From PCMag, Sony’s incredible gaffe - creating a DRM applet that loads prior to the operating system - has caused an incredible furor. Sony agreed to suspend the program , but that’s not all. Now the rest of the world is piling on. Microsoft now says it will delete the rootkit directly with its anti-spyware program, and it’ll be included in the December version of the Malicious Software Removal Tool. And it looks like the Macintosh, which is also affected by the rootkit , might still be at risk. ...

Well you can’t. As you might be aware that the .NET runtime are different between Visual Studio 2005 RTM and WinFX Sept CTP build, and the only way you can get this to work together is fall back on Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 - which is the only supported version as of now. On the other hand in about a week or so from now, a new WinFX build is supposed to be publicly released, which can coexist and keeps each other happy. If you can wait for a week I could recommend the latter. ...

Both Meenakshi’s and my parents and everyone else in the family is OK in Delhi after the blasts. Also been calling around and asking and of all the people I can get in touch with from the extended family to friends, as far as I know everyone is fine.

At long last VS.NET 2005 (code named Whidbey) and .NET 2.0 are shipped! You can download them from MSDN, and don’t really need to wait till Nov 7th (the official launch date). w00t! :o)

I guess it was eventually meant to happen, Google has a database coming out soon called Google Base (which will be available at http://base.google.com ), and their intent is if it can be posted online in any fashion then use their database. And all that information will be available through searches and can be integrated with google maps. Seems more revenue for them, and also they seem to be targeting the likey of eBay and Craigslist. You can read up an interesting post at arstechnica on the subject. ...

Meenakshi forwarded me the post from C Enrique Ortiz, who has a very funny and true, a Developer’s Top 10 replies when code doesn’t work . :) My personal favorites are number 6 and 2.

Thanks to Rohit for pointing this out, but the Curry and Rice girl is a riot ! If you are not Indian (or of Indian background) or don’t have any Indian friends or spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends, you might not get the context. Make sure the volume on your speakers are turned on high! :)

Seems like Microsoft has said , the XP SP3 bits going around are fake as it is not sp3; not sure who to believe, in any case you should not be updating any “real” machine you use and depend on.

Avi pointed out this one to me. Google has a rss reader called Google Reader which to me seems quite similar to Bloglines , why I would use one over the other is not clear to me. ...

HotFix has a list of some of the things that are going to be included in XP SP3; PC World also talks about it .

I think this is the new way to go , drink on!

I stumbled upon this via a colleague of mine who was answering a different question on our internal newsgroups at work. Paul Wilson shows how you can have multiple forms in ASP.NET

Check out the new features which are part of the next Sharepoint release .

WSJ has a very interesting story on how Microsoft had to restart a lot of Vista features from a clean code base and throw away a lot of work done on existing windows code base over the years; and from my point of view, the fact that it took this long is surprising, but as they say better late than never. ...

Zilla Smash has some excellent hi-res screen shots of the new Beta Yahoo Mail and as someone else said, boy does gmail look clunky in comparison!

Seems like there have been many cases where the iPod Nano gets scratched very easily, making it useless for viewing pictures and song names, etc that is playing. The Register has an article covering it including and the thread on apple’s newsgroup is already up to 240 posts on the issue. ...

Hats off to the mono guys who got this running on Nokia 770 (their new internet appliance running Linux); screen shot here .

Now that the PDC is done, I can get to talk a little more about Office 12, I have been playing with it for a few weeks and has some very interesting things, but more on that later this week. But, now you can get the proposed schema for Office 12 applications. This of course is draft and is a preview, so I won’t start writing anything against this other than your own learning purposes. ...

Meenakshi wanted an old version of a JDK, and it was quite interesting to try and find an old version at Sun’s site, they don’t plainly display a link - one would suspect that it should be somewhere on the download page itself, but if only things were made using common sense. E.g. Meenakshi wanted to get J2SE 1.4.2_05 (not very old from the current shipping which is 1.4.2_09), try googling it and you will see what I mean. Of course, if Sun had gotten it right in the first place, where every minor upgrade does not break everything in the older versions (even point upgrades for the most part), this would not be an issue to begin with. Like I said, if only common sense was so common. ...

WinITPro is reporting that SQL Server 2005 will ship without data mirroring as they won’t be able to meet the ship date in November this year. This will be a big blow as I know some people already incorporating that in their design of some solutions. What is interesting is why did it take MS so late to realise they won’t be able to make the feature for RTM? ...

Business Week has a interesting cover story about the issues at MS internally and how the employees feel the company is doing. It makes one think of the troubling signs ahead.

According to Neowin , MS is going to release the Rollup Update (code names Emerald) to MCE soon, which will incorporate: 2x HD Tuner supported No CableCARD No QAM DVD Changer Xbox 360 Extender support Sonic DVD Burning fixes Slight improvements in Media Library performance The update will be free and available via Windows Update. MS also released some information at the PDC about Diamond (Windows Vista MCE) and Neowin has some screen shots on their site and some more pictures here . ...

Thanks to Elia for pointing this out. If you are in the market for a new laptop but can wait, then this kick-ass machine can be out soon. Atom Chip corporation is getting ready for the CES 2006 show which is going to be held in January 2006 in Vegas. The computer should demonstrate how Quantum and Quantum-optical devices could operate in consumer electronics. Without proper benchmarking, it is hard to tell if the “AtomChip” 6.8Ghz CPU is faster than current high-end competitors are, but the solid-state drive (in place of the traditional hard disk) should be much much faster. ...

At PDC, Microsoft announced that there will be subsets of Avalon available on other OS’s including Macs where one of the demos at the PDC was actually running on a Mac. There is no linux bits that I am aware of (yet), but its coming soon I would suppose. Ben Galbraith (from Sun) has a post talking about this albeit a skeptical one. ...

Hmm, even for a banana-freak like me, is this going too far ? Make sure to read up on the comments. :)