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Had somebody flip me this url as a sign-up site for Longhorn Beta.

https://connect.microsoft.com

Looked authentic at first on IE6 but when I ran it on Firefox alarm bells started to go off everywhere about the validity of the security certificate. So is this place real of just a phishing expedition by some very talented hackers...

It's the real McCoy.

If you feel unsure whether you have a 1 or l or i or I because fonts look alike, you can always type in the name as you see it.

I accepted the certificate - Microsoft is very clumsy sometimes about authenticated certificates which is just the perversity of power -and did a traceroute on the destination that came up. It's well inside the Redmond complex.

If you go to https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/ and find ShowIP, you'll have a right-click IP address always on screen to do traceroutes and more with. It makes it very simple to check ownership and authenticity of sites.

Thanks Big Dog! Appreciate the info and the suggested update for Firefox!!

Thanks as well I was still on 0.9. Much better than IE. Do you use linux as well?

Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't.

I used Slackware, for years, and I occasionally loaded RedHat to see what it was doing. If I were enterprise-dependent, I might feel that was a good server route to take. It depends on why I want to go there.

This year, I put Ubuntu on and I was so impressed by the package selection versatility, and dependency automation, and the release speed, that I think I'll probably stay with that for the time being. It may be a Debian offshoot, but it's cracked all the Debian drawbacks, for me.

I've never got away from a need for at least one Microsoft Operating System machine, though. There's applications that only exist in a MSOS flavour, that WINE can't cope with adequately. Some legal forms packages, for example, or Blackstones - material that small producers can't afford to develop multiple variants of, who haven't gone near Java implementations yet. So, I have a vertical-market support station too, can't get away from it, with XP loaded.

I'm experimenting with Suse linux but like you I can't get away from Microsoft. I have some proigrammes I need that only work with MS. I do use open office as well though.