[The answer, it turns out, is yes. See update at end of this post.]

Via Neowin, I ran across a pointer to a new site called Windows and Me. It certainly looks like an official Microsoft site, with Windows and Microsoft logos and copyright notices splattered all over the home page. This is the footer on the home page, for example:

The site is very slick, and its colors and design are very Microsoft-like. But the closer I look, the more I’m skeptical of this site’s legitimacy. Here are a few observations and some facts that I was able to turn up in five minutes of searching:

• The About Us link leads to the Microsoft India home page.
• The footer refers to “Windows live” and “Windows mobile,” both of which are capitalized (as trademarks) on the official Microsoft U.S. site but are lower-cased here.
• The Windows and Me login system uses an e-mail ID and password combination but is not linked to Microsoft’s Passport or Windows Live ID services.
• The opening page has a slick Flash animation. Most newly designed Microsoft sites are using Silverlight for animations and other rich content.
• Trying to register takes you to a contest sign-up page, ostensibly run by Microsoft India. The contest terms and conditions make it clear that the contest is only open to residents of India.
• The Privacy Statement is ostensibly from Microsoft, and the address at the bottom of the statement is identical to the contact information Microsoft lists for its India subsidiary, but the text of the statement is completely unlike the official Privacy Statement at the Microsoft India site.
• A Whois search reveals that the domain is hosted by GoDaddy and the registered owner is NetCarrots.com of New Delhi, which identifies itself as a “loyalty marketing” service and has a list of obscure, mostly Asian clients. NetCarrots.com is listed as a Microsoft Certified Partner that specializes in Custom Development Solutions.

It’s hard to make a strong case that this is a malicious site. A more likely explanation is that someone in a relatively autonomous division within Microsoft India had an idea for a website and decided to go full speed ahead without getting official clearance or bothering to read Microsoft’s corporate guidelines for design and content. It’s also possible that the site was started by a third party that crossed the line (went way over it, in fact) in its zeal to be a fan site. Either way, I strongly recommend against providing any personal information at this site until its status is clearer. If the site is official, then at the very least it should be redesigned to make it much clearer that it’s intended for residents of India and not for those in the U.S. or other countries.

Overall, this site is an excellent example of the challenges that computer users face when they confront a site like this. Is it real? Is it fake? Is it malicious? It’s hard to say for sure, based on the evidence I have at hand.

Update: After a little more poking around, I found this in the NetCarrots Newsletter:

NetCarrots takes a giant leap forward in the loyalty space by engaging with Microsoft to develop a community portal for the software leaders.

This CRM initiative has been conceptualized to make Microsoft’s operating systems more user friendly. The community platform is designed to make the users more responsive to the various Microsoft technologies and get more familiar with the features of Windows Vista and Windows Live.

NetCarrots is proud to be managing this community program which includes conceptualization of relationship management, rewards management and handling of strategic alliances and partnerships. NetCarrots will also be managing the entire backend for this community portal, including the technologies, creatives etc.

I’ve asked some local contacts at Microsoft to comment and will provide their response here if and when I receive it.

Update 2, 1-July-2008: Microsoft’s Chris Flores confirms that this site is indeed legit. It’s from Microsoft India and “is currently in beta and is still under construction.”

It’s been six months since I last published these stats, and the recent release of Firefox 3 adds a news hook to the story. I have two separate sources of statistics now – my longtime SiteMeter database and the newer Google Analytics statistics. As it turns out, both sources tell a similar story.

Here’s the graphic analysis via Google Analytics:

That’s the lowest number I’ve ever seen for Internet Explorer, and the SiteMeter stats are roughly 1% lower than that. That’s a 4% drop in the past year, most of it coming in the past six months. Meanwhile, Opera continues to cling to its 2% share, a fraction of a percent above the combined percentage for Safari (Mac and Windows).

According to these statistics, Firefox adoption rates have picked up this year for the first time in the past three years. The question is whether Mozilla can sustain that momentum and transfer it to mainstream users or whether it’s just a blip.

Trend-watchers can look at all previous editions by following these links:

December 2007

April 2007

September 2006

April 2006

August 2005

October 2004

Yesterday’s webinar (yes, I know, silly word, but what can you do?) on HP’s new MediaSmart Connect extender went very well. We had more than 250 online attendees, some great questions, and overwhelmingly positive feedback. If you missed it, you can catch the replay online. Registration isn’t required, but you will have to jump through a few hoops to use the LiveMeeting software. You can avoid a little of that hassle by downloading the Windows Media version instead, but the quality is noticeably worse.

HP’s Brian Burch gave an excellent demo of the MediaSmart Connect device and Microsoft’s Ben Reed showed off Media Center’s features. My role was to answer questions about the design and functionality of the device and to take some questions from attendees.

Yesterday’s event was the first in a series of four. I’m looking forward to the remaining three, each of which features a different guest expert. If you’re curious about Media Center technology, I encourage you to sign up for one of the upcoming events so you can ask questions directly and hear some interesting perspectives. The lineup includes:

• Thursday, June 26. 1:00PM (Pacific): Ian Dixon, The Digital Lifestyle
• Tuesday, July 8, 10:00AM (Pacific): Patrick Norton, Tekzilla
• Thursday, July 10, 1:00PM (Pacific): Mike Garcen, Missing Remote

I’ll have a more detailed review next week.

Disclosure: I am not being compensated in any way by HP or Microsoft for my participation in this event, and any opinions I express are mine alone.

There is no scene on earth quite like the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

Sadly, the four days are over, the car is unpacked, and that wristband won’t get me through any more gates. But I have a few hundred photos to edit this week and I’ll be sharing some thoughts on digital media as well.

Next week, I’ll be participating in the first of a series of four web-based seminars on the new HP MediaSmart Connect devices, which were just announced yesterday. (Brandon LeBlanc has a great post with more details over at the Windows Vista Team Blog.)

I’ve been using an early model of this device for the past few weeks, and I’ll share my impressions of it and answer questions from the community. I’ve now had ample hands-on time with three of the four leading v2 Media Center Extender device families: Linksys, Xbox 360, and HP.

More details about the webinars, including sign-up details, here:

Brian Burch, Director of Marketing for HP’s Connected Entertainment group, will lead an interactive demonstration of HP’s latest advanced digital media receiver, and discuss other products on the market today. Brian will be joined by these industry experts who will share their impressions of the HP MediaSmart Connect and their thoughts on how this device will transform your living room experience:

• Ed Bott, Independent blogger for ZDNet.com

• Ian Dixon, The Digital Lifestyle

• Patrick Norton, Tekzilla

• Mike Garcen, Missing Remote

If you can’t make it, leave questions in the comments section here.

Oh, and if you have an old (or new) media-sharing device, you can trade it in for one of these devices. In fact, if you are one of the first to pre-order one of the new devices with a trade-in at 12 noon (Pacific time) today, June 18, you can get the extender free. Details here.

As I point out in Tweak #8 from my 10 Top Vista Tweaks series at ZDNet, there’s a big difference between the way Windows XP and Vista handle the automatic checkpoints that are used for System Restore. The incompatibility is so profound, in fact, that it affects dual-boot machines running Windows XP and Vista. When you boot into XP, the system detects that restore points exist but that they can’t be read. It then assumes (oops) that the restore points are corrupt and immediately deletes them. When you restart Vista, you discover that your restore points are gone and any Complete PC Backups before the most recent one are also wiped out. Not good.

In the TalkBack section of that post, Vince asks about this bug. I provide a brief answer there but decided it’s worth fleshing out that answer here.

Microsoft has published a Knowledge Base article on this topic that details a registry edit you can make while running Windows XP to prevent this from happening. What it does is make the Vista volume appear offline:

To keep Windows XP from deleting restore points of the volume in Windows Vista, add the following registry entry under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\Offline registry subkey in Windows XP:

Value name: \DosDevices\D:
Type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 1

Note If the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\Offline registry subkey does not exist, you must manually create this registry subkey. Create this registry entry when you have installed Windows Vista on the "D" partition in Windows XP.

When you boot into XP, the Vista volume will be invisible and thus protected from damage (you can see the XP volume from Vista, however). If you want a dual-boot system with a shared data drive, you’re out of luck. If you use this registry edit to make the drive appear offline, you won’t be able to access your data from Windows Vista.

Personally, I no longer recommend dual-boot setups at all. I prefer using Virtual PC, VMWare, or another virtualization solution to run XP in a virtual machine under Vista. On those rare occasions when I need to test XP and Vista on the same hardware, I swap the hard drives and access shared data files from a server to avoid this issue.

Over at ZDNet, I’ve just published part 2 of my 10 top Vista tweaks series. If you missed Part 1, you can find it here…

Here’s a quick list of what’s in the new installment:

6. Save your favorite searches

The Start menu search box works just fine for quick, ad hoc searches. To really tap into the power of Windows Search, though, spend a little time to create searches that bring together the types of files you use most often (Word documents modified this month or last month, e-mail messages from Fred or Rick, and so on). Then save those searches so you can reuse them later or copy them to another computer.

7. Fine-tune your search settings

Speaking of Windows Search, did you know that there are three separate areas where you can tweak settings that control search behavior? Use these tweaks to make Start menu searches more useful, simplify the complicated advanced search syntax, and add IFilters to search inside types of files that aren’t supported by a default Vista installation.

8. Make the most of System Restore and shadow copies

Did you know that System Restore in XP and Vista use completely different techniques to save snapshots of data? In this tweak, I explain why you might want to increase the amount of space set aside for volume shadow copies. I also introduce a free utility that lets users of Windows Vista home editions find and restore files from automatically created backups.

9. Bring network files closer

The fastest way to get to files in any network location is via a shortcut. And the best place to save those shortcuts to network locations is in the Computer window. You can add shortcuts to shared folders, FTP sites, or websites where you publish files. Here’s how.

10. Master power management

In XP, you have standby and hibernate. Vista adds a third power state, called hybrid sleep. Here’s what you need to know and how you can tune a desktop system to take advantage of this useful mode.

As always, I welcome feedback and questions. You’re more likely to get a response here than in the rambunctious TalkBack section over there. Word of warning: it might take an extra day (or five) for me to respond as I’m away on vacation the rest of this week.

I’m working on the second half of my 10 Top Tweaks for Windows Vista series over at ZDNet (Part 1 is here), and in the course of my research I saw this screen, which contains help text for the vssadmin resize shadowstorage utility:

The text that caught my eye was this syntax note:

MaxSizeSpec must be 300MB or greater and accepts the following suffixes: KB, MB, GB, TB, PB and EB.  Also, B, K, M, G, T, P, and E are acceptable suffixes.  If a suffix is not supplied, MaxSizeSpec is in bytes.

Given current storage media sizes, it’s perfectly reasonable that kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and even terabytes are acceptable units of measure for specifying how much System Restore space should be set aside. But whoever is designing the file system here is thinking way, way, way ahead. Those last two units of measurement (PB or P, EB or E) represent values in petabytes (1000 terabytes) and exabytes (1000 petabytes). If past trends in storage continue, we’ll be able to buy cheap petabyte drives in roughly 15 years. It’s hard to imagine setting aside more than 1000 terabytes for shadow copies, but then again who would have imagined, when Windows 3.0 came out in the early 1990s, that a 1-TB hard drive would cost around $100 in inflation-adjusted dollars 15 years later?

So how long do you think it will be until personal storage devices hit the petabyte range? Exabytes? Think this code or some variation of it will be in Windows 2020?

My father, Charles Bott, passed away in early 2006. He said he didn’t like to make a big fuss on Father’s Day, but I’m sure he really looked forward to the phone calls and visits he got from his six kids on this day every year.

In the last few years of his life we talked on the phone regularly. He used to call with questions about his computer, or to tell me with obvious pride about some cool trick he had discovered how to do in Excel. From there, our conversations always turned to other things, although we learned after years of butting heads over politics that we didn’t really need to spend a lot of time talking about current events.

He loved his children and his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, and he loved my mother more than anything else. She probably took this picture, in fact, while standing on a bridge over the Green River Gorge in Washington State in early May, 1957. My father had just turned 25. I was not even two years old at the time (my older brother, in front, was only three). Today, when I look at this picture, I marvel at how young we all were.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. We miss you.

The last time I checked in with Robert X. Cringely, he was reaching new heights of misinformation.

That was back in 2006. Good to see some things haven’t changed.