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Microsoft abandons bid to buy Yahoo [www.msnbc.msdn.com]

Remembering Windows XP’s early days [blogs.zdnet.com]

A geek trip down memory lane: Every Windows Startup Logo and Sound [video]

Didn't have any talks for today's conference, but I have two tomorrow. Overall it was a pretty low-key day, and it was great to see a bunch of the event people I only see at these Microsoft conferences.

It seems that Mayor Nickels has managed to scare the hell out of the locals about the I-5 Closure Apocalypse, as there was almost no traffic all day. Most people must be hiding in their basements at home awaiting the horde of zombies, or just choking their neighborhood Starbuck's wireless service. I'm guessing tomorrow will be worse as (a) Monday is unusually light most weeks and (b) the world didn't end today after all with 36+ hours of gridlock.

Spent today at a Microsoft's security training event: BlueHat. Some interesting presentations about the Underground Internet economy, Xbox 360 security exploits, Mobile device and Zune vulnerabilities, and general website security. It was scary enough to make one consider unplugging every internet device in the house and run for the hills to get off the grid, or at least disable wireless features of your mobile device.

A few tidbits:

- Anti-Virus has a hit rate of less than 30% on the approximately 12,000 samples of malware that float about the Internet every day. For older stuff, it peaks at about 50%. That means if you think AV is keeping you safe from random crap in your e-mail box or on websites, you're wrong. In fact, because AV tools are so invasive on the system and always hooked to the Internet for updates, the security tool itself is becoming the weakest link in personal computer security.

- Be sure to read the fine-print of your Electronic Banking agreement. It probably says if you get hacked because of your computer's security, you are screwed if they steal your money.

- Most people think that since Bluetooth is a short-range protocol that they are generally safe from anything more than a few feet away. Some crazy security researcher guys built a directional gun that will let them hack a Bluetooth-enabled phone from a mile away.

- If Microsoft releases a patch for Windows, be sure you apply it because the hackers just reversed engineered it within hours and are probably already deploying botnets using it by the time you hear about it.

- If you are annoyed about patches on Windows, just think about how few things get fixed on all the other Internet capable devices floating around. Mobile-device hotfixes are rare because the vendors don't bother, not because there's nothing wrong with them.

- Xbox 360 is probably the best secured gaming platform ever released, but it was hacked in about 14 months as compared to the usual 2 years for other consoles, primarily because it was too cool a device for hackers not to want desperately to run Linux on it. Pirates are lazy, and they don't actually fund the hack R&D but love to take advantage of it when it comes out. The vulnerability in the security came down to basically a single instruction chosen by the compiler because of C's crappy implicit promotion of integers. The C code appeared secure, but the resulting machine code was not and ran in the most trusted context.

Will Vista Run Your Games: The Final Word [www.extremetech.com]

Vista may have a lot to offer gamers in the future. This is an OS that will be around for years, and it's important to take that view of it: Windows XP wasn't the best choice for gaming the day it was released, either. Parental controls, the Games Explorer, DirectX 10, and the Games for Windows logo program can all be good things for PC gamers. The only thing holding up the OS is a month or two worth of patches and driver improvements. Even so, I'm generally really happy gaming on Vista and impressed enough with the way it looks and behaves when doing non-gaming tasks that I don't have any desire to boot up Windows XP. There is no compelling reason for gamers to run out and upgrade immediately just for the games, but I don't think a gamer who upgrades is going to be disappointed. The standard "your mileage may vary" caveat applies, but gaming on Vista is a surprisingly pleasant and relatively painless experience so far, and only stands to get better as drivers improve and games are patched.

Now that Windows Vista has hit the street, I expect to be getting a ton of questions about it from friends and family. I figured I'd head off some of the questions with the most basic question: ( What the hell is up with all those different versions? )

Had my second annual review at Microsoft today. All-in-all it went very well, and plenty of good feedback for things to improve. With the switch mid-year to an entirely new division, I was a bit worried the former Windows folks would get hosed in the stack-ranking but thankfully it didn't turn out that way.

Yay me. Yay high-paying enjoyable steady work.

I'm sure the television stations and websites are chock full of 9/11-related memorial stuff today with stories of what may or may not have lead up to the attacks, the world since, geopolitics, history (both factual and revisionist), etc. For the most part, I'm trying to not pay any attention to it and particularly not what the Prez decides to spin about that day during his speech given how much the Republicans have used it to justify their political agenda since then. Whether history will judge 9/11 as a Pearl Harbor-style unprovoked sneak attack on America or more as a Gulf of Tonkin-style excuse for a desired war is I think still up for debate.

Five years ago I was in the midst of a long-term bought of unemployment, new to a city where I knew no one, dating a girl long-distance who was already beginning to be withdrawn and stressed by the start of an entirely new career, and had way too much time on my hands to watch the hour-by-hour CNN coverage of the whole sad affair. In many ways, it wasn't ever real to me. At the time I didn't know anyone who lived in NYC. Andrea had been there a few weeks before, standing on those very towers, so it certainly could have been a very personal event had the timing been different. I didn't have friends and co-workers around talking about the people they knew touched by the events, and I was immensely isolated as it was. As it stands, I mostly just remember the sense of fear. The entire country held it's breath for a month. Really not much outrage, and more fear of an uncertain future. That was also something I felt keenly at the time in my own life.

For 25 years, people have used the Windows OS and one of the main reasons it has gotten such lasting use is that each generation runs the important applications of the previous one or two generations if not more. This despite the fact that 99% of the software written for the Windows OS makes at least one horribly bad assumption about the system behavior. Usually far more than that.

Achieving that compatibility has not been easy or cheap. Application developers, as it turns out, are completely unsympathetic to the fact that their broken software is making it hard to improve the platform. Besides, Microsoft has always done the work so why should they bother?

The way we do it is by having this magic little thing called a "shim", a tiny hack in the operating system that we turn on based on testing the applications to make them work. There are thousands of entries in the shim database. Some of them do stuff like lie to the silly setup program that fails if the OS version is "6.0" instead of "4.0" saying "Hey, this is NT 3.51 and we don't support it!" Some of it emulates the behavior of previous releases of Windows because the application does buggy stuff like release memory and then proceed to use it for the next hundred cycles or so because Windows 95 didn't notice. Sometimes we have to lie about a particular DLL being present on the system that they never use, but crash if it isn't present or endlessly try to install some component that no longer applies.

Each of these solutions is crafted by hand, applied with a debugging skill more akin to alchemy than science, and is one monstrous pain in the ass.

The really sad part is this doesn't just apply to old software. Major games released in the past few years by developers who should know better are rife with this kind of crap.

It is made even more difficult by three major factors:

(a) sticking to legacy APIs years after Microsoft tells you to stop. No really, Direct3D Retained Mode was dead on arrival in 1996, much less by the time Direct3D 7 came out in 1999. That was 7 years ago. Cut it out. Really.

(b) the proliferation of the hackery that is 'copy-protection' schemes. These things don't actually stop hardcore pirates and are typically hacked within days by 14 year olds in China, but make using standard debugging techniques impossible. That means in 2-3 years when we try to get your application running on the next version of Windows, we have to resort to black magic and sacrificing a goat to even figure out why the application is crashing much less fix it. As our AppCompat guru said, if you guys are going to use this crap, then you should be patching your game every OS release.

(c) despite having a version info resource record system in place for binaries since 1995, too few applications actually use them. That means our appcompat database has to resort to all kinds of scary things to try to determine if "Game.EXE" is the exact thing we need to fix-up or not--which, btw, is primarily what Windows is doing when you run "Setup.EXE" and it seems to just sit there a few seconds.

If you learn nothing else from this post, application developers, learn this: for the love of god, try not to make future appcompat gnomes lives hell and use accurate version information! For the rest of you, next time you run your favorite game from the 90s and it actually runs on a computer made 15 years later, quietly thank the poor bastard who had to figure out how to make it work without a clue from the people who wrote it and made all the money ever made off it. Hell, thank the poor bastard that got the game from last year to run on the new OS given the team that wrote it was likely laid off the day it shipped.