Two Slashes

If you’re reading this, the topic of Windows 7 has probably already been worn so thin it’s liable to be used as the cling-wrap protecting your next party dish.  If it has, I apologize in advance.  If it hasn’t…well, I’ll put up money towards the first person who isn’t tired of a Microsoft-branded discussion by the end of this.  Oh, and the Geeky categorization?  It’s been earned at least three times over in this post, so avoid at all costs if you don’t want to be wearing a confused look for the next month.

The release candidate for the next version of the must-have-if-you-work-in-an-office-setting operating system has been put out and the critiques are already coming in.  (In short, they can be summed up as saying that Windows 7 is the better-looking younger brother to Windows Vista, though they’re both of about equal intelligence, but that’s beside the point.)

The group of people I’ve been most concerned with hearing from regarding the operating system upgrade is security researchers.  Given that this is a field I take  a reasonable amount of interest in, I’m actually rather alarmed that the only topic I seem to be watching pop up is the same “issue” that’s plagued Windows for over a decade.  And yes, those quotation marks are intentional and completely reasonable.

Once upon a time, there was DOS and Windows 3.1.  You were limited to 11-character filenames in the “8-dot-3″ format, where the first 8 characters were a user-specified name for the file and the last three were an extension denoting the type of file it was.  Then came Windows 95, and lo and behold the world was amazed that you could have these amazing 255-character filenames (which were really just an overlay to the old 8-dot-3 system) and give your files reasonably descriptive names!  And you could use punctuation (granted that the punctuation you wanted wasn’t a question mark, backslash, forward slash, pipe, or any of another two or three characters) too, which made things even better!  Sure, the file extensions were still there (and are to this day, as is the legacy 8-dot-3 filename), but nobody complained for they could name their files “My Letter To My Boss About Me Quitting Next Week.doc” and all was right with the world.

Of course, nobody complained until this file extension voodoo was abused.  You see, Windows defaults to a setting where you don’t have to see those ugly file extensions because they take up screen space and confuse newbies.  And, in my book, it’s a reasonable expectation that most people don’t want to see them.  (For the record, I turn this functionality off, but that’s a whole different topic.)

With the advent of the Internet, people (even the newbies) have been blindly trained to start recognizing certain file extensions for what they are anyway, even if they aren’t technically inclined to do so.  For example, even if you aren’t a geek, I’m sure you know what a .jpg, .gif, .doc, or .zip at the end of a filename denotes.  It’s useful knowledge, even for someone who prefers things that Just Work™.

Expanding this same notion to the contents of a user’s local files, that user is just as unafraid and accepting of seeing .jpg as they are online to the point where they don’t even think twice.  After all, what’s the worst thing that could come out of an image?  Porn?  An old photograph of Aunt Millie?

If you answered in the affirmative to either of those two suggestions, most people would urge you to jump off of the nearest highway overpass, though I’ll accept either of those as correct answers.  This giant group of security researchers, some of whom work for the same companies that ultimately provide the software your favorite pimply-faced Geek Squad employee will be installing on your next PC, have nothing better to do with their time than to complain about a well-intentioned feature.

I cannot count (on one hand, at least) the number of articles I have seen recently (like this one) that cry “Wolf!” over a trivial morsel like hiding file extensions only to have a piece of malware call itself “AuntMillie.jpg.exe.”  And here’s where my post title comes into play.  Is it Microsoft’s fault for adding what amounts to a (in my opinion) useful feature?  Is it the Symantec and McAfee developers (to name the recognizable duo, though just about any security suite provider should be included here) who kindly will alert you that you installed Cain (and then promptly remove it) but refuse to sound an alarm or do anything about legitimate malware (I’ve had this issue)?  Is it the end user for not disabling the feature and being vigilant and knowing what they’re doing?

I suppose we’ve become too dependent on file extensions for me to suggest that Microsoft ditch the idea, join the Unix crowd, and start using the contents of the file to figure out what it is rather than its name.  For example, web servers will use the file extension to determine what type of file you’re requesting and whether anything needs to be done (like executing it) before it gets passed along to the end user.  Granted, file extension hackery can be fun (who knew), but it would be a small price to pay (and the files would still be accessible by other applications, so it really doesn’t even ruin the fun).

However, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to demand why these same security gurus are not busy including a feature of their own to warn of questionably-named files.  I can think of few legitimate reasons for someone to have two or more extensions appended to their filename, so warning of files that end in “.txt.exe” on creation or execution probably isn’t a bad idea.

And to think that I've done more work in thirty seconds with the Visual Studio form designer than the security gurus have in over a decade. (For the technical: Yes, I realize that user conventions would switch the position of these buttons. However, you don't want anyone going to the "Yes" button out of habit, do you?)

If I wasn’t starting my final exams tomorrow, I’d probably write a proof-of-concept that accomplished this simply because I don’t know of anything similar that already exists.  (On the other hand, it is something for me to work on rather than study… )

For a group of security-focused people, their intentions are in approximately the right place.  However, they seem to be forgetting that there’s more to computing (and life) than three or four extra characters on a screen and the bright intentions of a few developers in Redmond.

(Cripes, and to think I would be writing over one thousand words in defense of Microsoft…  I really must be off my rocker.)

Since ancient times, seven has been the number of choice for everything.  After all, there are exactly seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  There are (obviously) seven days in the week.  James Bond‘s agent number is 007.  (And what list of numbers would be complete without a blogger throwback to Brooke (more commonly known as Oh My Seven)?  Alright, that was corny…)

But while I’m either pleased with or indifferent to the aforementioned items, there’s one thing tarnishing the number for me.  And (to what I assume is Justin’s eternal glee), of all things, it’s a Microsoft product.

If you’re waiting on me to rant about Windows Mobile 6.5 and my Treo Pro, you would be half-right.  Literally.  Just one-half away from the appropriate version of Windows.  (Well, and a gigantic platform jump over, but who’s counting other than me?)  If you thought I willingly put myself into a position beta-testing the Next Big Thing™ to come out of Washington (other than the Mariners), you’d be right.  Seven points to you.

You might ask why I did it.  Back in October, I posted about how I have no problem whatsoever using in-development software.  (In fact, I’m writing this post using one of the latest nightly builds of Firefox, but I digress…)  Of course, that was before I willingly installed this pile of dung, and in the future I’m going to be putting more consideration into that policy.

Before you ask, it’s not the computer’s fault.  I’ve lived on Pentium 4s for the past several years, and finally decided in December to build a new Core 2 Quad desktop for school.  Of course, what would be better than loading up the test build of the operating system that it will most likely be seeing for most of its useful life, right?  That’s what I thought…

I’ve been using dealing with Windows 7 for about a month, and while I’ve taken to some of the “new” features, on the whole, I still feel like the experience is missing something.  A big something.

Performance-wise, everything seems to run at a very pleasing rate.  Even in beta, the operating system is quick to respond, and I’ve gotten used to some of the “enhancements” (read: mind-numbing changes for the worse) Microsoft made.  Things I’d also installed out of humor, like my old TV tuner, installed without any trouble.  Granted, the workflow in things like the Control Panel could be improved, but I’m going to let that one slide because it’s not the worst thing I’ve seen.

My biggest gripe is that Windows somehow seems to have lost control of user processes.  The same build of Thunderbird, for example, works fine on other operating systems (like my Windows XP-based laptop), but hangs in 7 to the point where it cannot be killed using the Windows Task Manager or even the appropriate command-line commands, and ultimately requires me to restart the machine from the front panel.  (As I write this, there is an unresponsive Thunderbird window where my desktop normally goes.)  This is on top of very annoying bugs I’ve already managed to encounter on more than one occasion.  I’ve also tried several applications that hang immediately, such as the NX remote desktop client, and plenty of applications you would expect to work (like Picasa) blow up without administrative permissions.

My next complaint is with data transfers.  For some reason, I have issues transferring files to and from removable media, though network transfers are fine, as is the removable media when used in conjunction with my laptop.  According to other people running the beta, they haven’t had any such problems, so this might be something I need to look into at a personal level, but it gets annoying that I need to transfer everything over in small chunks.

Win7′s inability to sync properly at all with my Treo is another showstopper, as far as I’m concerned.  And I would complain about power management, but I can’t say I’ve noticed any issues – my computer is kept on all the time, except when it’s being rebooted to ward off evil spirits and afflicted processes.

I’ll keep my hopes up (slightly – I wouldn’t want them dashed, as this is a Microsoft product we’re talking about) that the problems I’ve found get fixed before release.  I don’t know if I would be placing monetary bets on all of these issues being resolved before the final release, however.

What are your thoughts about the beta?

Microsoft may be known for Windows and Office and their fun little grip on the computing world, but they certainly aren’t known for a lot of their smaller technologies, and especially not for their voice recognition.  Some people still remember the incident during one of their demos prior to Windows Vista’s launch showing off just how much work went into the product in the first place (hint:  not much, at least at that point) and decided to make a subtle jab with the title of the post.

Someone must have taken the proverbial Q-tip to the Redmond campus, though, or at least picked up a pair of hearing aids.  It seems that Microsoft’s at it again with a new tech demo just in time for the Mobile World Congress, this time designed for Windows Mobile phones (like my Treo Pro).  Called Microsoft Recite, it’s not so much speech-to-text as it is an intelligent voice recorder.

My previous PDA, the Palm Tungsten|T2, also had a voice recording feature, though I rarely put it to use.  If you can keep the recordings straight and organized (something I never bothered to do), then the idea has potential for you.  But, at least in my experience, having to listen to every recording you have on you just to find the one little tidbit of information you need means it’s often more efficient in the long run to just have a handwritten/typed notepad open and draw or key the relevant information in rather than vocalize it.

Recite is designed to change that, though, because it offers a vocalized “search” feature.  After recording whatever notes you have onto your phone, you can tap Search and speak what you’re looking for; if you’re lucky, the relevant audio clip you recorded earlier will begin to play.  At least, that’s the theory.

Even in demo form, the software works reasonably well.  From a functionality standpoint, it works well enough to consider making it a daily-use tool, but I encountered a few accuracy issues that might make me think twice about relying on it as my only method of note-taking.  And while the interface could benefit from being touch-enabled for devices with a touchscreen (like mine; it took me a few seconds to figure out that I couldn’t tap the delete icon to remove notes), the interface is (and I can’t believe I’m saying this about a Microsoft product) somewhat intuitive.  It responded quickly (or at least well enough for my tastes), and there’s not a bunch of clutter floating around the screen making it look like the second coming of Microsoft Office.  Not that there’s much to the application in the first place, though.  (Click the screenshot – or here – for an animated GIF of every screen you’ll be staring at.)

I can see this as possibly being useful for reporters, as they can quickly pull up tidbits of interviews without having to cycle through gobs of unrelated and unnecessary recordings, provided they remember at least something their subject was saying.  Students too might find some benefit, but I personally wouldn’t have too much use in an educational capacity.  (My excuse?  It’s the major.  Everything’s already digitized. )

It’s a small app, and if you have a Windows Mobile phone with a little free space, it’s at least worth a shot if you work best with audio and carry around a cassette recorder in your shirt pocket.  Otherwise, stick with my personal favorite, Evernote.

Back on Monday I was making predictions about what would come out of this week’s Macworld and CES expos. Now that the keynotes have been delivered, the products introduced, and the reviews, well…posted, I guess, I might as well explain what I liked and didn’t like about what I heard through the grapevine and saw posted to the various tech news outlets.

First up, matching the beginning of the week, I might as well start with Macworld. Now, as I’ve said on too many other occasions to count, I’m not Apple’s biggest fan. I do respect the innovation and design they’ve brought to the table, but given how I’ve grown up with technology, they’re just not the fit for me. Nevertheless, I did (for once) pay at least some attention to what was coming out of Moscone Center.

If you’ll recall my predictions, I hoped that there would be a mention of the Mac Mini, AppleTV, or even a hint about Snow Leopard (once again, that’s OS X v10.6 for you IBM-compatibles). Three strikes, I’m out – I wasn’t even close on any of these mentions. However, I also asked for – and received – an announcement about the iPhone, though I was sorely disappointed that it was only to announce iTunes was going mobile, something that should have happened a long time ago and that (based on reviews) shouldn’t be a deciding factor in anyone getting a newfangled iPhone or iPod Touch.

What I didn’t even think about (which is to my eternal shame given the how-to I need to fix) was Apple’s iWork, and to hear mention of the new online aspect of it makes me wonder whether Google needs to go the extra mile with Google Docs to stay relevant. However, given that I haven’t used iWork.com yet, I’ll likely reserve judgment until I have that opportunity.

Apple isn’t the only company I have a certain dispassion for. Against my better judgment, I ended up watching the greater portion of the Microsoft keynote streamed live. (It’s alright, I’ll take a moment to allow you to throw things at me.)

While I was expecting mentions of Windows and Xbox, I wasn’t expecting them to turn a keynote into a combination concert/multi-person comic act. My first bout of laughter came when they made a brief reference to the forgotten Seinfeld commercials of last year. (Not only does anyone who happened to miss those commercials probably not get the reference, they probably felt Ballmer and Co. a little dumb for allowing such an out-of-the-way remark to display during their presentation.) Also noteworthy in causing me to fall out of my chair was the lower-third displayed during an Xbox 360 demo for Kodu (a game development platform-thing they’re planning on releasing soon), which they invited an “actual 12-year-old girl” to participate in. (I feel sorry for Sparrow – if that’s her name – and all the ridicule she’s probably getting, but the fact that a multibillion corporation needed to instantiate that they didn’t have an actor “playing” a preteen is definitely high on the list of unnecessary clarifications.) As far as musical accompaniment goes, they also could have found a better musical number than Tripod, one who didn’t seem to drag on and on.

Not all of Microsoft’s presentation was a stand-up act, though. I was more than pleased to hear that a new (Flash-compatible!) version of Pocket IE was going to be released sometime soon, though the also-mentioned “Netflix for Windows Mobile” definitely left me questioning whether such a waste of time was necessary.

Anyway, to continue with my lack of prediction skill, I also had questions about this Zii platform. It turns out that Zii is simply a media-oriented system-on-a-chip, touted as having power equivalent to that of a supercomputer. I think I’ll pass on the comparison, because for that to be true I must be carrying around the equivalent of a small cluster in my jeans pocket in the form of a mobile phone.

Palm really came though with their just-announced Palm pre. (They don’t capitalize ‘pre’ for whatever reason. I’ll also add that I think Nova was a better name, almost like Revolution was for the Nintendo Wii.) While the mockups were true to their word of the phone being a vertically-aligned slider (*BLECH*), the new OS is more than enough to make me at least consider it, should one find its way to a GSM network. The giant charging “podium” has me concerned, though, and makes me think that this phone was designed moreso to show up Apple than it was to be a phone, but that’s probably a minor gripe in the scheme of things.

Other than Microsoft, Apple, Creative, and Palm, I’m still not really too interested with this week’s events. Oh well – there’s always next year. Maybe I’ll develop some more enthusiasm by then.

(Some images shamelessly stolen from Engadget. Thanks, guys.)

I posted two weeks ago about some of the biggest failures I could think of involving technology.  While the responses to the poll I issued with the post were generally more than I was expecting, it wasn’t until Wednesday that I realized I had forgotten one of my ongoing projects.

It’s become habit for me to catalog all of the various mistakes and mess-ups I encounter in a visual manner, with the occasional flaw submitted by others for the sake of some variety.  This includes things both on- and off-line, as there’s no easy way to escape the clutches of human error and poor workmanship.  I think the old This Is Broken (the one I stole the name of my Picasa album from) and the Error’d section of TDWTF and the countless hours I’ve spent perusing both are partially to blame for my habit obsession, but I can’t be entirely sure.

Wednesday, when I had an issue with my (admittedly cheap) watch which caused it to somehow forget the rules to the Gregorian calendar (while still keeping accurate time, no less; yes, I took that picture at nearly 2a), it reminded me of some of my favorite entries in my album.  Considering I had already shared some other favorite failures, I figure that one more list won’t hurt.

• Far and away, my personal favorite is the picture I took in the produce department at a Meijer near my college campus.  There’s just something about going through a stack of nice-looking oranges and turning up the one that got past quality control that makes you not want to eat oranges again.  Or at least oranges from that store.
• Another mishap I take particular interest in is this product listing on Amazon, which appears to be a particularly gruesome mashup between at least three different products (price, product image, and title).  Either that, or floppy drives had changed their appearance considerably at the time I took this.  It’s a shame I never got around to actually ordering, as I would have loved to see what came in the box.  That original price tag certainly wouldn’t have been worth it, though.  (And speaking of sales on Amazon…)
• Speaking of mixed-up images, here’s a screenshot from Google’s Picasa web frontend while I was uploading photos and testing the (then-)new face-detection and tagging functionality.  Dear lord Google, that doesn’t quite seem to be a face to me!  And his head isn’t up his #*(, so there’s no other reason I can think of to tag the train platform between his legs.  I’m confused!
• I may alter some of my images to take into account things like order numbers or potentially revealing personal information (and this is a prime example), butI couldn’t make this up if I tried.  It seems that DHL has found the secret to speedy deliveries:  top-secret package locations.  Be it wormholes, subspace, or some other as-of-yet “undiscovered” transportation method, leave it to DHL to be the ones who milk it for all its worth.  As I recall, I got this package in record time, too.
• Being a big company like Microsoft, there are often little pet projects that get developed to test new strategies, ideas, or demonstrate components of their existing products.  Of course, these demos work better when they don’t make elementary school spelling mistakes (look at the document headers and you’ll spot it quickly), as the writer of one of their demonstration documents for Office Online has done.  And given that this image is still available from one of their press releases, I wonder just how much embarrassment they need before they can correct something like that.  I know I won’t be using Office Online until they have working spell-check, at least.
• Like the previous example, this one is also an issue of language.  However, I don’t think anyone reading this post will fail to notice what two staff writers and two editors from Reuters did, especially as I’ve outlined it for you in the image.  If I had the money, I would be mailing all four of those people fresh copies of Strunk & White in boxes complete with mechanisms that beat them over the head with the style guide when they first open it.

There you have it.  I’m sure you’ll find some favorites of your own, and I encourage you to keep track of some of the interesting mistakes you encounter in your own life.  If you have anything broken of your own to share in the comments, I’m also all for it.

I figured I’d try a different approach for once and see where that got me.

Given the sheer number of products and services we hear about on a daily basis, it’s easy enough to forget the ones that couldn’t quite reach out and make themselves a universally-known (in some cases, literally) entity.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less deserving of our attention.  For your enjoyment, here are some of what I believe to be the most amusing failures I can recall throughout the history of technology.

• (Swatch) Internet Time – If there’s one thing we definitely have enough of here on Earth, it’s time zones and ways to tell time.  Time zones, 12- and 24-hour time, daylight savings time…  Alright, listing that is boring, and having to take all of that into account while talking with people on the other side of the world is like taking a needle to your eye.  Swatch, being the omniscient corporate entity they obviously were, decided that all of this could be resolved with the introduction of an arbitrary standard called Internet Time.  Internet Time divided the day into 1000 equal parts of about a minute and a half apiece and was designed to be consistent across the globe to eliminate the need for time zones.  However, when you take into the account the fact that this was introduced just as the Internet was becoming mainstream, the issue with scheduling things in “blips” with people who have no idea what you’re talking about makes you look like a fool to the majority of the world, there’s no standard for writing the day (just the time), and the fact that ‘@’ was (and still is) most often recognized as part of an e-mail address, it’s not hard to see why Internet Time never made it to the big time.  (Sorry, pun intended.)
• Cuil – I wrote about Cuil once already, and I got quite a bit of feedback both here and on Twitter about it.  But for those who aren’t in the know, or haven’t seen my previous post about it, Cuil was touted at one point as the Google-killer, the end-all-be-all to searching.  Backed by some venture capital and a few of the genius minds who helped shape Google, Cuil was supposed to redefine what a search engine was.  Instead, it ended up showing just how pointless it was to try and humiliate Google right out of the starting gate.
• Microsoft’s Seinfeld Ad Campaign – Microsoft insists that the ads were intentionally about nothing (after saying that they were supposed to be a longer marketing campaign), but if that were the case, why were they produced in the first place?  I’m sure Jerry Seinfeld has plenty enough to do without helping Bill Gates try on shoes.  The only reason I can think of for this travesty even ever being unveiled was because Bill had some random “Things To Do Before I Leave Microsoft” list which was topped by making a pointless ad campaign with Jerry Seinfeld.  Well, Bill, now that you’ve got your wish, “What pointless thing would you like to do today?”
• Online Currency – Just as with Swatch’s idea of converting everyone to a unified time platform, several companies thought the way of the future was to develop “online currency” that could be used as an alternative to the real thing.  Get some credits for visiting a website?  No problem.  Viewing an ad?  Why not?  Want to buy something or send some money to that far-off relative?  Why not send them some e-money rather than worry about things like exchange rates, especially since retailers accept this mock currency as a legitimate form of payment.  It sounds like it might have been a good idea, had they put some thought into why they sounded just like they were illegally printing their own money and then corrected it.  I think I’ll stick with Paypal, as at least they keep my currency in US dollars.
• Lively – It’s curious enough that I should have something from Google on this list, but Google never expected to be knocked onto their backside when they launched their answer to Second Life with little fanfare and little reason for anyone using Second Life (especially those investing in the game) to make the jump.  Lively shuts its doors at the end of the year (so it’s not dead yet), but being the top performer in one area doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be the greatest elsewhere.
• The Phantom – An apt name for this ghost of a console, The Phantom is perhaps the precursor to the downloadable content now available from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.  In short, The Phantom was designed to be a console that acquired games over the web, eliminating the need for pressed disks, cartridges, and whatever other physical delivery method you can think of.  Unfortunately, the product never reached fruition, and the only part of their work to make it to market was their excuse for a keyboard.
• Windows ME – Alright, so it’s probably unfair to have two items by the same company on this list, but I really think that Microsoft managed to outdo themselves by even bothering to ship Windows ME.  Having spent several years living having to deal with this monstrosity, I can tell you that Microsoft should have thought ahead and given everyone prescriptions for headache medication with every license.  Between ME and Vista, I’m beginning to believe that Microsoft’s business model is to release a stable, usable operating system as a quick follow-up to versions that create plenty of uproar.  (See ME v. XP, Vista v. Windows 7.)
• Disposable (“Rental”) DVDs – What does fruit have in common with a DVD?  If you said that they both can rot, you’re not far off.  Who would have thought that people didn’t like the idea of paying for movies that expired like produce?  (I’d like to add that this idea seems to come up quite often; while The Register reports that the idea was spawned earlier this year, I distinctly recall Disney running a pilot program a few years ago.)

Do you have any other failures you’d like to bring into the limelight?  Is there something I’m forgetting, or do you think one of these is more worthy than the others?  Or, alternatively, is there something you believe to be one of the greatest developments since sliced bread?  Leave a shout in the comments and vote for your favorite.

(Also, I do believe I owe some thanks to The_Ugster for a suggestion or two.)

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A day or so ago, Gizmodo ran an article explaining some of their beliefs of why Windows Vista isn’t bad.  It’s their site, and their beliefs, but I’m not crazy over the arguments they picked, and decided it was worth at least a mild post about.

1. It’s more secure than Windows XP.

Excuse me a moment while I laugh, then point out that Windows XP has more security bulletins (at least, as far as I’m aware) than any other platform, be it OS X, Linux, Solaris, or anything else.  Then let me point out that XP also has the largest market share.  Make sense yet?  Notice the correlation?  I thought so.

I’ll give Gizmodo credit for actually acknowledging that little tidbit in their article, but there’s no reasonable way to compare the security across all of these platforms.  So what if there are fewer bulletins?  For example, if I code a CMS for a site, and that site is the only one with that CMS, is it necessarily any more secure than a common platform like Drupal or Joomla?  It could have all the holes in the world, intentional holes even…but the fact that it’s one site in the shadows means that there’s probably only a handful of people in all the world who would even attempt such a pointless endeavor.  Those holes would remain, my CMS would have no security reports – so by all means, I’m coding the most secure platform, right?

There are some things that can be compared…but the “amount of security” is not one of them.

2. It’s the best-looking Windows yet.

This is a matter of opinion.  While I’m not a fan of the Fisher-Price stock blue Windows XP theme, I’m not a fan of Aero either.  The transparency is a little much for my taste, and I prefer a full Start button to something that makes me feel like I’m trying to predict the future with it.  And most of the other stuff, like the 3D task switching, is just overkill.

Instead, I prefer Windows XP (*cough*) with this theme (though I use the alternate version with the actual start button instead).  It’s a lot cleaner looking, and it looks professional and sleek enough to me to at least not look like I’m messing with some virtual preschool toy.

3. Games work just about as well as under XP.

This one’s a tough one, because it really depends on the game and the system configuration.  Some games experience drags on one or the other, others need to be hacked to work on one or the other platform; all in all, it’s a real mess.  But in my case, I’m fine with Hover! and a 486.  (Nobody ever said “gaming rig” meant top-of-the-line specs.  And if they did…well, they should be forced to play Hover! for a while.)

4. Vista Media Center is a fantastic DVR.

Not everybody’s even hopped on the DVR bandwagon yet.  First, you need to teach people how to make their clocks quit blinking 12:00am.  Then, you need to explain to these same people why using their computer over a subscription box or the cable converter gives them an advantage.  Good luck with that.

My dismay with the lack of intelligence among people today aside, there’s also the issue of lock-in here.  There are plenty of great and reliable alternatives that AREN’T Media Center, and have a lot more expandability (namely MythTV for the experienced, and MediaPortal for the faint-of-heart).  One also has the benefit of working under…Vista.

If I had to recommend a DVR, I’d actually probably end up recommending a Tivo over a PC solution for the people who can’t read manuals.  I did just suggest MediaPortal, but Tivo at least has the benefit of being dumbed down and friendly enough that anyone with a moderate English vocabulary or the ability to recognize a thumbs-up or -down could pick up the remote and start using it.  And people can understand and recognize a Tivo box much faster than they will a PC sitting in the entertainment center.

5. The sleep mode works.

Funny…I’ve only ever had one problem with a computer sleeping while using Windows XP.  And you know what the funny part is?  It’s a hardware problem, an issue on my motherboard designer’s part that causes the Ethernet jack to disable itself (and an issue easily circumvented with a separate LAN card, I just haven’t bothered to put one in).  My laptop’s actually sitting here, also in a state of slumber, awaiting me getting back to updates.

If you need further proof still, I’ve been kicking the power button to my Gateway Mini-PC for the past hour now.  And I can still see it lighting up in my management console.

6. Built-in search is better and more useful.

Perhaps if Microsoft had thought to default indexing to ‘on’ in XP, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.  Not that it matters; a properly-organized work environment means you’ll still be able to find things faster than that search box.

7. User Account Control is useful for some people.

Wait…what did they say?  Let’s look again:

7. User Account Control is useful for some people.

That’s what I thought.  And the problem is that they’ve just shoved their foot in their mouth.  Yes, UAC may be useful to some people…but most often people get too annoyed.

Microsoft tarnished their “plug-and-chug” image as far as usability was concerned when they implemented UAC.  What I mean is that rather than people have their all-authoritative power that they’re used to, with nobody and nothing asking them what to do, suddenly the computer is the boss.  “Are you sure you want to do this?”  “Are you sure you want to delete that?”  “This wallpaper looks nice, so you’ll need administrative privledges to change it to something else.”

Understandably, there’s going to be the phase where everyone hates it, then slowly warms up to it and the idea that it “helps”.  Right now, this is the hate phase, and everyone’s turning it off.  OS X does something similar, requiring the user to enter their password as additional confirmation…but the users are over it because there’s no setting to turn it off.  (If there is, please correct me.  But my voyages through the cat-flavored fruit haven’t turned up any.)  Microsoft, perhaps the checkbox should have waited?  Or been included only for enterprises?)

If you want all that in a nutshell, I’m actually commending Microsoft for this move.  But the implementation…it’s missing something.

8. Drivers support isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be.

Wow.  Finally an argument I don’t have enough experience with to debate completely over.  Why couldn’t Gizmodo have brought this up sooner?

I actually think the driver support is backwards at this point.  I’ve purchased “Vista-only” devices before, and had to hack them into submission for use with XP (namely, a Pinnacle remote control).  I understand that Vista’s the newer, shinier consumer sibling in the Windows family, but too many people are complaining and stalling their move to Vista to warrant products with no compatibility on older platforms.

9. It’s not any buggier than XP.

Once again, this is a matter of opinion in relation to the level of mishap you’re willing to accept before something becomes buggy and unusable.  And it’s already known that the biggest issues come from driver bugs - the more people using those “bugs” the merrier.

10. Vista is not slow if you have enough RAM.

Alright, complaining about this one is probably a little overkill, especially given that Microsoft has finally realized that free RAM is wasted RAM, and decided to stuff it with the morsels you might need to use the most.  Some of the slowness can be alleviated by turning off things like Aero…wait, did I just suggest turning off bloat?  Alright, that’s it.  Vista needs to get on the StairMaster now and lose some weight.

I tend to agree more with the complaints they brought up, including the painfully slow file transfers from h*** and the requirement to categorize every wireless network you see as something like “Home” or “Work”, .  But those are common and heard just about everywhere anyway, so it really wouldn’t be missed if Gizmodo hadn’t bothered at all.

For a computer science major, software developer, and someone who generally is known to stick with everything needed to get stuff done…it’s nearly 1.5 years since Vista was released, and I’m still running on the previous generation.  And for once, I would rather wallow in the history than leap into the future.

I came across a video purportedly demonstrating some of the new features of Windows 7 that Microsoft’s been working on.  While this early in the development cycle, such videos should be met with questions and belief in deceptive and mockups of what people would WANT, I figured it was worth a few moments of my time to discuss it.

For your convenience, the video is embedded below:

Now that you’ve seen what we’re expected to be using in just a while, perhaps it’s time to point out that absolutely none of this is revolutionary or breathtaking, or even a big step up from what’s available now.  If anything, all they’ve done is take the hard work and brilliant ideas of others, and besmeerch them with an Arial Black Microsoft logo.

Windows Explorer
Browsing for files in a paned/tabbed system navigator is not even remotely new.  Konqueror, Dolphin, and countless other utilities have been doing this for ages.  And there are add-ins available for Windows XP.  Nothing new to see here.

FTP Locations
How many times around the track does it take for you to realize that this is a feature of Windows already?

Now, Microsoft:  Where would you like to go today?  Because I’d like to go somewhere where the featureset of your operating system isn’t yesterday’s news to everyone else.

…Wait, you seriously thought I was kidding?

Keyboard Shortcuts
This may be new to Windows users who don’t want to use remapping utilities, but other platforms have had this for a while.  The one I can think of off the top of my head is the K Desktop Environment, which is extremely lenient and flexible when it comes to setting things like this.  On the other hand, this is also one of those features that permits standardization to fly right out the window.  Just wait until Great Aunt Cecil remaps all the keys to Shutdown and wonders why the manual telling her Ctrl-P to Print instead powers off her machine.  Perhaps this should come with a safety warning.

Screen Animation & Capture
The video portion of this, if true, is at least a long time in coming.  But they’re only integrating the tools many people use and reuse daily (Camtasia, FRAPS, etc.), and I highly doubt they’re even going to consider it for use in anything more than a basic desktop capture (i.e. no games or really-hardware-accelerated functions).

Disk Usage Analyzer
Pardon me while I clear my throat here; to have the nerve of pushing this as new is pushing it.  It’s been done…a lot better and with a more helpful visualization than a pie chart.  (Anyone notice that smell?  Smells like burning pie to me…and I think it’s coming from the Redmond campus.)

Task Manager
The only thing new I see here is that someone’s finally harnessed the power of Netstat in a convenient graphical interface.  Though, they’re definitely a bit late in this respect.

Virtual Drive
Need I say more than, “Daemon Tools and Alcohol, noobified?”

Website, Blog, and Portal Designer
Excuse me, but why is there a copy of Expressions in my operating system?  Shouldn’t that be something extra?

Seriously now, I can’t wait until people actually start using that…you can tell who the inexperienced are by their use of one of a few dozen stock header images and designs that probably say “Microsoft” in more ways than there are calendar days in a year.

Coming Soon…

• Image Conversion – Image conversion.  We’re spending all our time and money on image conversion.  Because Grandma can’t use the software that came with her digital camera to do it.  Or because it’s a part of several other operating systems and work environments.  Take your pick, because either way it’s still lame to me.
• Document Conversion – I love how ‘document’ can be so vague as to encompass anything and everything all at once.  Does this mean Windows might actually be able to open OpenOffice files?  Doubt it, unless you want to install the third-party filter.
• PDF Conversion – Wait, doesn’t this one smell like a royalty fee?  Has Adobe approved this?
• Password Manager – This one I can understand, but it’s also nothing new.  KDE has Wallet (which IE had something similar to), OS X and GNOME have keychains, and other password managers have their “acceptable alternative metaphor” to a Post-it note in a wallet.

I know I should be taking everything in that video with a grain of salt, but I can’t stand unoriginality in something like this.  Vista was just catchup for OS X (and a failed attempt at that, too…heh)…now it looks like Windows 7 is slated just to move Microsoft’s operating systems division into something resembling the early 2000s…most likely after 2011.  Oh well, at least it’ll give me more time to enjoy my eXPerience.

It’s always been said that there was a purpose involved with studying history.  Movies constantly preach about how you must study the past to move forward, and there are millions of people who dwell on historic fact in hopes that we can learn more about where we came from, and perhaps piece together shards of the map to our destination…whatever that destination is.  And one piece of history nobody can neglect is their own childhood – the only history not taught in schools.

Unfortunately, the majority of people are becoming more and more disconnected from their past, the times before that molded their lives into what they are, and there’s seemingly nothing we can do to stop it.  It’s not helping that evolution seems to be playing its part, as people seem to be jumping right from childhood to adulthood, skipping the memories that could help shape their lives and interests.

Digg was nice enough to remind me of a small part of my past in a roundabout way with the link to this article about the decline and possible extinction of pinball.  It’s saddening enough to realize that people don’t want the real thing anymore; they’re too busy firing up the cheap Microsoft imitation included on their PC, or playing something more recent like Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4.  What’s amusing to me is that these people play their games without a single thought as to what came before, or how they’ve developed into what they’ve become.  Hardly anyone younger than 20 even knows what an NES or Atari is, and you can completely forget about trying to convince them that anything older existed.  Some people might occasionally experience this phenomenon even with people of the proper age, just as I did earlier today what with re-introducing several classmates to the wonderful world of Hover!.  (No, that’s not bad punctuation…the legitimate name is “Hover!”.)

The pinball decline is understandable; the people who used to feed the machines with quarters they earned selling bottles and cans are now the people earning tens of thousands of dollars answering phones and making business deals with each other, and their priorities have changed from high score tables to high-return stocks.  What these people forget, however, is how easily the tables turn at the execution of a simple movement (a la bumping the table or using a flipper, though I could be making a metaphor )…and it might do them well to recall it.  And the machines that were once shrines to hours of fun are now the relics and antiques of yesteryear.  (Side note:  My hand is in those pictures on the first page as I help out repairing an older table…)

The lesson isn’t just relevant to pinball or old games, though.  As I said before, everyone’s always on the fast track, only worrying about where they’re going with no concerns about where they’ve been.  Perhaps it would be worth it to stop, take a second’s pause, and note what you have/see/do.  Then compare it with notes you’ve made, and the notes you will make.  Everyone claims they can improve…but without the records of what you’ve done in the past, how can you improve without a benchmark?  An even better solution would be to “Stay Young“, but without the experiences of their past, how could anyone possibly expect to

This is one of those times where suggestions on how to help yourself might be appropriate, so I might as well fill the gap while I have the chance.  If you really want to review the past (and especially yours in particular), it needs to be documented.  Memories fade, and opinions change as the result of new experiences, therefore a record is the only feasible way of maintaining a non-tainted record of the past as it was.  What I mean by record is completely flexible here.  For the more adventurous, there are plenty of blogging areas, but even keeping a simple word-processing document with some thoughts once in a while would be enough.  If you’re a photographer, take pictures.  If your nickname is Steven Spielberg, go make yourself a short video once in a while.  Even if you keep them to yourself, you’ll notice that the self-reflection (and even just the enabled ability to) is really what people mean when they tell you to “look at where you’ve come from.”

I think I’m getting too intellectual for the late-night hours…that’s enough insomniac-posting for one night for me.

Since it’s a required part of my curriculum here at school, I’ve been taking a rhetoric class. Recently in this class, we were assigned a research paper on a category of problems in academia, something that we can observe and then propose solutions about. Considering the post topic and me in general, you can probably guess (at least partially) what problems I’m focusing on in my research. This assignment couldn’t come at a better time, as I’ve heard plenty of complaints in particular about password-related issues as of late. You see, the school I attend mandates yearly password cycling, and considering the timeframe at which they hand incoming freshmen their account information, it’s becoming the one-year mark for a lot of people. Mostly, every gripe I’ve heard centers around one of a few major issues:

• The passwords my university requires are much more complex compared to the passwords most people use in their daily lives.
• Most services don’t require password cycles every year, or…ever.
• Since most people keep the same password (or set of passwords) for everything, constantly forcing password changes forces people to forget their password more often since it’s not the same password as other things they use on a daily basis.

While these arguments are perfectly legitimate, the people attempting to use them as rationale against needing to change their passwords also are the same people you find in a typical setting, not groomed in any form of security beyond that of the idea that any password is a surefire protection. (Cue Morpheus’ voice…”Welcome…to the real world.”) Anyway, as part of my research paper, I decided to compare the three pages’ worth of requirements about our university passwords with the requirements used by what I thought to be popular web services. And, after a few hours’ worth of investigative work, I can sympathize with the people who think changing their password is a lot of work. In short, these services, which I thought probably had at least a slight pulse on the idea of security, are grooming their users to be lazy and very unprotective of their data and service access. I’ve put together a table that should at least give an overview of the services I selected (if you have suggestions for more, I can’t promise anything but would welcome the heads-up) and the security procedures they enforce:

The numbers in brackets above correspond to these quick side notes:

1. MySpace’s requirement is an in-between: at least one numeric and one alphabetic character must be included in the password; no requirement is made as to the case of this character, however.
2. Windows Live has two sets of requirements that depend on the services the user accesses. Typically, users only have a six-character requirement, but if necessary due to the requirements of an application they use, Windows Live will force all of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and a unique symbol, and mandatory password changes every 72 days. These 72-day password changes are provided as an option to non-qualified users.
3. eBay refused to accept the password ‘aaaaaa’ because it is very poor in security. However, ‘ababab’ works, which means that eBay offers at least a slight security check at registration.

Frankly, I’m very concerned with all of that red, and especially concerned with sites like Amazon, which allow you to store important credit card information in your account for easy checkout, and then allow me to log in with a capital ‘A’. Microsoft even surprises me (though in a good way), if you consider their forced-security dependency to be a good idea. (For once, Microsoft, I like.) Not that these sites and services even compare to the requirements for our university credentials, but it gives you an idea of just how absurd it is. Especially when I throw in the fact that a lot of these places have posted “suggestions” for creating a good and secure password, and then brush them all away in favor of some six-character string. So I apologize if I’m re-iterating what you already know or have seen, but after all of that, I think it’s important that people actually understand what good security is.

• The best passwords are not found in any published or publicly available work, be it a dictionary, your favorite action novel, or some random screenshot you found on Flickr. Don’t use anything important either, like a social security number. And anything personally identifiable or that has a direct reference to your life is out too; that means quit using your aunt’s birthday as a PIN.As one demonstration of coming up with unique but memorable passphrases, try to think of memorable snippets from your favorite written work (you’re probably double-taking right now, but continue reading). Now, develop your own personal algorithm for going through the phrase to select characters (hey, don’t be afraid of punctuation or numbers, because they help too and add uniqueness). For example, try taking the Fibonacci sequence’s digits and pulling those letters out. It sounds tedious now, but if you use the password regularly, your muscle memory will take over and you won’t even realize you’re entering the password anymore. At least, if you use it that regularly.
• NEVER use the same password in more than one place. There IS a reason for this, aside from “the man” trying to confuse you and prevent you from checking your mail; it’s compartmentalized security. If an attacker can compromise one account, and holds a password you use everywhere, you haven’t just handed him one site or a credit card, you’ve handed him your entire life. If that password doesn’t work somewhere else, the attacker’s got to go back to work and start all over again on the new site (if they’re indeed targeting you). If you can’t keep all of your passwords straight, get a trusted and notable password manager, and store your passwords with it. Some suites also provide you the added benefit of randomly-generated passwords like ‘Bs4&nd*D’ – but at the expense that you probably won’t remember them unless you use the application.

Considering these password recommendations are nearly timeless, it only makes me wonder when people are actually going to pay more attention BEFORE something bad happens to them. So quit complaining that you’ve got to change your password. Make it memorable, make it unique, and consider it worthy of a national secret. And for christ sake, ignore the fact that Google isn’t going to check for varied-case characters; force yourself to check for them. And a note to the few, the proud, the WordPress users: WP2.5 RC1 is nice, but I don’t think it’s ready yet. It’s got a few bugs, and I miss my old blue administration panel. I actually think it made more sense doing “Blogroll > Add Link” than “Write > Link” to add things to my blogroll.