Yesterday at the Office Developer Conference keynote, Bill Gates once again mentioned his imminent departure from day-to-day operations of Microsoft. However the video spoof documentary of his last day at Microsoft he showed was not the same as the one shown at CES earlier this year, but in fact another edit with some alternative scenes.

For example, it features a different workout video with Matthew McConaugheyr, a longer phone conversation with Steven Spielberg and George Clooney about Oceans 14. Even if you’ve seen the first, I recommend you to check out this one too.

[flv:http://istartedsomething.com/uploads/bill_gates_leave2.flv 670 375]

My favorite? “Solar powered nano-robots grown from Justin Timberlake’s stem cells are intriguing.”

Following up on the previous sightings of what might be a Windows Vista product placement deal in the TV-series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the faux operating system clone has made another brief appearance in the fifth episode that aired earlier titled “Queen’s Gambit”. The runtime is at 20min 48sec for those of you playing at home.

What you see here is a terminator robot infront of a computer looking at police records through presumably a web browser. The two red dots are reflections of his eyes. The interesting anomalies on the computer screen include the gap between the address bar and search box as well as the menu bar below. Perhaps for aesthetic reason, the back button in the browser as well as the Start orb has been colored red instead of the default blue.

So I guess the take-away point is that Vista is even the preferred operating system for advanced artificial-intelligent robots sent back from the future, so it must be pretty good. Since the show is set in the present, the terminator probably bought back a copy of Service Pack 2 with him.

Update: Rafael has the low-down on all the code that’s displayed on screen as well as high-definition screen captures.

I would say I’m quite good with maps and for that reason I’ve never needed a GPS device. Having said that, I’m also deeply intrigued by the technology. Today I received a HP iPAQ 312 Travel Companion to review.

Prior to this, I had no idea Hewlett Packard had made a GPS product. This is in fact their second. Still, I was a little worried they might be stepping into unfamiliar territory and the quality of this product would reflect their lack of experience in the field. Having played with it now, it has overcome all my fears and I believe there’s no reason why anyone looking for a GPS device should exclude this from their list. Here’s my what I found.

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South Park meet Star Wars meet Microsoft. Minh over at the Microsoft enthusiast community Channel9 has finally revealed what he has been teasing in the past week or so, an animated movie about Microsoft he’s been working on. It’s all being done in Anime Studio and Windows Movie Maker. Here is the trailer he released today, with the full movie coming soon.

Starring Ray Ozzie as Senator Palpatine, Bill Hill as Qui-Gon Jinn, Steven Sinofsky as Anakin Skywalker, Bill Gates as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Steve Ballmer as Darth Maul, Mini-Microsoft and more.

So I guess this is what happens during a writers’ strike and you leave creative people with the right tools.

The ability to run decade-old applications on the newest releases of Windows has almost become a rite of passage. Most people would agree that software backwards compatibility on Windows is easily one of the important factors for its success. However with each release, Microsoft digs itself deeper and deeper into this pit of support as the breadth and depth of software grows exponentially. So much so some predict it will eventually ruin Windows, if it hasn’t already.

A recently published patent application, “Environment For Executing Legacy Applications On A Native Operating System” for those of you playing at home, filed in April of 2007 by Microsoft’s Hoi Vo and Samer Arafeh (who works on the Windows kernel) reveals some details of how they might (and emphasis on might because patents are just words on a piece of paper) accommodate and dramatically improve software compatibility in future releases of Windows.

As described in the patent, the problem of legacy applications support lies in binaries (DLLs and EXEs). As operating systems are updated, system binaries change. Older system calls, callbacks and exceptions may not exist at all in the new operating system, may exist to some degree or may generate alternate responses. Any of which is likely to wreck havok on legacy applications which depend on these binaries.

Currently there are two conventional solutions to the problem. Each with their respective advantages and disadvantages.

The first employs the use of “shims”. Metaphorically speaking, it’s basically sticky tape around the edges to make sure things don’t fall out. Technically, it’s a custom-written patch that is applied on-the-fly when legacy applications are loaded and will sit in between the legacy application and the native system binaries. Reportedly Microsoft has written thousands of shims for Windows Vista, and are still writing. The upside is that shims are relatively easy to implement, but having to generate shims on a per application-by-application basis means it doesn’t scale well at all.

The second solution takes advantage virtualization technology. By hosting a legacy OS virtual machine, legacy applications won’t any know any better. Virtualization offers full application support but at a hefty performance cost. Hardware support is also primitive, making it difficult to share resources like 3D graphics for example. It also requires users to be able to install each version of the legacy operating systems.

The proposed solution in some ways takes the best bits of both. It works first by detecting if the application was written for the native operating system. If not, it will load the application with its respective legacy system binaries. To accommodate the difference in system calls between the legacy binaries and native kernel, an Application Compatibility Module is placed in between to act as a translator for these calls. In certain cases where a comparative native system calls may not exist at all, the ACM could also be smart enough to provide the same functionality as the missing system call.

Hypothetically speaking, if the system detected an XP application running on Windows 9, it would load the XP system binaries (ex. system32_xp) and then a “XP-to-Win9” compatibility module.

The benefit of this solution is it offers much broader application compatibility with relatively low investment on Microsoft’s behalf on the scale of per-application – they will only have to write a ACM for each legacy system they wish to support. Legacy applications will also be able to take full advantage of the system resources as a native application, because there is no emulation involved.

Notable Windows on Windows – the compatibility system used to provide 16-bit on 32-bit systems support and 32-bit on 64-bit systems support uses a similar concept.

One of the biggest gripes from most Windows enthusiasts has been the bloat legacy compatibility forces into Windows. Whilst this patent doesn’t specifically mention so, I presume such ACMs are modular and can be installed and removed on demand. For example, if you need to run Windows Vista applications in future versions of Windows, you will only download and install the Vista ACM Pack (with Vista binaries) for that operating system. Those who do not require legacy support will then be not required to install any ACMs.

Thinking about it, it could become a business model to sell ACMs separately to Windows – reducing the overall cost of Windows and charging a tiered price for legacy support. A cheaper and less bloated Windows, wouldn’t that be nice.

It appears the roadblock preventing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 from being made publically available when it was released to manufacturing two days ago is a deja vu of the same but less severe problem that also happened in 2004 with Windows XP Service Pack 2.

The problem then affected a very particular ATI graphics driver and Dell Bluetooth driver which resulted in loss functionality after installing XP SP2.

The problem today affects an identifiable set of drivers which too results in loss functionality after installing Vista SP1. Both of which will require driver updates prior to the service pack install.

“What happens is during the update, the sound and video components are disabled, and in the process the drivers are accidentally removed.”

At the moment there is no precise list of drivers which are affected. Some but not all audio driver(s) from Realtek, graphics driver(s) from Nvidia and network driver(s) from Intel are believed to problematic.

Over the next 30 days, Microsoft is going to work on a preemptive measure to identify which drivers are affected and prevent users with those drivers from installing SP1 until they are cleared. At the same time, they will also be knocking on the doors of many hardware vendors to make sure a driver update is available before SP1 is released. When available, those new drivers will be offered as critical updates in Windows Update to make it for easy for users to overcome the problem without scourging through vendor support websites.

Knowing that, still wished those of us who can take a chance and worst comes to worst, reinstall the driver after applying the service pack, can do so without the Windows Update crossing lady who’s not coming until March.