I’ve just received an invite to a conference call this Friday with a couple of senior folks from the National Cable Television Association to discuss the impact of SDV on CableCARD technology. I’ve been asked this question a lot in comments lately, so I’m looking forward to this one. Anyone have any specific questions they want me to ask?

I’m on the waiting list, but surely someone out there can move me to the front of the rope line. Anyone?

Update: Wow, that was fast. Thanks, Benjamin.

Looks like I will have a few invites to pass along shortly but want to look around first. If you’re interested in getting an invite, leave a comment.

Update 1-May: I’m all out of invites. Sorry. If I get any more, I’ll contact people who left comments below. Meanwhile, I’m closing comments to avoid disappointing anyone new.

Dave Murdock is shocked – shocked! – that no one is outraged over Microsoft’s attempts to push Silverlight via Microsoft.com. Surely, he insists, this "horrendous user experience"  should make us all "cry out in agony." And oh, by the way, it means that this behavior by Microsoft is just as bad as Apple’s attempt to shove the buggy, insecure Safari browser onto Windows PCs even when the users didn’t ask for it.

Here’s the crux of Dave’s complaint:

It is unavoidable. Think Emperor Palpatine’s voice from Return of the Jedi. No matter where on Microsoft’s site you go to, MSDN, Mactopia, Sysinternals, you are going to get prompted to install Silverlight.

You can’t ignore it. No matter how many times you click the X on the prompt, go back to the Microsoft site later, you are going to get prompted again. Over and over and over again.

Uh, Dave? One word: cookies.

The reason I’m not outraged is because I allow Microsoft’s website to set a single cookie that tells it I said no to the Silverlight prompt. Here, see for yourself, using the cookie viewer in Firefox:

With that cookie set, you won’t be prompted again. I just tried it. One click on the X ("No, thanks, I don’t want Silverlight right now.") and I don’t see that dialog box again.

Sounds like someone has their security software set a little too tight. Meanwhile, Apple just offered the latest version of Safari to me along with yet another iTunes+QuickTime update, even after I specifically excluded Safari the last time I ran Apple Software Update. Now, that’s outrageous.

Jeremy’s side of the story. Be sure to watch the video.

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The latest installment of my saga with a Sony Vaio is up at ZDNet now:

Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time

If I had bought a machine that worked as poorly as this Sony Vaio, I would have returned it right away, but I’m glad I was able to fix it. And I really hope more OEMs will realize how much crapware sucks. In the case of this Sony Vaio, the biggest irony was the startup message saying "ThirdPartyAppMgr has stopped working." When you can’t even get your crapware installed correctly, it’s time to rethink your process:

One Windows Vista feature that I like a lot is the setup process, which is far more customer-friendly than ever before. With XP, you need to have a product key to complete setup. Without a key, setup just stops. If you have an XP system from an OEM that doesn’t supply Windows reinstallation media but instead uses a recovery partition, you’re completely screwed, because the product key on the side of your case will only work with media built for your system.

By contrast, with Vista you can borrow retail or OEM installation media for any system, do a clean install without a product key, and then take up to 30 days to activate over the phone using the product key on the side of the case. It’s still not the most elegant solution, but it’s a vast improvement over the XP way.

A post by Joel Spolsky announcing a new site he and Jeff Atwood are building (stackoverflow.com) covers the same theme as my recent Don’t believe everything you read, In the process of describing why he’s doing this, he nailed one of my pet peeves. In this passage, he’s talking about programmers, but he could just as easily be talking about newbie end users or IT professionals or Exchange administrators:

[T]hey happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can’t figure something out, they type a question into Google.

And sometimes, the first result looks like it’s going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, and discover that it’s a pay site, and the answer is cloaked or hidden or behind a pay-wall, and you have to buy a membership.

And you won’t even get an expert answer. You’ll get a bunch of responses typed by other programmers like you. Some of the responses will be wrong, some will be right, some may be out of date, and it’s hard to imagine that with the cooperative spirit of the internet this is the best thing we programmers have come up with.

Joel’s too polite to mention the sites he’s talking about, but I’m not. I am sick and tired of looking up an error message or a troubleshooting term and getting taken to a link at Experts-exchange.com (I won’t include a link, because I don’t want to send them the traffic and it would only annoy you to see this in action). When you click on that link, you get to read the question someone asked, which is pretty close to the question you asked, but the answers are cloaked with text that says you have to pay for a membership before you’re allowed to read the replies. And it’s apparent from the structure of the replies that there’s no “expert” involved, just a bunch of other (paid) user/members.

Now, I have no argument with Experts Exchange trying to make a living with this economic model. If it works for them, good. But I do object to Google indexing these results and sending me to sites where the landing page is a teaser rather than the actual content I’m looking for. I’m not sure how to register that complaint, but I do know that the Google spider pays a visit here every so often, so maybe I just did.

(h/t to Dwight Silverman for the pointer)

Several people asked me for more details about the software I’m running on my new Dell Inspiron 530. The short answer is Windows Server 2008 Standard, x64. You can get more details about how well the Hyper-V server software works on this system in my latest post at ZDNet:

Is Hyper-V ready for the Windows desktop?

And don’t miss the accompanying image gallery.

Earlier this week I mentioned my saga getting accurate information about memory support for the Dell Inspiron 530. After a BIOS update, I was indeed able to get Windows Server 2008 to recognize all 4 GB of installed RAM. But wait, it gets better.

Newegg has 2GB SDRAM DDR2 800 modules available for $37 each, so I picked up a pair. With shipping, the price tag was under $80. They arrived yesterday, and I swapped them for two of the 1GB modules in the Inspiron 530. According to the manual for this machine, the maximum memory supported is 4GB. But this system had no trouble recognizing the new RAM.

This motherboard will reportedly recognize up to 8GB, when used with a 64-bit OS. With three VMs running (Vista Ultimate and Server 2008 with 1GB each and XP SP3 with 512MB), I’m using a total of 3.61GB. With the new memory, I have room for two or three more VMs.

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised with this machine. It’s very small and ultra-quiet. It has room for two internal drives, and I could easily add an external SATA drive with an inexpensive eSATA adapter. I added a Gigabit Ethernet card in place of the onboard 10/100 Ethernet adapter, but stuck with the integrated audio and video, which are just fine for a server.

Dell is currently selling this machine, with a 2.4 GHz quad-core CPU (Intel Q6600), 3GB of RAM, and a 500GB drive, for $499 (offer ends April 16). That configuration includes XP Home; it can be upgraded to XP Professional for $20. It’s a pretty amazing bargain at that price.

I’ll be in Seattle at my first MVP Summit next week. Looking forward to meeting folks like Aaron Tiensivu and John Walkenbach and a million other smart people. If you’ll be there, leave a comment or drop me a line (you can guess my e-mail, honest).

On days like this I feel grateful I don’t have an editor breathing down my neck demanding that I pontificate about what the latest moves in the Yahoo-Microsoft deal mean.