"More generally, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft's tying of WMP is an example of a more general business model which, given Microsoft's virtual monopoly in PC operating systems, deters innovation and reduces consumer choice in any technologies which Microsoft could conceivably take interest in and tie with Windows in the future." [via The Register]

Possibly a very big ouch.... in any technologies which Microsoft could conceivably take interest in and tie with Windows. So, virtual machines are a technology, it is being tied in with Windows in the future, at the expense of other vendors VM technologies? It won't happen, but...

The NHS is clearly in a crisis over croutons and we've set up CroutonAid to raise public awareness and call on the practical help of the great British Public!

Please visit www.croutonaid.org.uk now! [via Ecademy: user blogs]

 It seems harmless to visit, but doesn't really say much more than the above (which is what made me larf)

Pete Cole: The XP SP2 RC1 SDK Beta is not available yet, but should be very soon. Stay posted, I will post a link to the SDK as soon as it ships.
 [via XP SP2 RC1]

 Well, at least its not me whose mad - I thought there must be one of these but I was too stoopid to find it......

Dave: I can get you a pretty good discount on Visual Studio if you'd like to go down that route.

Robert Scoble • 3/22/04; 6:27:45 PM

 [via comments]

 I'm a small company, how do I get a discount on MSDN?

A good one-page resume for a technical candidate.  

 

 

                                                                       Name

 

Street Address                                                                                                              E-mail Address
City, St ZIP                                                                                                                   Phone number

 

 

EDUCATION

XXXX – XXXX      University                                                                                             Location

Degree, Grad date

GPA                                                    

 

.....

 

PATENTS

·         Patent 1

·         Patent 2

 [via Microsoft WebBlogs]

 I wonder how many resumes come in with a list of patents! (Best I can do is a Microsoft patent references work I've been involved in).

IE in XP SP2 (Part 2): Information Bar - Stopping the modal dialog madness.  

...

Local Machine Zone Lockdown

Local Machine Zone Lockdown is one of the most impactful security mitigations in IE for XP SP2. It deserves an entire blog entry (or several), but, briefly, LMZ Lockdown affects the explorer.exe and iexplore.exe processes, and places severe restrictions on on things such as executing script and running ActiveX controls in the local machine zone (i.e. a local .html file). When the lockdown is in effect you will see the Information Bar with a menu item that lets you temporarily disable the lockdown by reverting to the old Local Machine Zone settings for that instance of the browser. [via Microsoft WebBlogs]

 Interesting - not seen this, nor seen it documented anywhere. Hmm, I wonder how it works (disable lockdown for that instance of the browser....).

Hacking IE Security Zones [via Mr P Torr]

A most wonderful article about messing about with zones, including the most valuable set flags=1 to make a zone appear in the Security Settings panel. This will probably also work in XP SP2, though whether all the new features of SP2 are exposed, dunno.

...here report any bugs. (Requires .NET passport)

This entry created, after some effort, by hand writing on a tablet PC. If you want to improve the neatness of your writing this may be the device for you!

What is truly bizarre is that this is written into iMunch by using remote desktop connection from the tablet pc to my desktop PC.

Over in comments Phil Ringnalda notes that Google now seems to be indexing this stuff after I made the dasBlog config change.

Certainly seems to have. It's not actually that G doesn't index pages with query strings, so much as that it doesn't like to risk long query string values when the variable name includes "id", because that smells like a session id. If rather than ?guid= dasBlog used ?whatever=bunchacrap then Google would be fine with it.

This explains why google was indexing permalink.aspx?guid=250 (the old radio content imported into dasBlog) but not the new content put into dasBlog. Phil doesn't like the stupidly long GUIDs - nor do I. Since dasBlog keeps a post count, I can't see why they didn't go for a much simpler id - other than the risk of duplicates when the software fails!

I'm tempted to change the web site to use permalink.aspx?article=ssssssss rather than ?guid= to see if Phil is right - but it is most likely that he will be so I can't be bothered