People give MS so much flack. Take this recent slashdot article for example. The A/V maker is complaining that MS's product is so secure that their virus package dosn't work unless they hack the system to make it work. Uhh.. If they have to do that, how to they expect to catch "true" vista viruses?

Seriously, people even critisize MS for even trying to come up with their own Anti-Virus software saying that "If they can't even get windows right, how are they going to catch all the viruses?" Few people realize that most viruses in windows aren't exploiting "bugs" in windows, they're exploiting completely valid programming APIs (and some undocumented APIs) to aquire access to your system. If those APIs didn't exist, no windows software would ever work. Anti-Virus packages catalog and recognize known malicious software and remove it. You can't blatantly "remove the feature the virus is using" or "secure the interface" without giving the keys to the interface away to any software developer who wanted to write an application using said interface.

I would completely trust a Microsoft Anti-Virus package for 2 reasons.

1. Everyone bitches to Microsoft about anything malicious already anyways. Who else better suited to monitor and respond to malicious software? You think that the current set-up is better? With every anti-virus vendor trying to track every virus seperately? Anti-Virus response has needed to be centralized for a long, long time.
2. There's the old "Microsoft never does anything right" argument. I disagree with it. 90% of the time, a computer gets infected because the user allows it to run a virus. Microsoft can't remove/secure the APIs, as I stated above. It is true that Microsoft's OS patching development cycle is slower than any of us would desire, but that is necessarily so because of the complexity of the OS. I believe that the cataloging of viruses and malicious software can happen in a completely seperate process by a seperate team within Microsoft without requiring every new entry in the virus catalog to go through Windows Quality Labs. Thus Microsoft will be able to release new virus definitions as fast or faster than current Anti-Virus vendors.

Now, the only problem will be if we can all stop the bitching long enough to allow Microsoft to improve the computer industry. Or do we all have to bitch and moan that a big, ugly Microsoft is putting yet more independant, bloated, no-name and legacy software vendors out of business. Without raining Anti-Trust all over this parrade.

I'm looking forward to Windows Vista. I will buy it. And the very next thing I buy after that, will be the Windows Live One-Care Protection. Thank god someone in Microsoft had the same ideas I do.

Basically, as soon as I get my hands on the CS 2.1 beta SDK, I will compile up a version that you can use with the downloaded CS 2.1 beta.

If there are enough people who reeeeely want to start using CS-Wiki now.... Just note:

• You will have to patch your CS 2.0 source code and recompile the SDK from scratch. If you don't know how to do this, don't ask.
• CS-Wiki is .NET 2.0 only. I've already said that if you're too lazy or paranoid to install .NET 2.0 on your server or your ISP is ghetto, go get a pet rock. That's about the only thing you are qualified to administer.
• CS-Wiki is still under rapid development. Lots of things are changing, and the list of features is still very long. If your favorite feature is not on the list, let me know and I will add it. If it is on the list, but isn't at the top, go away. I'll get to it eventually.

Windows keeps a list of all hardware you've ever had installed on your machine. In fact, all those drivers are still there, waiting to be loaded. Sometimes I find it necessary to completely remove the drivers for a device which may not be physically present on my machine. Here's a little trick to get the Device Manager to show everything without having to go into safe mode.

1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories and then click Command Prompt.
2. Type set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 in the Command Prompt and then press Enter.
3. Type cd \Windows\system32 in the Command Prompt and then press Enter.
4. Type start devmgmt.msc in the Command Prompt and then press Enter.
5. Click View > Show hidden devices. This will display devices that are not connected to your computer.

The above instructions can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/?id=315539.

If anyone ever sends you an empty file and calls it source code, look no further! That empty file is code! Hehehe. This is such a joke, but I wanted to pass it on anyways. It's a programming language that uses only tabs, spaces, and line feeds. Everything else is comments. Hehehe. It's great and very funny. Write some spacy code!

Above is a full application that echos simple input.

It's alive! The first CS-Wiki went up yesterday morning. You can surf arround and take a look here. If you register, you can play arround and edit topics in the Sandbox.

The official homepage for the CS-Wiki project is going to be http://developer.db4o.com/ProjectSpaces/view.aspx/Wiki

The source code will be available for download soon!

Topic history, permissions management, and topic set creation are all complete. This marks the end of Phase 2. I didn't think I'd get this far when I planned this project 3 months ago. But thanks to Community Server, I'm rocking.

Next:

• Ttopic rename/redirect.
• A new one "Promote to Topic Set", which takes the current page and creates a Topic Set with the same name, but with the current page's content as the default page of the new TopicSet.

Well, that's about it for the CS-Wiki permissions and Topic Set management. I'm definately on target for wrapping this thing up. From my previous list, the only thing left is the topic history page. This should be easy.