Bad guys have apparently begun exploiting the security hole that can take over a Windows machine simply by displaying an image. This vulnerability requires patching both the OS and Microsoft Office.

Several news sites are beginning to parrot the meme that the root cause of last week's outage of air-control in the Southwest US is Windows Server 2000's “design” to shut down every 49.7 days “to prevent a data overload.“ This isn't true. This is almost certainly referring to the …

Half the Viagra sold over the Internet is fake, according to British scientists. In other news, the budget department of the University of London is very gullible when it comes to funding requests. I'm expecting money for my “Correlation of loneliness to sexual desire in Internet-using housewives,” study any …

FlexWiki, a Wiki project by Microsoft Program Manager David Ornstein, has moved from GotDotNet to Sourceforge and changed to a Common Public License. This is the third project after WiX and WTL that MS has placed on SourceForge. Clearly, Microsoft lawyers have worked their way through the CPL and found …

Peter Coffee, eWeek's astute analyst, says that Web Services should have a standard for crash analysis. The two biggest benefits to programmer productivity in the past decade are managed memory and exceptions that generate stack traces. I'm coming up to speed on a customer's system for which I have a …

There's a Big Honkin' Mushroom in Oregon that covers 2,200 acres and is claimed to be the “largest living organism.” My question is whether a mushroom is a single organism or if it's communal and therefore in the same class as the Great Barrier Reef (which extends for more …

I've been doing way too much flying lately.

Have you ever noticed that the pre-flight safety briefing starts with instructions on “how to buckle a seat belt” and moves without pause through “activating your on-board oxygen mask” to “transforming safety slides into liferafts in the case of a water landing …

Oh yeah, I think I'll continue developing this...

"Our scheduling and predictability on this project has been better than it was on OS 360." -- Bill Gates, August 27, 2004

Just got off the phone with John Montgomery and Bill Schultz of Microsoft regarding today's announcements re. Longhorn. The official word is that they're announcing 3 things:

1. Longhorn client will be "broady available" sometime in 2006;
2. The Avalon (display) and Indigo (communication) subsystems of Longhorn will become available sometime to …