Respectfully, I don't agree. The photos show a truth: a truth about what happens when we speed at 100mph on cocaine and fly off the road. They show a truth about how incredibly fragile we are. That we are mortal.

Unfortunately, driving 100mph on cocaine and flying off the road doesn't particularly scream "WE ARE FRAGILE".

Rather, a better example of that is perhaps dying in a collision while going to work on a neighborhood road at 25mph. The only thing that dying from a collision caused by driving 100mph on cocaine tells us is that there is no such thing as God Mode.

The message store in Exchange can be simplified by viewing it as being a bunch of MAPI tables.

A read-only view of a table is provided by the IMAPITable : IUnknown interface.

If you have an initialized IMAPIContainer, then you can get a MAPITable by calling either its contents or hierarchy table retrieval methods.

Regardless of how you get the table, you have something you can work with in terms of querying, but as far as I know there is no outright support for straight up SQL query syntax with MAPI and Exchange. I'd recommend instead using the ExecSQL method found on the MAPITable object exposed by Redemption.

Agreed.

I tend to view Silverlight as the black sheep of the family of WPF UI-programming technologies; an approach that is useful for desktop application development, but an utterly inappropriate choice for web content.

I'm not aware of any instant messaging client that integrates nicely with Active Directory other than Office Communicator (hell, it extends the schema), which definitely fails in the "FOSS" department.

I believe Jabber has LDAP support, however I'm not sure if there is any sort of "corporate address book" functionality built in.

Because Microsoft does not have a proper installer interface that installs programs for you.. instead each program has it's own installer/updater Windows has no control over the process and does not know if the user has been asked or not ...

Perhaps you meant to say that Microsoft doesn't have a package management system, because Windows definitely has a transactional installer interface that installs programs for you. Yes, it does require developers/publishers to learn how to use it, but many don't, which there is no excuse for.

If Microsoft offered a package management system like our favorite Linux distros do, would you really trust it?

First of all, no one is forced to install the .NET framework. Most of the larger commercial applications, if not all of them, have no .NET dependencies, including Office.

Second of all, why is this so horrible when installing Adobe Reader (post-Firefox install) does the same thing?

Firefox certainly doesn't rely on .NET, but that's the whole point of a "plugin". You see, you can extend a product to support additional technologies if it has a pluggable framework. There is .NET content for the web, and the same update we're talking about (which addresses ClickOnce) also adds functionality for XBAP's.

However, I do think that the Firefox extension should be a separate feature in the .NET 3.5 setup; one that we can switch off either during install time or afterward, like any MSI feature.

I'm curious as to how they would achieve digital signature verification as (in the case of Windows) using WinVerifyTrust relies on the root certificate authority store.

If they got around that via throwing their own CA in the store, that would only lead to an easy way to make the virus ineffective. Their might be built-in functionality in the virus itself for such operations, but I'd think that would increase the size of the binary too much.

Yes, most semi-competent folks would probably be able to learn how to use regedit in an hour; the difficulty in changing simple settings in the HKLM or HKCU is not that high. The registry is a simple thing when it is used for this purpose. Using it is much more pleasant than having to tangle with vast amounts of scattered INI files.

The complicated and mind-numbing area of the registry is the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive, where all the COM information is stored. Unversed individuals will not make sense of the various types of entities stored there without some prior knowledge. This is also where the design of regedit fails, given the sheer amount of items thrown at the user (very difficult to scroll through thousands of CLSID's). This is unfortunate, as the HKCR is probably the most critical section of the registry.

Technically, you don't even have to have over 4 gigabytes of RAM to see the benefit. Having just 4 gigabytes of RAM installed with a 32-bit Windows running will leave you with only 2 - 3.5 gigabytes available (3.1 gigabytes being the average).

I use 64-bit at work because I want to:

• Get full use of my 4 gigabytes of RAM.
• Ensure whatever software I'm designing works on both architectures.

The whole point of redesigning the interface was for the "inefficient" mouse users. How does the fact that the keyboard shortcuts remained the same during an interface overhaul allude to an assertion of any sort of understanding on Microsoft's part?

Regarding the "item is useless until way later" situation: that's a common theme in that genre, and can be observed in other games as well.

An example that comes to mind is the honeycomb and wand items in King's Quest V.

Although the immediate effect of this device is one of confusion, I always felt that it was intended to be humorous.