In recent years, Microsoft has taken a pummeling in the Web server business. At one time, IIS and Windows NT Server 4.0 was the most popular commercial Web server platform; today, Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 are fighting against a wave of free and inexpensive versions of the Linux operating system and Apache Web server software. Microsoft argues that such servers don’t come with the support that a multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft can provide; f....

If you write macros that other people in your organization use, you should be aware of the Macro Security settings in Excel (and in all Office applications). These settings control the messages you receive when you open a workbook that contains macros; they ask if it’s okay to enable them. In the good old days, developers didn’t have to worry about such things. But with the advent of macro viruses, you now need to take such user-level security settings into account....

Datacenter Edition builds on the feature set offered by Enterprise Edition and eliminates a few features that aren’t considered appropriate for a large enterprise data center. For example, Datacenter does not support the Internet Connection Firewall or Internet Connection Sharing, two features designed to make Windows an Internet gateway for network clients. Both features are, however, supported by Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Datacenter Edition adds support....

The key to finding anything on the Internet is to use a search engine, but if you ask different search engines to find the same information, each one will find a number of websites not found by the others. Rather than limiting yourself to the tunnel vision of a single search engine, experiment with some of the different search engines listed below, and you may uncover information that your favorite search engine missed. Even better, you may find that one sea....

Linux was developed as a freely distributable version of UNIX. UNIX is the most widely used operating system in the world and has long been the standard for high-performance workstations and larger servers. UNIX, first developed in 1969, has a strong programmer-oriented user group that supports the operating system.How did UNIX get its name? It was based on an operating systems called MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing System). Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Bri....