this kind of push of new information by such a lineup of author heavyweights (like Don Box and David Chappel) since the days of the .NET beta. Below is the list of articles that caught my eye. I'll be trying to get through these over the coming weeks.

A two-in-one special: the main post goes into great detail about exactly what the topic describes, but the attached comments go into a whole other discussion that should be of interest even to those with no interest in COM+.