http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

Windows does have UI standards readily available for developers in the place a Windows developer would be most likely to look for them. They can also be downloaded in PDF format, and they used to publish it as a book, too.

Of course, there are a lot of guidelines that a lot of people ignore, and a few that are in direct conflict with Apple's guidelines for OS X. The conflicts especially are where Apple either ignores the guidelines for Windows applications or simply falls back on consistency across platforms, rather than consistency on the current platform (something MS got bashed for with one of the 9x versions of Office for Mac OS).

According to TFA (reality may exist separately from what the article's author has written), they were expected to take down the site when they were notified of the "illegal activity". Now the fact that the web hosts were sued and found guilty leads me to believe that it is more likely they were being stubborn and not helping the investigation. However, the article didn't really make that clear.

What the article did seem to make clear, though, was that the web host's lawyers seemed to rely on existing DMCA law and case law, while Vuitton's lawyers relied on existing trademark law as applied to the physical realm. How they made the stretch from cooperating with a legal investigation to, for instance, give police access to a rental property where someone believes counterfeit goods are sold or manufactured, vs. taking down a web site where someone alleges counterfeit goods are being sold, I don't know. I would imagine the web host's lawyers thought they were in the right in advising their client, but I would hope he also followed the steps put in place by the DMCA to comply with a takedown notice, rather than just filing it in the junk mail.

Don't most windows solidify when maximized? Maybe I'm just imagining it, since I don't have transparent windows available on this machine to check, and don't use maximized windows enough at home to really remember.

You don't really need it if Escape actually stops when you want it to, either, because Enter and CTRL+R already work perfectly fine for Go and Reload.

If you fill the width with tabs, you end up with about a slightly less than 2/3-sized title bar. Of course, if you only have 1 or 2 tabs open, you end up with about a 1.5x-height title bar for a portion of the window. Additionally, the window function buttons are the smaller size of the title bar.

Umm grabbing and moving the tab does not do the same thing as grabbing and moving the title bar, and double-clicking the tab appears to do nothing. If I manage to grab the small space above the tab I get the functionality I would expect from the title bar, but that makes for a much smaller than usual target.

Of course, if you sit around with your browser in full screen mode all day, the only one of these that applies is double-clicking the bar.

While I agree that both OS X and international issues should be important, it should probably also be remembered that some users would like the Windows version of Firefox to conform to Windows UI standards, too, even if IE and Office don't bother to do so (and who knows how many other MS apps).

I usually use multiple applications side-by-side on a widescreen monitor, or multiple MDI windows side-by-side within a larger window maximized to the screen. While I can understand the use of the vertical space, I find it more useful for using applications full-screen than for my personal use scenarios, and when I do full-screen an app it usually is to run video ;)

There would be an a missing from "all" if you were spelled "ya". Thanks for playing, though.

I'm not an MBA type, but I have a pretty good idea about these issues.
1) High-dollar consulting/contracting deals are usually made to handle things that have the in-house people scratching their heads, or that appear to be harder to do and are usually ill-defined in the first place. Usually it's the combination of a moving target and trying to do something that may actually be difficult that screws up these types of projects, but there's also the chance that the consultant or contractor was less competent than they let the client believe.

2) Generally the idea for outsourcing is that you go to a fairly reputable consultant firm that says they can get you the expertise you need to get the job done, without having to hire someone that you don't think you'll need after the job is finished. One of the big problems here, though, is that someone usually has to maintain these systems after the consultant is gone, and no one understands it if it was setup by an outside entity.

3) In the case of government work, these problems are just as bad when they contract the work out, because the government often expects to be able to change what they're asking for after the contract is signed. The terms are usually vague enough that they can get away with it, but if their feet are held to the fire and someone managed to get a contract that works in their favor when holding the government to it, the government ends up with something that doesn't do what they had originally wanted because no one bothered to do the analysis necessary to determine what needed to be done. Of course, if it were left up to the government workers themselves, there's a good chance nothing would ever change, which is part of the reason government contractors have such a hard time in the first place (since they're an outside entity bringing unwanted change, there will be little or no cooperation from the people that could help things go smoothly).

I think he means that "you" would be written "ya", in which case there are no letters missing from the first word in the contraction.

Most of the "holes" have been evolved out of the language, rather than there being any significant chance of it evolving to fill them. Almost every language that's had an influence on the English language had one or more of the missing features, and many of them even made it into English, but have long since been deprecated, as someone mentioned below with "thou", "thee", and "thine". Another instance would be the insistence on the part of some people to call certain objects "she" or "he" instead of "it", despite English having dropped the feminine and masculine references for objects.

and I have no idea how I managed to use the wrong spelling for hear in the above post. WTF?

Some people will address an individual as "y'all", though, despite most of us wanting to use "y'all" as a plural of "you".

In that sense, "all y'all" would be a plural of "y'all", though I generally concur that it's more common to here it used for emphasis rather than as a plural form, similar to the way people might use "all of you" as opposed to just "you" when asking a group of people to do something.

Actually, one of the problems is that it's non-trivial for most users to even discover that the security of their system has been compromised, on any operating system, until it's far too late (or has been compromised in so many different ways that the system succumbs and fails to function in the expected manner).

If someone comes along and steals your car, it's not there when you get back. If they steal the car stereo, there's probably glass all over the place and the stereo's gone. Even if the take it for a joy ride and return it there may be clues, like the position of the seat and mirrors, the odometer reading, the amount of gas in the car, or a change in the position in which it is parked.

If your computer becomes part of a botnet, the best thing for the controlling interests to do is make sure that it's very hard to tell that your computer is infected. A virus or worm might sit on the machine for months infecting other systems before finally unleashing a destructive payload, for the simple reason that this makes it more effective. Tracking malware will hide itself in order to have more time on the system to gain more information for the advertisers that bought the information.

So the most effective, and damaging for the overall security of the network, forms of malware are those that are hardest to find. If the system doesn't tell you that there's suspicious behavior going on, and most users don't know how to see what processes are running on their system (and don't know what processes should be running on their system), then all of the security looks like hand waving, because they don't see a difference between the compromised and secure systems.

Half of the functionality in security products is alerting the user to potentially harmful activity taking place on their computer or network. Of course end users hate when these alerts get in their face and require action on their part, so if they're given a chance to disable them, they do so. The trick is alerting the user without annoying the user, and making it easier to disable a security warning when it's being overly paranoid than it is to disable the entire security system.

My simple analogy is not for a car, but rather my house: if I had to use the older style of home alarm system where I keyed in a security code and then attempted to exit the house while it armed itself, or come into the house and key in the code before the alarm went off, I would never use it. I'd rather depend on the keys that are only effective against those that would probably be stopped just as easily by the fact the door is closed. However, since my house's alarm has a keychain remote like most cars do, it's a simple matter of locking up the house and arming or disarming from outside. Additionally, the alarm is obnoxiously obvious when someone opens/breaks a window, trips a motion sensor, or opens a door. There's simply no chance of someone getting into the house without me knowing it unless they find a way to bypass the system.

Bypassing the system may turn out to be fairly easy for someone that knows how to do so, I really don't know. However, the system is there to handle a higher percentage of possible intruders than the simple lock that my wife can bypass in 30 seconds or less.

Make it easier for the user to understand what is really going on behind the scenes on their machines. Let them see the network traffic, where it's going, and what processes are using it. Make it easy for them to figure out what is supposed to be running on their system and what is not.