I'm unsure as to whether Microsoft's strange new ads for Internet Explorer 8 are either a) brilliant and reminiscent of the old internal funny spoof ads with Bill Gates and friends or b) a pathetic reach to be quirky and relevant which instead comes off, well, pathetic. Glad Dean Cain found work though....

This is kinda cool, from Ars Technica: Microsoft announces free antivirus, limited public beta. Anti virus, malware, spyware, etc, all in one package from the OS creator. Kinda gives me a warm fuzzy in a way. I have some computer cleaning to do some time soon, and this could be a huge win.

Aryk pointed me over to an article on the Good Experience blog. Entitled A hundred million mistakes, you can probably guess that their Bing impressions aren't all that great.

What's the world coming to, when Microsoft can't build a monopoly around a knockoff? It's those effing customers. They keep choosing the best experience.

I was accused recently of hating Microsoft ("hate" is such a strong word) and that I'd never give Bing a fair shake anyway (only partially true). I thought my article a bit ago was fairly fair and perhaps the cold hard truth.

The main gist of the linked article is twofold. First, why the hell is MS trying to compete in the search engine space. Google has it locked up, and lets be perfectly straight, Microsoft's core competency is not the web. They do great operating systems, office apps, and gaming systems. Seriously, I give them 100% honest kudos for those. Even I, a hard and fast Linux lover am excited about Windows 7. You don't need to rule every single market out there.

The second point is that instead of building something better and letting the customers come to it, MS is spending a hundred million dollars (that's $100,000,000, lots of zeros) to advertise it, and in essence, shove it down the consumers throats. In setting up a Windows 7 virtual machine with the new IE 8 the "recommended" settings are live search (which is now Bing of course).

I also was contacted by a company called M80 on behalf of Microsoft pointing me (and my readers) to a series of youtube videos called talking about windows which is blah blah windows marketing. I've also seen a lot more Microsoft-centric / loving / etc random articles just happening to pop up around the web.

Anyway, hit the article for a good read.

Hot on the heals of the Windows 7 vs Linux link from the other day is the Lifehacker Windows 7 Versus Mac OS X Leopard feature by feature showdown.

Of course, as I've found, use whatever you want, and it's not just the features sometimes that make an OS a winner, sometimes it's the "feel" of it.

That said, still an interesting look, especially some of the features I didn't know were in Windows 7. Also you're comparing an OS that isn't out yet to one over a year old (wonder what Snow Leopard news will come out next week also).

Bing is up and working this morning. It's a "preview" (guess that's equivalent to the google "beta" moniker), and unfortunately doesn't seem to have a lot of the cool functionality turned on (the image filtering, relevance/trust filters, flight filters, etc). I'm not sure why, and frankly I'm a bit worried that this will be seen as just a re-skin of Live search and completely ignored. I have some feelers out to figure out why this is.

Update: Sounds like you have to change your location to the US to get the good stuff. It's at the top right under More -> Preferences and the Location. Sadly this doesn't work for me :(

Over the last couple of days, the new re-branding (and re-imagining) of Microsoft's Live search, now called Bing has been made public. Well, almost public anyway, right now the service isn't available to the public, but a lot of journalists and techies have gotten access. Here are some of their early thoughts (via Digg).

I actually got a look myself from a friend who has access, and have a couple of thoughts. First of all, it's not going to un-seat Google. Nope, sorry, no chance. While it's search results are fine, so are most of the other search engines out there. Ask, Yahoo, etc all have decent search engines and search results.

Luckily, this isn't what Bing is going for (I hope it's not anyway). Bing is going for what Ask did a while back, taking their half decent search results and skinning and organizing the results to make the results more useful. When Ask did this they did an "OK" job I think, but I have to say the new Bing is impressive.

For certain searches (ie: "yvr to lax" or "pentax k20d" or "vw golf review") the results are filtered and presented in completely different ways. For example, plane flight searches have tips such as "prices dropping $50, wait" or "prices trending up, buy now". Product reviews (especially for tech gadgets) are the bane of Google, with SEO and spam hitting the top pages like mad. Bing will filter by "trust" (ie: the "x out of y found this helpful" notes on Amazon reviews) and various other factors to give a more useful result.

This isn't perfect though. A search for "digital camera" filtered in this method resulted in the top hit being a 3 year old DSLR (and a great camera by the way). Probably not what you were wanting, even if it is the most "trusted" hit. This sort of thing will no doubt become better over time though.

Bing also does what Google does with fancy image searches (including "portraits", "line art", only xxx color) and mapping results related to location right in the search result page. This sort of thing though is what people are used to these days. Not that it's inconsequential of course :)

So what's the downside? First of all, the results are going to be about the same as google, so why move away? I see Bing being a bit of a niche search engine, the sort of thing where if you're looking for plane flights or hotels, you go to bing, for everything else you stay with google. This is a perfectly fine place for Bing to be I think. Hell, right now Live search has as good results as google without any of these nicities! The problem with the fancy filtered airline searches is do you trust Microsoft to give you "honest" results? MS has partnered with certain companies to get the fancy airline data for example, but what if there's another company that gives better prices? By filtering down does MS miss the deals that a googler might get because they are getting the full results instead of the filtered view of what Microsoft thinks are the best results? I think some of this can be negated if Bing makes it obvious that the "yvr to lax" fancy filtered results are indeed connections with their partnered sites.

The interface, if I may digress for a moment or three, could be better too. Some of the UI is neat, but odd. For example to the right of search results is a little bar that gives you an overview of information from the site (such as a paragraph or three of context around your search result instead of just the one line that you get on the main search result). If it's person information it'll pop out contact information if it's available all nicely formatted. Great stuff, but as I said, a bit of odd UI.

My conclusion is we'll have to wait and see. I'm sure that Bing will become the default search engine for some, and will become successful for niche searches and certain types of information gathering. I don't think it'll unseat the 800lb Google-rilla though.

So the Zune HD is finally (almost) real. Looks like a fairly sexy little beast, marketed head-to-head against the iPod Touch, complete with a touch screen and multi-touch. Looks a bit like a super-sleek first-gen iPhone.

Nifty features it has are HD Video out, wireless with a browser (more on this in a second) and HD Radio (who really uses this though?). Only issue I have with it is it's built on Windows CE (ugh) and the browser will (I'm guessing) be either IE 6 mobile or if you're really lucky, IE 6.5 mobile (which I believe is coming out with the new Windows Mobile 6.5). First of all, IE? Ugh, second of all, IE < 7.0? Double-Ugh.

That all said, it's good for apple to have some competition, and I'm fairly interested to see just how the UI and performance is. Microsoft always has a habit of one-upping apple with some of the features in their iPod-killers, so we'll see.

Nope, it's true.... saw today on Paul Thurrott's site that As promised, Windows Vista (and Server 2008) SP2 ships in May and lo and behold with only 5 days left, SP2 has arrived. Looks like it's a rolling release though, and may not be available for your Windows Update just yet.

Sadly nothing notable shows up in the release notes :(

Lifehacker has a nice list of Windows 7's Best Underhyped Features. Nice to see, not going to make me give up my MacBook Pro, but look forward to having it on my Windows gaming box :)

The Apple Blog has their Windows 7 RC: Reality Check Edition, which is a fairly fanboy-ish look at Windows 7. They do reference legitimate articles when pointing out things like sluggish performance, edition confusion (even Paul Thurrott things this is stupid) and the XP compatibility issues, but it's a fairly cynical look. Some people I know have run Windows 7 for a while now and find it just fine.

That said, we'll see how it goes when things actually get released late this year.

Ed Bott blogged that Windows 7 RC is now available for download. Lets go MS geeks, make those servers smoke!

Since I discovered the iPod a few years ago I've been a fan, and (along with a lot of the world) scoffed at the Microsoft Zune. However when I saw the IO9 story where you could Win a Zune Packed With Battlestar Episodes, and the Zune is laser etched with the Caprica logo... hell yea I'm there.

The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 is alive and ready for download. Boosting lots of bug fixes and some hefty performance improvements (so claimed, I haven't verified anything yet myself), sounds like a must-have (290mb) download. If it's not up on Windows Update for you the link above should do for you.

Slashdot discussion on Windows 7's Virtual XP Mode and what sort of pain it could cause IT professionals. Personally I think it's a neat idea to allow a transition for users, as well as a nice bridge for people who are still on XP and not yet up to Vista who may begin to feel really left behind when 7 hits sometime (this year maybe?).

That said, I don't have to support windows machines myself, much less windows machines with 2 copies of windows running on every desktop!

Paul Thurrott shows one of the fun applications of the newly announced Windows 7 "xp mode" - IE 6 and IE 8 side-by-side. This will definitely be an interesting feature for people doing web development. I think you can do it now with VMware and it's "Unity" mode (which allows virtualized apps to run as native windows within the host OS.

So along with the "macs are too cool for me" ads, every once and a while you find a gem like this article from Computer World entitled Living on Air: A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac

For PC users, Mac OS X takes some getting used to, but once I did, I found it a more elegant, polished piece of work than Windows (either XP or Vista). With so many nice little touches, it seemed as if I was finding a new one every day.

Essentially it's a story of Windows Boy meets MacBook Air, spends 2 weeks getting to know her, finding out that while she's a bit more pricey than some of the other girls on the block, she's worth it. Then after two weeks Windows Boy wants to keep her. Or something like that.

Could be all BS though.... and in a week some article will come out about how the author Preston Gralla was really a mac-sympathizer all along or something, who knows.

Over the weekend there was another Microsoft ad released. Again it focuses on the differences between Mac and PC pricing. I could go into how this is really missing the point (in a way) and how the ads are both good and reeking of desparation, but Jeff over at the iPhone development blog has some
good thoughts on it. To quote:

Whatever the actual numbers, there's not even a close second to Microsoft in this market. Apple is a very distant second, Linux (if you lump all the distros together) is an even more distant third. There are few industries where a company enjoys this kind of lead.

But, Microsoft is suffering an identity crisis because the world of computers has fractured into many components, of which the general purpose computer (laptop/desktop) is just one piece, and Microsoft has had a very hard time repeating their dominance in other sectors.

I guess my main objection or eye-roll to these ads are that people already know (at least I think they do) that Macs are more expensive. I don't see honda putting out ads about how if you went looking for a BMW under $20k you wouldn't be able to find anything, but you could get.... drum roll a brand new Civic! I've used and bought both (a) Mac and (multiple) PC laptops, and while the bang-for-buck and "apple tax" is kinda there (many people with more time on their hands than I have gone though component by component and no doubt proved that the Mac is on par price wise for the equivalently outfitted PC laptop already), the feel and quality and "vibe" of a MacBook is much higher than the $500 or $1000 laptop. Specs be damned, the light, thin, sexy aluminum case with less USB ports trumps 99% of the PC laptops that this ad portrays. Course, I'm sure I could be accused of being a fanboy :)

Microsoft announced at Mix09 that IE8 is available now, via Ed Bott. The IEBlog has some info on making your IE8 experience more pleasurable as well.

Paul Thurrott weighs in on the changes from Windows 7 Beta to RC. Not all good news IHHO.

Paul Thurrott has some details on what to expect from the Windows Vista/Server 2008 Service Pack 2. The notes include a couple of stand out items, blu-ray disk writing, integrated windows search 4.0, better power management and general compatibility/reliability/performance improvements. Oh wait, hardly any stand out items. Very boring in fact. Course, this might be a good thing... I'm not sure if you want huge changes from a service pack.

Microsoft Unveils WinMo 6.5, My Phone, and Marketplace via the Apple Blog (so they might be a bit biased). Short story is a tweaked (not completely new) Windows Mobile, a syncing solution a-la Mobile Me / Exchange called MyPhone and an app store type solution. Sadly while this is still a good step forward, MS (and pretty much everyone but Android based phones for that matter) are still playing catch up to the iPhone. Even the MS advocates such as Paul Thurrott have said this.

Now that said this isn't a bad thing. This forces other companies to innovate and push forward, and the people completely centered in the MS Mobile world still do get an upgrade, which is never a bad thing.

OK, so if what Paul Thurrott is reporting about Ultimate Extras in Windows 7 is true people should be up in arms, and any Microsoft lovers out there should really be ashamed of their favorite company's marketing.

So it appears (again, this is only rumor at this point as a) nothing is final b) Windows 7 isn't out yet and c) I just read this on the Internet), that not only will there be no Ultimate extras in Windows 7 Ultimate edition, but the UEs you do have installed if you have Vista Ultimate (more on this in a second) are removed during install.

Lets be straight... Vista Ultimate Extras are something that MS should be ashamed of. Vista Ultimate edition's golden feature was supposed to be all this cool extra content you get randomly made available in the form of these "Extras" (I've bitched about this before). The extras that were made available were a joke. Animated backgrounds, a couple of sound themes, and a poker game were about the extent that were delivered. Remember that people are paying top-f-ing-dollar for Ultimate edition. $399 rings a bell for the cost of this, but I'd have to look it up to be sure. Animated backgrounds and a poker game. And now these are silently removed (supposedly) when you "upgrade" to Windows 7 Ultimate.

Now I'm actually excited about Windows 7. I have it installed via bootcamp and it looks like a fairly clean, good upgrade to Vista, really more of a Vista++ than a whole new OS, but regardless I applaud Microsoft for Windows 7, I really do. They'd get a lot of cred if they sucked it up, gave Vista UE owners a high discount (hell, make it a free upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate) and publicly say they screwed up and over-promised what would be coming from Vista Ultimate.

Let me also disclose that I was one of those people who got Vista Ultimate Edition, though I got it through the Microsoft store so it was a fraction of the cost of my guessed pricetag of $399.

Guess we'll see what happens when Windows 7 comes out....

Just to show I'm not totally biased, IEBlog has the details on Upgrading to Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1. Honestly I gave IE8 a shot in Windows 7 (see how progressive I am?) but the interface just seems to have gotten more cluttered and (for lack of a better word), "bleah". Honestly IE7 isn't that bad (for IE), and at least it's less sucky than IE6, but IE8 seems to have gone in an ugly direction and the interface is more cluttered than before. What do you guys think? Anyone going to be using IE instead of Firefox or Safari or Opera?

Windows 7 Tip: The Windows Key Is Actually Useful Now!

Here's a guide to Windows 7 x64 Build 7000 on a Macbook Pro with bootcamp. I'm almost tempted to do this, just to see how well it runs on proper hardware (I have Windows 7 installed on vmware and don't get all the nice fancy graphics effects).

Lifehacker has the details (and worked for me) of How to Get Your Windows 7 Beta Product Key.

For those wondering what you may or may not be missing in Windows 7, howto geek has a What You Should Expect from the Windows 7 Beta extensive walk-through of new features. Via lifehacker.

Wired has some details on How to Get Your Windows 7 Beta 1 on Friday (today) when it's released at noon PST. Course, if none of these work, or you're not one of the first 2.5M people to download it (or get keys, or however it works), there's always bittorrent...

Update 12PST: The page to go to seems to be this one, however, I'm just getting "server too busy". Oh, and I hate myself for being pulled into even wanting to try it.... :)

Update #2: The wired page has been updated with direct ISO links (thanks Oneiros Darren).

Lifehacker has some details on What's Inside Vista SP2, based on a flurry of blog posts lately (apparently, I've been out of it). Sadly nothing hugely exciting is in there other than fixes and tweaks.

Well, with PDC in full swing it seems that some folks have gotten a Hands-on With Windows 7's New Features. I'm going to reserve judgment for a bit as IIRC the first betas of Vista released at PDC a few years ago looked and felt like XP with a black skin, and (for me anyway, for the most part) Vista turned out OK. Mostly OK anyway.

Paul Thurrott noted Microsoft actually updates Ultimate Extras. Sadly the content (one game, a sound theme and some backgrounds) are "junk". Not worth the extra $$ paid by Vista Ultimate users and definitely yet another blow to the faces of the dedicated Microsoft customers who believed MS's promises about what they were going to do with UE.

So the Mac people's take on the first ad from the newly formed Microsoft-Seinfeld alliance is not good, saying: Microsoft’s first “Seinfeld ad� a bigger disaster than the Hindenburg.

Me, I'm not in the same mindset. If MS had fired back with a "mac vs pc" type ad they'd be playing in apple's playground, which would look even worse. That Apple ad campaign is fairly brilliant, and nothing short of something with the dial up to 11 would have looked like anything less than a cheap (or rather, expensive) knockoff, and the Mac community would have laughed even harder.

However, what MS is good at is the quirky, funny, internal type ads that they do for their conventions and developer conferences (or at least that's what I keep on hearing on Windows Weekly from Paul Thurrott :) .

This new ad definitely is taking this to heart, and has that same feel. It's also obviously not the end of the $30m or whatever huge amount was paid to get the not-all-that-relevant ex-sitcom comedian.

That said, I'd almost say they were trying too hard to be quicky, and seeing this on TV I'd probably ignore it after the first few seconds, and the only mention of anything MS oriented (other than Gates himself) is about half a second at the very last few frames. There isn't even a clear connection between the whole shoe thing and Windows, or software at all. Unless they're saying that if you accept things that you don't want and people can't properly sell you and that take a lot of work to eventually enjoy are worth it. And honestly I'm not even sure if that isn't a huge stretch. Of course, this is probably more of a "hey, look at us, we've got an ad campaign!" message. I think.

Paul points to a good article on how to resolve lots of Vista Annoyances over at tweakguides.

OMG a Vista exploit! This one sounds different though as the neowin article claims Vista's Security is Rendered Completely Useless by it. Somehow I think it might be over-exaggerating a bit, however if it is as big an issue as they claim (in that there's not much MS can do about it), maybe it has changed the game a bit.

Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. have discovered a technique that can be used to bypass all memory protection safeguards that Microsoft built into Windows Vista. These new methods have been used to get around Vista's Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and other protections by loading malicious content through an active web browser.

The way it sounds is that it's a browser attack, which means IE, so the solution might be similar to the last time IE was found to have huge holes and the recommendation from MS will be to turn off all scripting. There's nothing actually out in the wild yet, so at this point it's a theoretical thing that smart people have come up with but no one has actually seen (like black holes I guess).

To help guard against such things, here's a link to a browser that you'll be happier with if you're an IE user :)

Of course, depending on what side of the fence you are on OS leanings-wise, this is either BS or the first sign of the MS demise. OS News has people from both sides in the comments.

Someone else chimes in on Microsoft and Why the 'Mojave Experiment' Fails.

The "Mojave Experiment" is conceptually a fresh marketing effort—at least for such a lame marketer as Microsoft. But after looking more closely at Mojave and reviewing Microsoft Watch reader comments, I have to call the experiment perhaps the worst kind of marketing.

I'm glad someone other than myself has stepped up with a good explanation of why “The Mojave Experiment:� is Bad Science, Bad Marketing. They're wrong of course in the respect that this is bad science, this is no-science, this is marketing, just presented as if it were "real".

Next week I'll be running "The Atupquonihanque experiment", where I present Mojave users with a copy of Ubuntu and tell them it's Mojave's successor, and they all tell me how awesome it is next to XP, Vista, or Mojava! Come to think of it I just need to put a tiny little * Based on laboratory results at the bottom and I don't even have to do anything but get actors to say it!

See how well all this works? :)

I just thought of something.... hasn't Microsoft's new marketing campaign basically taken a page from the Burger King Whopper Experiment? Seriously, it's the same idea....

Not everyone agrees with me of course :)

So part of the new Vista marketing effort called The "Mojave Experiment" is online.

Not a lot to say about this, I give this about the same amount of credibility as I do to late night infomercials, paid programs on afternoon TV, and any commercial with a "(*) based on laboratory results" in tiny lettering at the bottom of the screen.

I could say that these were edited to make the people's assessments of Vista worse than it sounds and their assessments of "Mojave" better, but this is as "real" as a reality TV show, and shouldn't be seen as anything more than what it is, a commercial, and it's content should be taken with that in mind.

Please note I have Vista Ultimate at home and am perfectly satisfied with it.

Paul Thurrott pointed out that there were New Ultimate Extras Released. Wow. A new sound theme and three new dreamscene wallpapers. Well worth the extra $100 cost of Vista and the almost two month wait since the last ultimates release (language packs) and the one previous to that (the first dreamscenes in march 2007). Oh, did I sound sarcastic there? Not really, honest. Glad I didn't pay full price for Ultimate though, that's for sure.

Just saw the word on WinSupersite that Vista SP1 is available to the world.

Of course, it's not showing up on my windows update..... oh well. Anyone out there have things asplode because of this?

Update: Why you might not see SP1 in Windows Update.

BBC reports that Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo. So is this the start of a major power move, where one family absorbs the other in an attempt to hit the big boss? (Sorry, just finished watching a bunch of Sopranos last night). Or is this just political posturing? If the merger goes through will it really mean anything to anyone? In my online world google is my search engine, and my online mail goes to gmail (though that's not a primary address). I have a yahoo account, and a hotmail account, but they were only really for getting access to downloads, or flickr, or something or other.

Microsoft has been putting lots of work into both hotmail and their Live.com search lately, so are they looking to replace them with the yahoo search and mail (both also (from what I've heard) updated and improved lately), or are they just looking to kill off Yahoo from the search engine market. Yahoo doesn't have online advertising (that I know of, feel free to correct me), but they do have things like Flickr.

Anyone out there have any thoughts? Or should I just keep an eye on the geek podcasts and news to see what the industry experts think?

xPerts64 (a Microsoft x64 blog) has a hint on how to Disable UAC Prompt for a Single Application. Genius! Still a bit overly-complex for a normal person, but handy I suppose if you have something you use often that requires UAC (for me, BF2142 and Quickbooks) that you know is safe.

I wonder why a) Microsoft didn't put something like this into Vista to begin with (possibly to "force" application developers to change their apps to be UAC compliant) and b) if this could be scripted out by malware authors.

So fellow vista users... you know how copying or moving files around, especially to/from network shares is worse than the smell from a sweaty wookie's pits? Well, acording to WinExtra, Vista Service Pack 1 RC may not bring a solution :(

From the article:

Well it would seem that the Service Pack hasn’t made one bit of difference to the problems I was experiencing despite what had been listed in their published changelog that Long Zheng was good enough to publish. I realize that some will say that this is just something I am experiencing and must be related to my setup. The problem with that wishful thinking is that it is just that - wishful thing - especially considering that more than few forums around the web are reporting exactly the same; or very similar, problems.

I installed the hotfix a while back and performance has gotten 100x better than it was from the default install, which saved Vista from being rolled back to XP, however the performance is still pretty crappy compared to my linux box copying the same files to/from the same network drive (a Linux system running Samba). No, I'm not going to turn my fileserver into a vista box to get the (alleged) benefit of Vista-to-Vista copies :)

All I can say is I hope that Steven is exaggerating or that some changes happen between RC and the final release sometime next year.

Looks like there are plans to ditch the Vista “kill switch� in Vista SP1.

When SP1 ships sometime in early 2008, it will strip away one of Vista’s most annoying features and remove one of the most persistent objections to Vista’s adoption. Microsoft plans to remove the infamous “kill switch� from Windows Vista when SP1 is installed, restoring the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program to its original role as a series of persistent but nonlethal notifications.

Wonder if this will gain Vista more popularity through piracy, and put it on top of XP, instead of the current state where isn't not pirated half as much!

TechCrunch has some commentary on what Ballmer's comments about how Google is Only Ahead Of Microsoft In Search. Guess everyone will have their own spin (or reality distortion field :)

The Vista blog announces that they have "the next generation in Windows Live apps & services". Basically a suite of software and webapps for online tools. I wouldn't call it "next generation" though, more like "catching up with google". Still, competition is always good. I got my live.ca address.... wish I knew how to change it to live.com though :( Doesn't even seem to work even through a US proxy...

Speaking of service packs, istartedsomething notes that Microsoft posts more Vista pre-SP1 ‘wonder patches’. These are performance updates that are going to be in VIsta SP1, but are being released early. This is most likely because some of the issues that Vista have are beyond aggravating for people (like the 'calculating time remaining' bug that was fixed with the last set of hotfixes that were released).

Ars Technica: A day on the Surface: a hands-on look at Microsoft's new computing platform. Interesting...

Well, the Vista Ultimate Extras' Windows DreamScene has been released. These are basically animated backgrounds. From the page:

In early July, I wrote about The Ultimate Team’s intention to ship the remaining promised Ultimate Extras (DreamScene and the remaining Language Packs) by the end of the summer. Unfortunately summer never really came to Seattle this year—so we missed our cue. That being said, we are pleased to announce that Windows DreamScene is now available.

What I saw on my vista ultimate system is an update that required a reboot, and then the addition of five mpgs integrated into the desktop background control panel applet.

All but one of these was released in beta ages ago. WTF? Come on microsoft, you can do better than this. I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

Dream Gallery - Your home for Animated Wallpaper - addon's for Vista Ultimate's dreamscapes.

The Windwos Vista Experience Blog talks about Experiencing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta and what's in there, including screenshots.

Windows Vista UI design spoof video. Sadly not nearly as funny as you'd think. The spoof on 'what if microsoft did the ipod packaging' was much better.

IStartedSomething has the roundup of links about Windows Vista Service Pack 1 whose details are starting to emerge.

A few days ago a story passed by my news aggregator about how under Vista if you are playing audio, your network connection will be affected. I just saw a new post by Robert Love about Those Dang DPCs Clogging the MMCSS which goes in to explain a bit more about this, and compare and contrast the same kernel systems in Linux.

In other words, consuming half of your processor is (surprise!) detrimental to multimedia playback performance. At this point, it becomes clear that the process scheduler folks and the networking folks are bitter enemies and do not converse. Consequently, the obvious solution of fixing the abhorrent networking performance was bypassed for a quick bandaid:[...]

Not everyone is (still) impressed with MS's "we're doing open source now too!" initiative (Shared Source I believe it was called). Microsoft's Open Source Trashware is an article where a few of the open source MS projects are looked at. As you can tell by the title, the author is not impressed.

It does seem that the staying power of MS's initiatives falls off rapidly as the marketing campaign ends. Who has heard about the Zune (outside the zune specific blogs I suppose) in the last couple of months? The Vista Ultimate site remained silent for months after Vista's launch, and was only updated after 5 months because of pressure from the internet community bitching that the extras they were supposed to receive after paying the ultimate price for vista were a) lame and b) not updated. Even now, 2 months after the update (which really just said they were going to release more stuff "over the next couple of years") nothings been put on the site.

Of course this (the lack of MS open source projects) may simply be due to pressure at work. We all know how easy it is to be busy enough to really have no desire to do anything in the evening after work, maybe that's the case for these folks? Or they have realized that OSS won't make them money, while working for The Man at MS will.

Today in Microsoft news, we have:

• Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 Betas Leaked: A Bad Week for Microsoft?
  
• Vista SP1 analysed in-depth
  

Chris points to some (official) Windows Vista Updates which (they say) will fix various performance issues, including the dreaded "calculating time remaining" bug. These are official updates, from the MS support site, so I don't see any reason not to install them. If your vista experience is like mine... "mostly good with a handful of pissing-me-right-off", these sound like at least part of the solution.

Fingers crossed!

Istartedsomething has some news on Vista hotfixes improves file performance, reliability, standby/resume, games graphics and global warming.

If you were one of the many betting on performance and reliability improvements in anticipation for Windows Vista Service Pack 1, then your winnings has arrived early, in fact some can already claim the jackpot. Winning lotto balls KB938194 and KB938979 for Windows Vista were distributed today to a group of Windows Server 2008 testers which is said to fix many of the mass-reported performance issues in Vista and even some unexpected improvements.

Sadly these aren't available to the common folk yet, but they are expected to be coming out via Windows Update "in the coming weeks", unless you're feeling very brave and want to download the patches from some random site on the net (I'd recommend not doing this by the way :)

Another post on Vista SP1 is here.

Ed Bott has started a Vista Master Driver List. Still nothing there to help out my SigmaTel microphone issues, or my film scanner, but it's a nice place to start for others.

The 20 Worst Windows Features of All Time - according to PC World anyway.

The report that came out a while back saying basically how Vista has had hardly any security issues and Linux has had tons has been, debunked by insecure.org. First of all it's shocking that someone with interests in Microsoft would see less vulnerabilities and someone with interests outside of Microsoft would see more. Shocking. Next you'll tell me that statistics can be manipulated!

So read the debunking, and read the original report and commentary over at OSNews.

The MS Photography blog announces the Windows Live Photo Gallery, Beta 1. Vista and XPSP2 support, MS Spaces integration (does anyone use that anymore?), Panorama stitching and exposure tweaks are some of the features. Interesting move, we'll see how it pans out, and if it's good enough to move over other photo sharing sites and apps out there. Obviously integration right into the OS is a big plus, but being tied to Microsoft Spaces (if it stays that way) might be a deterrent for people to use it. We'll see how it goes.... right now it's an invite only Beta it seems.

I've criticized Microsoft and their marketing in the past, but this banner on why debugging matters shows a clear win for them from the Visual Studio team :)

I found a story over on Digg entitled Leopard looks like … Vista from ZDNet. Assuming the entire article isn't a blatant troll, please excuse me while I rant a bit about so-called tech writers. Or maybe it's all satire, not sure... if it is please ignore this :)

1. New Leopard Desktop: Not a whole lot different from Vista’s Aero and Sidebar.

... or conversely, not much different than the original OS/X desktop from 2001. The Leopard desktop is (sadly) not all that revolutionary and more a nice evolution from the original.

2. New Finder: Many of the same capabilities as the integrated “Instant Search� in Vista (the subsystem that Google is trying to get the Department of Justice to rule as being anti-competitive). The new Leopard Coverflow viewing capability looked almost identical to Vista’s Flip 3D to me.

Well, the 'instant search' in Vista could be said to be snatched from spotlight which was introduced in 2006 in OS/X 10.4. The new coverflow is fairly different from Flip 3D from what I can see, and is actually a modification of coverflow from iTunes which was introduced in September 2006. Flip 3D could also be argued to be Microsoft's interpretation of Expose from OS/X.

More below....

3. QuickLook: Live file previews — just like the thumbnail preview capability available in Vista.

Kinda sorta but different. Looks almost more like the 'quickview' that was in windows 95 or the 'preview' app from OS/X. Thumbnailing open windows is IMHO nothing like viewing files without opening an app.

4. 64-bitness: Leopard is the first 64-bit only version of a desktop client. Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit varieties. And most expect Windows Seven will still be available in 32-bit flavors. Until 32-bit machines go away, it seems like a good idea to offer 32-bit operating systems.

I think this is correct, but this doesn't seem very much of a "Leopard is Vista" argument.

5. Core animation: Not sure what the Vista comparison is here. The demo reminded me of Microsoft Max photo-sharing application. The WWDC developers attending the Jobs keynote didn’t seem wowed with this functionality.

They probably weren't wowed because core animation isn't all that differnet from the offscreen video that OS/X and vista use already, giving things like Expose and Flip3D. Or it could be there's no Vista comparison because there is no Vista comparison.

6. Boot Camp. You can run Vista on your Mac. Apple showed Vista running Solitaire in its WWDC demo. But I bet those downloading the 2.5 million copies of Boot Camp available since last year are running a lot of other Windows business apps and games.

Probably. And?

7. Spaces: A feature allowing users to group applications into separate spaces. I haven’t seen anything like in in Vista, but the audience didn’t seem overly impressed by it.

Not sure about vista, but there is a similar powertoy called virtual desktop manager. Sadly it sucks :) Oh, and people weren't impressed by this because things like the Unix desktop have had multiple desktops since the '70s or so.

8. Dashboard with widgets. Isn’t this like the Vista Sidebar with gadgets?

Vista sidebar and gagets, aren't those like the OS/X's Dashboard (introduced in 10.4) or Gdesklets or SuperKaramba (2003)?

9. iChat gets a bunch of fun add-ons (photo-booth effects, backrops, etc.) to make it a more fully-featured videoconferencing product. The “iChat Theater� capability Jobs showed off reminded me of Vista’s Meeting Space and/or the new Microsoft “Shared View� (code-named “Tahiti�) document-sharing/conferencing subsystems.

Not sure if adding silly effects makes something more fully featured :) File sharing / viewing does though. I have no experiences with Meeting Spaces and minimal with iChat, so I won't comment on how similar they are.

10. Time Machine automatic backup. Vista has built-in automatic backup (Volume Shadow Copy). It doesn’t look anywhere near as cool as Time Machine. But it seems to provide a lot of the same functionality.

This was a critique when Time Machine was first introduced (it ripping off VSC). However, I think that since OS/X is built on a Unix core there aren't the file locking issues that VSC allows you to get around (I think anyway, not sure if it does just that or does other stuff as well). I don't think that the idea of automated backup is new (or a copy from Vista by any means), but the presentation of it is something new, and if that gives users more inclination to use or be aware of backups, great. I'd be interested in comparing the numbers of people doing backups though. I think that windows 95/98/xp had the ability to do backups built in as well (might be wrong about that) and how many people used that? Again, so how is time-machine (a backup application) a copy of Volume Shadow Copy (a file conversioning system/service)?

Anyway, that's my response to the IMHO quite bogus article.

Those of you who drink the kool-aid, or do only on your employers time, might be interested to see the New Features in Windows Server 2008. Self-healing NTFS, Address space randomization, SMB2 filesystem (reason for this I heard on one of the TWIT podcasts was "to f*ck with Samba"), virtualization (oooh! that could be interesting) and Server core, a GUI-less system (hows that going to work I wonder.... hey, Microsoft is stealing all Linux's ideas! where's the innovation!?!?).

Like I said, an interesting read to see what's around the corner. The interesting question for the Linux camp is a) does linux have equivalents to these features and b) does it need them?

El Reg has an article on Windows Vista's file deletion problems, mostly related to the inordinate amount of time taken for what should be simple file operations, moving / deleting / copying files around. I see this all the time and it's a immensely painful experience when it takes 15 seconds to delete a 100kb file on a dual core 2.40Ghz machine with 2G of RAM.

To prove the point, one user found the problem went away when he ran an XP Pro Virtual Machine that was running on top of Vista. Mysteriously, it took him about eight seconds to delete the 23GB of files he wanted to get rid of. Using Vista on the same machine took him more than 25 minutes.

Interesting reading if you're using Vista and wondering if you're the only one having these issues, or if you're thinking of switching.

So I saw today that Microsoft Silverlight CTP (public demo) was released. I downloaded and installed it, then watched the video using the new technology. Other than the video not having the standard controls, I'm not exactly sure exactly what this is. The video was typical marketting, showing flashy graphics (lots of images of skateboards) and throwing slogans around ("Light up the web"), but there is absolutely zero content! I suppose this is typical for big companies though, MS in particular. About the only thing you can gleam from the video is a short bit in which you see people with a buddy list or something like that.

Digging into the site a bit it seems this is a new plugin (yay) under 2mb (so what), for rich interactive applications on the web (isn't that already there with flash/quicktime/wmp?), vector graphics and overlays (isn't flash vector based?), enhancing existing standards/AJAX based applications (extending and embracing?).

All in all I'll wait till something either comes out or there's something more exciting out there.

Original post was via the vista experience blog btw.

I'm not sure exactly how much tongue in cheek or plain old linux zelotry (is that a word?) is involved in the latest "ask Microsoft to open source windows" letter, but I took a look through Dear Mr. Gates: save Vista, open-source it and found it ..... interesting.

Most of my comments amount to "not going to happen." Even if they did give it away, how long would it take to do anything on it? Remember mozilla and the problems they had when they open sourced just the browser? How long would it take for people to get in and know enough of the windows guts to do anything useful.

Sure, maybe a couple of minor itches could be scratched, things like stripping out the deluge of DRM processes taking up memory or maybe changing the logout button to separate icons or something (that's already done with tweak VI BTW), but addressing some of the real issues that are (IMHO) plaguing Vista like security, the UAC PITA, compatibility and performance? And doing it so that nothing else breaks, and that people trust it afterwards? I remember hearing that windows 2000 or 2003 or XP took 24 hours to do a full build. I really don't think that hobby hackers have quite that amount of patience.

What could come from it though, would be to take some of the core win32 code and use that in the Wine Project and in OS/X to give compatibility between the apps and whatever OS the user wants to run them on. The OS really doesn't matter as much these days, because people are really just running apps (or in extreme cases not even that in a web-based world). Wouldn't it be wonderful to have your sexy OS/X desktop and run [insert needed windows app here]? Or have the ease and convenience of GNOME (or KDE you freaks) and run [other needed windows app here] alongside [needed / loved Linux app here]? Heck, in a perfect world you'd be able to run OS/X apps on all three major platforms as well!

Or hey, port over the windows shell to run on top of Linux... Mac did it with OS/X didn't they?

Anyway, end rant. Short story is if you need/want windows and don't like Vista or don't want it, don't use it, use XP (at least until 2008). Ubuntu is very close to their next version and if you want super-sexy hardware, just get yourself a mac.

Some tips on extremetech on how to Speed Up Windows Vista. I'll check these out tonight.... hopefully something addresses the default 600-900mb of memory that it seems to use just booting up and running no apps.

Cool video of the latest Windows vulnerability, affecting Vista, XP, 2003 and others due to Animated cursors. The Microsoft advisory is here. The result is a crash-reload loop of explorer crashing, restarting itself, crashing, restarting itself, et infinitum.

What's really scary is that it doesn't seem to be affected by UAC or any of the new security precautions. It does still require the specially crafted ".ani" file to get onto the local system, but these days that still isn't that hard I don't think. Hey, it's just an animated cursor, right? :) This is 0-day because it's apparently been seen in the wild.... Slashdot flamefest here.

Of course, who uses animated cursors anymore. Most likely this will only hit 12 year old girls installing my little pony cursor sets.

I point out this post from Robert McLaws not so much because I've heard of the problem it's fixing, but as a note that the next time someone complains that "well, in Linux if you have to fix something you end up having to type cryptic commands into a scary black window", point them to it and contemplate on

icacls favorites /setintegritylevel (OI)(CI)low

Suddenly "apt-get dist-upgrade" or "umount /dev/hdd" doesn't seem so bad :)

The IE Blog announced the IE Add-ons Contest Winners a couple of days, and I have to take a moment to bitch about this, even though the first few comments on the site echo my thoughts.

First thing is that the first criteria is:

Creativity: Creative and innovative application.

Fair enough. I applaud Microsoft for engaging the community, encouraging innovation and doing something different. However, lets take a look at the winning entries:

Grand Prize - Inline Search

Available in firefox since sometime at least in the 1.x series.

First - Spell checking

Available in Firefox version 2.0, released mid to late 2006.

Second - FoxyTunes (puts media player buttons in your browser)

Available as a plugin for firefox since 2004.

So basically the first three prizes, equaling a trip and $3k cash were won by re-creating features available on a competing browser. Huh?

Do the authors of the plugins deserve credit for the work they did? Yes. Are these features needed in IE7? Definately! That's why they were created no doubt. Do they deserve to win the top three prizes in a contest where innovation is the first criteria? Uhmm.... I don't know about that. Oh, and some of the winning plugins (not those top three though) are for pay as well (but I guess that follows the Microsoft philosophy).

Just when I just think that I am understanding Microsoft, they confuse me again.

Anyone else have any thoughts / opinions on this? Am I mindlessly bitching here?

Microsoft - Posted by Arcterex at 02:55 PM

I think a project like Linux Personas quite well defines the term "passive aggressive". Basically they group Linux users into broad categories (experimenter, follower, application, geek, transitioner) to help "better understand the marketing opportunities". Then they provide stats like sales cycle length, potential revenue, etc.

There's even a funky screening tool (with well worded questions akin to "do you like linux, or do you care about your IT infrastructure" to let you determine if you should attempt a sale to them.

I so wish I could say that ironically the server that runs the site is Linux, but no, sadly it's W2k3.... I guess they won't make that mistake twice :)

Via /..

The Inquirer has a look at a program that allows you to crack Vista activation by brute force.

The method of attack has got to be quite troubling for MS on many grounds. The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people.

I'm not sure how I feel about this... on one hand I'm a cheap bastard and admit that part of my not upgrading to Vista (which is attractive to me for some reason, though the love is fading with the various horror stories surfacing with nVidia driver issues, performance being bogged down by antivirus, etc) is due to it being harder to get a "clean" pirate version where it doesn't expire, WGA works, etc. MS did a fairly good job of protecting it, though there are some timer / clock hacks around (invalidated as soon as you run an update of course). On the other hand, if/when I shell out my $100 for a legit copy of Vista, and I get told I'm a stinking dirty pirate because someone's brute force hack has grabbed my activation key, I'd be pissed off, even if it is solved with a simple phone call.

If this starts happening in force do you think that...

• a) MS will realize the error of their ways and discontinue WGA and activation or....
  
• b) They will create even more invasive procedures to determine who is a dirty stinking pirate or not
  

Here's an interesting look at some of the insides of the latest kernel from Microsoft. In Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 2 there's some fascinating stuff on readyboost, superfetch, and their other superhero friends.

Taken of course with a grain of sale (this is slashdot you know), this commenters story of the most frustrating 10 minutes in front of a computer sounds eerily familiar to the "spoof" switch ad that Dana talked about the other day.

I'm told that after you have everything configured and setup, you never see the UAC prompts again, which is good, unless you're like me and enjoy trying new software and mucking around with the system, which may mean the best alternative for people like me is to disable UAC, which means that you end up with the situation in the ad of "then he doesn't warn me at all".

Interesting to see some of the reaction to Vista now that it is actually real and out there and people are able to use the final version and not base reactions on previews, marketing literature, etc.

Found via Fake Steve Jobs' Blog is what looks like one of the meanest review of Vista I've seen so far.

Windows Mail is a mild reworking of Outlook Express whose big new feature is a spam filter that in my tests flagged nonspam as spam and vice versa an unacceptable 10% of the time. The bare-bones word processor WordPad used to be able to open Microsoft Word files. No more. What possible rationale could there be for "fixing" that, except to force users to shell out for the real thing?

The rest of it has some similar ranting, and not all unjustified in my opinion. I've been watching what Vista is shaping up to be, and some things, like games running slower under Vista than XP, are a bit disturbing. Aren't things supposed to get faster as new versions are released not slower? Maybe it's the driver manufacturers fault, maybe the architecture.

Personally I have a odd desire to run Vista, but I'm honestly a bit scared to move all my setup to a new OS just to find a deal breaker. I'm sure I will eventually though. Anyway, read through the review and make up your mind (and take it with a grain of salt).

An interesting and cautionary tale on using Microsoft Vista. I'm sure there will be more like this in the future, as some of the less obvious features and bugs start appearing now that Vista is out in the wild.

Curiously, when i looked at the files in the folder, it didn’t look like the time stamp had changed. I figured i’d just modified the wrong one of several different versions, so i retraced my steps: nope, that was the right file. This is weird, i thought, so i re-opened the file from the folder, and all my content was there. I saved it again … no changes to the directory listing.

Ars Technica has the details on Windows Home Server. Might be an interesting project to see something like this implemented in Linux. A lot of the major bits are there already, shadow copy looks equivalent to LVM snapshots and a bit of scripting + EVMS would give you the "plug in a drive and auto-expand storage" part. Of course, it'd take a bit of work to put it together in the package that MS has, course, they also have a bit more money to throw at this. Also sounds like they might have felt threatened by the availability of the easy home server setup that Linux offers as a file server. We'll see what happens though.

The ars discussion has some good talk on what it actually is and does, as well as (perceived) up and downsides.

.... with a minor hitch. You have to watch some webcasts. See the details over at Robert McLaws blog. Apparently the Get Vista & Office for Watching Webcasts is legit, so we'll see.

"While supplies last" of course, and only open to US residents :( Anyone want to watch some webcasts for me?

Note, some of the graphics don't seem to work in Firefox, you may have to use IE to see the link/arrow beside the 'free gift' graphics.

There's a certain humor in that Vista RTM was available on bittorrent before it was available on MSDN and TechNet.

Engadget shows off the less than stellar software experience that apparently comes with the Zune. Looks like there are some bugs to work out still, at least on their test system. Not to spoil the end of the story, but after hell to get things going on one computer:

But just to be EXTRA sure, we tried the software on a second PC we had laying around. Besides 20 minutes to install (huh?) it worked just fine. Expect more from that PC in the near future!

Bitch I do, but I have to give credit where credit is due when I saw that the license terms for Vista have been revised to create less pain for hardware enthusiasts and people who upgrade and change their hardware a lot. Good stuff, glad to see I won't have to re-buy my OS if I upgrade my computer.

So what does anyone think of these Five Zune TV Spots? They are a bit reminiscent of the XBox 360 water balloon fight ads, all ending with "Find your audience".

Personally they are a miss for me. I honestly zone out because there's no focus or anything to draw me in or make me watch all the way to the money shot. Most of the commercials really have nothing to do with the player or any advantages it has. The first three basically are random shots of people socializing in a park, with some of them listening to generic looking mp3 players as a complete aside (to my eyes). The features that the Zune has that set it apart (large screen for video, wifi, landscape mode, comes in black, xbox integration, "social networking", etc) aren't mentioned, or highlighted. In fact, in watching the five spots, other than it's use for listening to music, I saw only one quick reference to watching videos (I think, it was a quick shot of someone turning it sideways, perhaps a reference to the landscape video mode) and perhaps a reference to the filesharing abilities by showing two zunes sitting beside each other.

The videos are very... "amateur looking". Not as if they weren't done professionally of course, but that stylized look. Definately focusing on the social aspects rather than the technology itself (maybe on purpose?).

Compare this to the iPod ads. They are a lot simpler, concentrating on the hardware itself and the enjoyment of music, or at least that's how I interpret it. Following the Apple simplistic style I particularily think that this U2 Video iPod ad is well done. A simple music video, and it just pulls out to show it's playing on an iPod, saying a lot.

Of course, I have a feeling most of the Zune marketing has been the grassroots kind that's over at ZuneInsider.

Anyway, I'm interested to hear what others think about the Zune marketing so far.

A nice article on the MSDN Blogs The Old New Thing entitled I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature. It goes through what the quicklink menu, taskbar, and balloon help should be used for, as opposed to being cluttered up with useless crap by pretty much every app you install these days. A good / must read for application developers on the windows platform.

The rule for taskbar notifications is that they are there to, well, notify the user of something. Your print job is done. Your new hardware device is ready to use. A wireless network has come into range. You do not use a notification icon to say "Everything is just like it was a moment ago; nothing has changed." If nothing has changed, then say nothing.

Just so you know I'm not all anti-microsoft (though I do go on a tear sometimes), I'm pretty impressed with this Zune review.

All in all, any reservations I had about the device melted away after I had a few moments with the Zune. Yes, it is a first-generation product but I really like the direction Microsoft is taking with the Zune. Regardless of either the Zune or the iPod, the consumer will be the winner of this new front in the battle for our entertainment lifestyle.

I'm still not convinced it's an iPod killer, but it does sound like it's a pretty cohesive app / service and of course MS is going to leverage whatever they have to make sure it integrates with your OS, console system, etc. Lets say that I am hitting the point where I wouldn't mind checking one out at least.

Wendy has a nice article on how Windows licensing disserves the user. Apparently Microsoft doesn't realize that users actually should matter, instead of extra money.

2. Vanishing functionality through invalidation. "The software will from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software. … [if validation fails] you may not be able to use or continue to use some of the features of the software." Again, your computer must make periodic (period unspecified) contact with the Microsoft mothership if you want to continue to enjoy what you thought you paid for. Microsoft, of course, disclaims any liability for the consequences if their servers fail or mistakenly deny you validation.

• The licensing / DRM / functionality issues will be overblown and everyone will continue as they do now with XP, some pirating, some buying legally.
  
• More and more people will rebel and go to other OSs.
  
• Apple will come out with an ace in the hole with native windows application execution or something like that and suddenly desktops will move over to the Mac side of the world.
  
• Hackers will fight with MS by releasing patches to un-DRM/WGA/etc Vista. MS will of course release security updates to counter these, hackers will respond, etc.
  
• Microsoft will relent and realize they are squeezing too hard, either through their new and improved "interact with the users" attitude, or through floods of phone calls to the call centers complaining, and remove the restrictions (I believe apple did this with itunes at some point).
  

Congrats to the IE7 team for releasing Internet Explorer 7, the first release for... well lets just say a while. Commentary as well as fixes and ways to get this installed if the standard WGA-infested way doesn't work for you is here.

Update: First vulnerability found. 'Nuff said.

Hands on: A Mac fan takes on Vista... vista via bootcamp from a Mac. No surprise which one comes out on top of course, though the way that I read it it wasn't due to a glaring bias towards mac, the article seems relatively fair and balanced to me. Some of the critisism can also be boiled down to familiarity. If you're used to hitting a key combo to get your widgets up then not having that will seem like a bad thing. If you've never had key-combos, you won't miss it (as an example).
Course, if you're a Vista fan I'm sure you'll disagree with some of the assertations.... feel free to discuss here of course!

Paul Thurrott has his thoughts on the newly released Vista RC1 in an article called The Dark Side of Windows Vista RC1. Some interesting finds and opinions in there as always. Anyone tried out RC1 yet? Any opinions?

Interesting article telling you how to download files from Microsoft without Windows Genuine Advantage. Useful for pirtates or folks who don't like Big Brother Bill snooping in on them. Not sure if there's a difference between that and pirates though...

So this is an issue that I'm asking the web at large to help with. My Windows XPSP2 system refuses to save the refresh rate setting for my CRT monitor. It seems to happen in conjunction with a dual monitor setup. Basically what happens is I reboot, and when the system comes back up the refresh rate is back to 60hz (ie: painful on the eyes). I go into the monitor settings, and it says it's set to 85hz. I set it to 75, hit ok, the refresh changes and it's all ok. I reboot and it's back to the painful refresh rate, go into monitor settings and the settings say 75hz. Change it to 85 and hit ok, and it's back to ok.

Very strange. The setting is saved, but the refresh rate doesn't change. I have the same problem on a relatively new XP install on my work setup where I have an LCD and a CRT (the LCD works fine), and at home where I have two CRTs. At work the monitor is using the PnP drive and at home I have the correct NEC monitor drivers.

Anyone know about this or have any idea how to fix it? I don't reboot that often, so it's not a huge deal, it is however a pain in the butt...

So this is pretty intersting.... according to a digg story, Vista Beta 2 will be available for public download later today.

I'm not sure of a couple of things... is this only for people with MSDN access, or a 100% public beta such as they did recently for office 2007? What restrictions will be placed on it (I'm going to guess it'll be expireware)? Etc etc.

On the other hand, this is pretty brilliant. Vista is the "next big thing" for the home desktop market, and all the magic 8 balls say that it'll be available to the public Q1 2007 at the earliest. That's another 6 months before it can start being realisticly in the hands of the average joe, and then only at either the cost of the OS or bundled with a new computer. This way everyone can get access to it, free, get the brainshare going, and have an extra 6 months of (in theory) training to get used to the OS which will be a lot different than XP.

I wonder if they'll be taking tech support calls, or will be relying on the QA software built into the OS itself? Either way, it'll be interesting to see if this makes the final release less buggy and more secure.

Also, it kicks the pirates in the balls a bit. No more need to download the torrent from pirate bay, grab it straight from MS. Of course, this also goes along with my theory that MS actually likes pirates or at least does the minimum to protect their software from piracy so it gets into the hands of the most people, and increases their brainshare. Now, they have been cracking down lately, but when you have 90% of the market, you don't need to spread much further.

Things I'll be looking for...

• Memory use.... Beta 1 uses about 600mb of ram doing nothing compared to 200mb with XP, hopefully that's debug uglyness that'll be gone.
  
• How will games play? Most of my windows experience is for gaming, so it'll be interesting. Most of my hardware is pretty common so drivers shouldn't be an issue (knock wood).
  
• Are the security warning popups that bad?
  

Anyway, I'll be downloading and installing this over the vista beta 1 install I have from an earlier torrent on my second hard drive :)

Update: Downloads now working.....

I know I rag on Microsoft, and Windows security, but at least there are those out there doing something about it. My ex-boss, ex-coworker and good friend Dana has just released version 1.1 of Firewall Dashboard. New features include:

• Import/export of config for deployment to multiple machines
  
• A new plugin to aid in remote monitoring for managed service providers
  
• New reports and the usual array of bugfixes and tweaks
  

I'm not a huge Microsoft guy, however I do like to know what is going on in the rest of the internet world. My buddy Dana has published a slidedeck with an Introduction to ISA 2004, the windows firewall. Looks very nice, and looks like a good reference for you ip[fwadm|chains|tables] people to check out.

Good work dude!

Took me a bit to find the solution to this issue I started having today after a windows automatic update..... turns out that KB908531 is at fault, and removing that in the add/remove programs fixes all (at least for me). Symptoms I had were that if I right clicked on the desktop, it would freeze up and I'd have to kill explorer.exe in the task manager to get my system back.

Hope this helps someone.

The second point is the automatic disk defragmenter (second screenshot). Uhmmmm.... wasn't this a feature in Windows 98? Wasn't this removed in Windows XP for some strange reason? Hasn't MacOS been doing this truely automatically for 5 years now (OS/X automatically defrags files under 20mb just through general use of the system, whereas Windows requires you to say "defrag my disk").

"Sleep mode" - basically they are using the instant off/on that OS/X laptops have had for 5 years now on desktops, which is cool. Basically a less sucky 'hibernate'.

Improved networking stack, very nice, of course, you only get benefits connecting to other Vista machines. Go figure. Anyone want to bet if a) the new stack is open and b) if it is, and were implemented on *unix, the benefits wouldn't work? </cynic>

I'm sure it'll be nice for those moving files around at lan parties or in the local network though.

Media center... *yawn*

On page 3 I find that your audio drivers won't BSOD you anymore. Uhmm.... "yay". Built in speech recognition just like OS/X (and possibly before). Per-application audio control, been there, done that.

Better built in mail (outlook express finally overhauled!), good, hopefully this will be less of a virus magnet than the current iteration. Built in calendar app, photo viewer app, good to see. What I've seen of media player 11 it's less ugly now. Course, I wonder if it'll still have the same stupid UI issues it has now (ie: the hidden window frame that even though it can't be seen it still has an effect on the window).

The new Aero engine looks sexy, but I'm going to guess by the time that Vista is out technologies like XGL will be out and "standard" on the Linux desktop. I personally set up the latest Ubuntu with XGL and wow, very sexy. The screenshots of the new Vista UI does look quite nice though. It will be a delicate balance of "looks good" and "eyecandy overload".

Sidebar? *yawn*.

Better security - Yay!

Those are my thoughts anyway.

• Big F'n Deal - a smaller tablet with a flashy add to no doubt boost tablet PC sales (which we haven't heard a heck of a lot about lately). Note the accessories you need to make it useful (ie: the wonky looking keyboard setup).
• Potentially cool.... they look like they have combined something like a PSP and a tablet with all the built in things like wireless networking, bluetooth, GPS, USB, etc etc. No evidence of bluetooth of course, but one can imagine.
  Of course, there are some issues. First of all, they appear to have magically solved the the problems of using laptops / LCD screens outdoors, or is it just bit in the video that should be titled "does not represent real usage". To anyone who has done work in the sun outdoors knows that the first part of the video is total BS. Also the video implies (but doesn't say right out) that WiFi is ubiquitous and you can hook into mapquest from anywhere without looking into a network to get mapping directions. The reality might be a built in GPS (or add on GPS unit) against a static map or something. Who knows.

  I guess we get confirmation early next month.

  Microsoft - Posted by Arcterex at 01:13 PM

Of course, Microsoft would never do it. They've put too much energy into discrediting Open Source and the GPL (if they released the source code, for free, they'd never use that evil, cancerous GPL license anyway). My $0.02 anyway.

Of course, not to let anyone think that I'm selling out, this video decided to lose my currently playing mp3 without giving me any option to to re-start it. Normally not a big deal, but finding where I was in a 3 and a half hour mp3 sucks.

Also, I still disagree that the term "open source marketting" is a) even a real term or b) applicable to the fact that MS has a bunch of people blogging about how cool they are.

This article says pretty much the opposite of what all the Microsoft advertising and rhetoric says, Linux lowers TCO.

We talked to independent analysts, developers, and IT company executives. They all pretty much agree on one answer to the question: Yes, generally there are fair to good TCO savings with Linux -- sometimes huge savings. But variables in every organization's mix will determine exactly what that monthly, quarterly, or yearly savings will be.

Surprising to anyone? Someone should tell these guys that maybe their "independant third party" tests were biased.

Granted, IT Manager's Journal is part of OSDN, a pro-linux organization, but two can play the bias game I guess. Course, I also trust OSDN a bit more.

My opinion on this is pretty much as follows. Looks mostly like XP with a black skin. Many of the changes appear to be cosmetic, and some major components are lacking in any really exciting upgrades (ie: IE has pop up blocking (which warns you that it might not work!), but no tabbed browsing or anything else that looks remotely revolutionary. Some things are just wacked, like the sync manager still uses the windows 95(!!!!) offline webpages icon, and the icons still don't seem to be scalable.

The 3D avalon mode looks pretty swanky, but nothing that hasn't been in OS/X for 4 years and Linux (in various forms) for a while. Basically it's dropshadows and a nifty thumbnailing alt-tab mode. All this requires a fair amount of hardware of course. Of course, sometimes features like this new alt-tab are far worse than the tried and true classic. Anyone using the new alt-tab replacement that came out for XP, which thumbnails and gives you huge ass icons in your alt-tab list? Didn't think so.

Overall the interface is pretty similar to XP, but in some places it looks far more cluttered, a step backwards, not forwards, to me. Of course, this is still pre-beta, full of debug code and un/half-implemented features, and the final product is still years from release. It's still interesting to see what's coming up. Based on this though, I'm not chomping at the bit yet.

As a friend of mine mentioned it is possible to get 0 errors back from ad-aware by using your computer smartly (not running IE, watching cookies, changing your security zone, not running as admin), but in my opinioin this isn't the way that most "normal" people work. They turn on the computer and use what is available, click on pop ups, click executables that come in email, and are blissfully are hosts to adware, spyware, worms and viruses. The number of worms and crap that float around support this theory :)

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{F0291081-E87C-4E07-97DA-A0A03761E586}

Once again, thanks for nothing microsoft.

On the day that a the nice big Windows Outlook Worm is filling up email inboxes (mine included, since yesterday morning), news.com has a story called Gates takes swipe at Apple, Linux security.

"A high-volume system like (Windows) that has been thoroughly tested will be by far the most secure," Gates told the audience at the Developing Software for the future Microsoft Platform conference...

What crack is this guy smoking? Of course he follows this up with:

"To say a system is secure because no one is attacking it is very dangerous," [regarding os with less market share].

Of course, when you're talking to a bunch of MS developers you can't tell them the truth can you? I wonder if they actual believe this stuff? There was no indication that he was talking about the next generation windows (longhorn) which is touted to be much more secure either, but the current one.

Sorry Microsoft, you're still full of it.

Thanks to Christophe letting me know about it.

Of course, unless you buy a new computer, you'll have to install it, and if you're installing your original XP from scratch, you'll still be screwed until SP2 is installed, but I guess it's better than nothing. Anyone want to take bets on when the first new or old vulnerabilities show up in it? BTW, it's not in beta yet though.

There is another story with some of the start of this and Microsoft's objectsions to Lindows.com setting up MSFreePC.com to help Californians get their rightfully deserved piece of the anti-trust settlement pie.

Thanks to this page for the link. John's updated observations are also up.

• Windows XP SP2 is a look at what to expect in the as-yet-unreleased SP2 for Windows XP.
• The version of Longhorn that was released at the Microsoft PDC show did not include the littlebit touted "Avalon" interface which utilizes hardware graphics rendering like OS/X and can (apparently) do wonderful and amazing things. Anyway, the interface is kept under tight wraps, but there are some digicam shots of it that were found over at betanews.

Some of the stuff looks nifty, some is pretty obvious. I don't develop under windows though, so they don't excite me a whole lot. I know some do though, so chime in to what you think.

Ideas like making patch CDs freely available at computers stores etc would be useful, as well as having OEMs release fully patched versions, as that would have made the latest eXPerience Silverstr had a lot less painful.

Course, we'll probably have to wait till 2005 or so before it comes out, but on the upside, we'll have from enduring hype, hype, hype from october 26th till the actual longhorn release to convince us it's the right and only way to do it.

Hopefully they'll design an OS that isn't so userfriendly in it's installing of software. Think that'll happen?

I know that not having to download patches off an install would require a new CD for each patched version of Windows, and that's not that realistic, but just running one update once would be nice.

Some of his other suggestions I'm not sure I completely agree with. I don't trust Microsoft to install software without my approval. I don't trust anyone to install stuff without my approval, so having your system patched and having things installed in the background without my consent doesn't make me all warm and fuzzy. On the other hand I cleaned off about 500 virii and infected files (via AVG and ad-aware) off a system not that long ago. When I asked if the user ever updated she said "oh, that think I always hit 'later' on?". *sigh* Maybe a "I am a techie" button somewhere that will convert from a "do whatever you want MS" to a "ask me before doing anything" schema.

This screenshot shows what appears to be a crashing version of Longhorn. Interesting look. I'm going to ignore smarmy comments about the bug as it is a few years from release :)

Personally they have the "ooh! cool!" look, but in reality, would I want my grandmother trying to use something that needs this many lines explaining what it is? I wonder why they aren't moving towards a more simplistic and easier to understand look? (from XvsXP's discussion on the dock icons vs the taskbar icons). Do you really need this wide a control to indicate the volume level?

Interesting question eh?. Right now a lot of geeks aren't too Microsoft friendly and this guy is a big player (I think) on the Longhorn team, and we have a chance to respond. A few people have, but I'd encourage all y'all to throw a (politely and maturely phrased) response back to him.

The suggestion every Linux machine running VFP-created aps would need a VFP license. For Windows, only the development machine needs to have a VFP license.

WASHINGTON -- Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday warned about a serious flaw in almost every version of its popular Windows software that could allow hackers to seize control of a person's computer when victims read e-mails or visit Web sites.

The Windows program is a reference-only license. So in the Windows team today we let you view the code and debug against it, but you can't change the code.

and

Can people access all the Windows source code?
No.

Of course, the best quote has to be:

Microsoft does not subscribe to security through obscurity.

Course, it's only fair to go read it for yourself! :)

Anyone tried this yet to confirm? If it's true... wow, that's a big bug.