The summary is where the incorrect title appears: "fundraiser at Google CEO Marissa Meyer's home."

Unless format B is lossless, you will degrade the quality when transcoding from format A to format B. By definition, a lossy encoding will result in the loss of some information from the source video. I haven't experimented with this, but I would guess that codecs that are similar to each other (i.e., both lose similar information) would result in less degradation with an output at roughly the same bitrate. If the codec is completely different (loses information unrelated to the information that the first codec discarded), I would imagine you would need to increase the bitrate closer to the point of being lossless in order to maintain the quality.

I assume that by owning @hotmail.com and @microsoft.com, Microsoft itself was the target of a large amount of spam from this botnet. That would give Microsoft standing to sue, as well as a lot of evidence to back up its claims.

For what it's worth, the disk space requirements quoted for Windows are not for the OS, let alone the kernel. The disk space calculation is based on the OS, a set of applications (Office + other basic apps), room for documents, plus a couple service packs. The goal for Win7 was that it would be usable on a netbook with a 16GB SSD. I've heard of people getting a full install on an 8GB SSD, but it's not supported.

The objection that the DoJ and other companies have is that Google is being granted a wide license by way of a class action settlement. Normally a company can't make a licensing agreement with all copyright owners without contacting each and every one of them. But since this is a class action settlement, all members of the class are automatically opted in to the agreement. Interestingly, all the publishers who sued Google in the first place have opted out of this particular arrangement (they negotiated better deals with Google). So this settlement is being agreed to by a group of publishers who have nothing to lose.

The only way a competitor could get a similar agreement is by being sued and hoping that a similar settlement is the end result.

The proper way for something like this to occur is for Congress to modify copyright law to allow any company to set up a similar service (potentially with a single entity in charge of distributing royalties and managing any opt-in/opt-out process).

Hold Alt, navigate through the menus with the keyboard, then press PrtSc.

The documented ones are for views that you can normally get to in Explorer. The "All Tasks" folder is an implementation detail for the control panel search feature (instead of special casing the indexing of control panel tasks, a virtual folder contains all of the tasks). It's not intended to be used for any other purpose, so it is not documented.

For what it's worth, the VC++ team is getting rid of the NCB file in VS 2010. Here's a follow up post with some more details on the new architecture behind intellisense: http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/05/27/rebuilding-intellisense.aspx

It appears the UI isn't in Windows 7, but the feature is definitely there. If you have Windows 7 with a recent WiFi driver (virtual WLAN support is required for Win7 logo program), just type "netsh wlan start hostednetwork" and it'll create the virtual WLAN. Type "netsh wlan set hostednetwork" to see the options for SSID, passphrase, etc. The documentation for this is on MSDN.

There are actually changes in Windows 7 that help with this. WiFi virtualization was added to the Windows 7 kernel allowing you to run two WiFi connections from the same hardware adapter. So you could put a PC in range of a normal access point and then share the connection by creating an access point on the second virtual adapater. With previous versions of Windows, you would need two hardware adapters, or you would be limited to sharing a LAN connection.

In order to "look in the same place", you need to have code that does the looking. The NX bit will prevent arbitrary code from executing on the stack. One way to get around NX is to overrun a buffer and replace the return address of the stack frame with a known function address that does what you want. In order for this to work, you need to know the address in advance of the attack. ASLR makes it difficult to predict this address.

To get a similar deal, a competitor would need to either be sued (so the courts could authorize a deal) or Congress would need to grant an exception to copyright. You can't create a contract with "All publishers" unless you actually get an agreement with all publishers. The class action lawsuit gets around this by allowing Google to settle with all members of the class at once (even if those class members are not aware of the litigation). What's worse is that all the publishers who have lawyers working on the settlement are actually planning to opt-out (they have better deals already in place). So this settlement will cover everybody except the publishers who brought the suit in the first place.

This isn't about IT, which is already remotely administered in datacenters around the world. Product groups generally have their own labs containing servers for running builds, tests, etc. These are also remotely administered, including things like installing OS builds. The new datacenter is a way to consolidate these small labs.

I can't speak for the OO.o prototype, but in Office 2007 you can actually minimize the ribbon: either double click on one of the tabs, or right click and select "Minimize the ribbon". After that you actually get much more space for the document than you did with previous versions of Office (unless you got rid of every toolbar, but then it would be much less usable). Once you've done this, the ribbon will drop down only when you select one of the tabs and then go away after you select an option or interact with the document. There are a couple screenshots here: http://www.lytebyte.com/2008/03/09/how-to-minimize-and-maximize-the-office-ribbon/

If you've turned off IE, you won't be able to run iexplore.exe (the executable is removed from the Program Files directory). It's just like how you can't run telnet or IIS by default, until you turn on those features.