Cubic

Today I ran across a news article announcing the demise of Windows 98 and Me: http://www.informationweek.com/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=188703336 I find it slightly humorous that Microsoft is incapable of creating an upgradeable OS. Linux, and to some extent, Mac OSX, are upgradeable. Okay, Microsoft has attempted it in the past and generally failed miserably. What would be nice is if I could buy just the features I need. This would allow Microsoft to develop the software at their leisure and if I bought a feature (say for $5), I'd get that feature and any security updates for it forever. Let's take a few examples: 1) MS Paint. I never use this feature and, frankly, don't want it either. It hasn't changed since Windows 95 and people shouldn't have to pay multiple times for the same application. It is a terrible image editor. However, a lot of children in schools use it because they either are bored or really don't know there are plenty of bet...

Internet Explorer holds the primary market share in web browsers. Still. And this week Microsoft made it clear that "IE7+" is not going to be available to WinXP users despite the fact that it probably wouldn't be hard to do. The difference is most likely three #ifdef statements: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=188501124 This is a blatant attempt to garner sales for Vista and is a wholly monopolistic tactic. Those are some seriously expensive #ifdef's! Probably worth $1 billion each! The real reason I'm writing this blog entry is not because IE7+ has features I want or need. I'm writing this because Microsoft is attempting to redefine words and phrases that have predefined meanings. One specific phrase, "protected mode" (or PMode, for short), refers to the flat addressing memory model of all 32- and 64-bit operating systems that the CPU "protects" using multi-layered rings. The Intel CPU has 4 rings where the...