I’ll be a guest on Craig Crossman’s Computer America show tonight (with co-host Carey Holzman). We’ll be talking about Windows Vista Service Pack 1, my five-part Fixing Windows Vista series at ZDNet (the final installment, on Windows Search, is up now), and whatever else strikes our fancy.

The show’s on from 10PM to midnight, Eastern time, which is a more reasonable 8-10PM in my part of the world and a downright civilized 7-9PM for you Left Coasters.

You can probably find a local radio station, but it’s easier to listen online:

http://computeramerica.com/listen.htm

Got a question for me? Call in, or leave a message at the show’s site, or leave a comment here.

An amazing picture from the red planet. Ironically, it was taken by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in 2005 and is unrelated to the current Phoenix Mars Lander mission.

You can get lost for days in NASA’s image gallery site.

I have used the Firefox 3 beta on a couple of test machines, and it seemed fast and reasonably lightweight. So I was surprised to see this post from NeoSmart today. After a snippet from a Mozilla paper touting big improvements in memory usage and a concerted effort to stomp out memory leaks, the author (there’s no by-line on the post) notes:

Firefox still uses a lot of memory – way too much memory for a web browser.

We haven’t seen it reach 1GiB+ like we have with previous versions, but it’s quite normal for Firefox 3 to be sucking up ~300MiB of memory right off the bat, without a memory leak (the difference between memory leaks and normal memory abusage is that in a memory leak you’ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the browser is open/in-use).

I’ll take a closer look later, but meanwhile I throw it out to you. The final release is just around the corner. Who’s been using Firefox 3? Are you happy with it? Does it demand a lot of your system resources?

Long Zheng was briefly overwhelmed by the outpouring of contributions to his Windows UI Taskforce, which I noted earlier this week. But only briefly.

The project is back with its own page and a slick data-driven interface. Oh, and a new name that uses the correct nomenclature: UX (for user experience) rather than UI (user interface is deprecated). Long explains:

The way I originally imagined it was to go through each of the suggestions by hand and add them to my post along with a pretty screenshot. Needless to say, I got tired about 20 entries in and couldn’t imagine doing 140 more. I had to come up with something more manageable.

With PHP in one hand, MySQL in another and some duct tape in my mouth, I’ve put together a voting-centric community feedback portal over at www.istartedsomething.com/taskforce.

It’s not done yet, but it’s at a stage where it’s complete enough for use and I can add functionality (hopefully) without destroying the database. One key functionality missing for now is the ability to edit the entries you’ve submitted, so keep that in mind and double check everything.

You can browse the current crop of Windows UX Taskforce listings and contribute your own if you sign up for an account.

My first reaction is that the current listings have drifted a bit from the original concept. Most of the entries I looked at in “Newest Submissions” mode were actually suggestions for improvement in the Windows UI rather than quirks, inconsistencies, and errors, as in the original concept. For example, the current entries at the top of the Most Recent Submissions list suggest allowing the taskbar to span multiple monitors, allowing the user to reorder taskbar items, and allowing custom folders on the Start menu. Good ideas all, but definitely not mistakes so much as design decisions.

It would be nice to come up with a categorization that separates suggestions from bug reports.

I read the same story four times today, with screaming headlines proclaiming that one in four computers in the U.S. are infected with malware. It made the Inquirer and the Sydney Morning Herald, and at least one wire service. I’m sure it will continue to spread.

Turns out the story is pretty much pure BS from start to finish. The reality? A study conducted in 2005 by the Pew Internet group found that 43% of the people they surveyed had experienced problems with adware and spyware and had changed their online behavior to minimize the risks.

I’ve just published a detailed breakdown at ZDNet:

Debunking yet another bogus malware study

The OECD report is wrong, and the reporters who wrote these stories didn’t even do any rudimentary fact-checking to see whether it was correct. I went back to the original documents and followed the footnotes. This is literally a fourth-hand report from a three-year-old study, and the original research doesn’t support anything remotely like the conclusion that’s being reported today. It illustrates what is so horribly, horribly wrong with our media in general and our technical press in particular.

Here’s the real story: In a study conducted three years ago, in 2005, one organization found that roughly 43% of the American computer users they surveyed had experienced at least one go-round with spyware or adware, which they defined as the kind of programs that produce pop-up ads on users’ computers. The experience had been so annoying and frustrating for the users they spoke with that 90% of them had changed their behavior dramatically, doing things that would specifically protect them from this sort of infection. From those results, this organization extrapolated that their findings at that time would have equaled 59 million computer users who were being annoyed by adware and spyware programs.

Longtime readers of this site will remember that back in 2004 and 2005 I wrote a lot of posts about adware and spyware. It was a real plague back then. Today, the situation is far better, thanks to changes in people’s behavior, the widespread use of security software, and much better baseline security as introduced in XP SP2 in late 2004. The threats are much worse today, because of the rise of organized crime and the big money to be made in malware. But the actual rates of infection are way, way down.

Meanwhile, sensationalized reports like this one don’t help anyone.

Today Adobe launched its online office product, Acrobat.com. When I visited, it looked like this:

Not inspiring, but also not a surprising glitch for the morning of Day 1.

Turns out the problem was the Flash blocker in IE7Pro. Even if I clicked the link to enable Flash, the screen remained invisible. I had to completely disable Flash blocking on the site for it to work properly. With that done, I tried to sign up for an account. But it turned out I already had an account? Really? OK, e-mail me a link to reset the password. Done. Now install an ActiveX control. Done. Finally, I am able to try to use the new Buzzword document creation/editing service.

it looked like this:

Wake me up when it’s out of beta.

Update: Five minutes later, it’s working. Slick looking, but I ran into several problems in my very first document. More details later.

Another update: Several more server disconnects while in the middle of editing documents. Based on this experience, Acrobat.com is definitely not ready for an open public beta.

Back near the very end of Windows Vista’s beta testing days, Chris Pirillo went on an extended rant about the inconsistencies and "mistakes" in the Vista user interface. (You can read my reaction and then follow the links back to Chris’s two-part series.)

A few days after I wrote that post, I was a guest on Chris’s radio show/podcast, and we talked about where we thought Windows Vista was at that time and where it was headed. What neither of us knew at that time was that Vista was literally days away from being locked down, and there was no room in the development plan for UI changes. In fact, if Pirillo’s story that Jim Allchin personally asked him to prepare this list is true, it is a nearly perfect embodiment of how badly the Vista development effort was being managed. Allchin reached out to an influential member of the Windows community, asking for input and setting the expectation that that input could be acted on. It was too late to do anything, it turns out, and so the result was disappointment.

That was exactly two years ago today, and by coincidence, this weekend Windows super-sleuth Long Zheng has kicked off a similar campaign. He calls it the Windows UI Taskforce, and unlike Pirillo’s purely personal list, this one is distributed. I’ll let Long explain:

Most of us who use Windows Vista have probably come across a couple of user-interface quirks during our times – some of which irritate you more than others, some are more obvious than others. With the development of Windows 7 speeding full-steam ahead, I thought this might be an opportunity as good as ever to make these problems known to Microsoft and hopefully get them all resolved.

Instead of going at it alone, I thought this is the perfect opportunity to harness the wisdom of the crowd. Therefore I’m asking you to submit any UI quirks you know of in Vista and I’ll help compile a list of them together, including but not limited to legacy icons, legacy styles and malformed layouts. Include with it a brief description of the problem (and possible alternative if appropriate).

Long’s original post went up on May 31. Roughly 36 hours later, the list is up to 48 entries, each formatted as a bug report with its own screenshot. If someone decides to go through Pirillo’s original list(s) and add them, this thing could be up over a hundred entries by the end of the week.

So now the real question is, did Long start this project soon enough? Will someone at Microsoft take this list to heart and have the time to act on it?

Update: Long is overwhelmed: "I’m going to work on a custom web application solution to make this a little easier to manage. Until then, keep the ideas in your heads."

Every once in a while it’s amusing to go back and look at the cost of hard disk storage on a cost-per-gigabyte basis. I’m often struck, when I do this exercise, at how closely prices and capacities align with Moore’s Law, with capacities doubling every 18 months or so. Back in August 2005, I noted that terabyte drive arrays were in the $999-1499 range. That was roughly a 100% premium, given that around the same time I was paying $110 or so for a 200GB hard drive.

So here it is, roughly three years later, and I’m seeing 750GB drives at the $120 price level and 1TB drives breaking below $250. That’s still a premium for the larger sizes, but not nearly as great. For the past year or so, the 500GB drive has been the sweet spot in terms of cost/GB, but it looks like sweet spot is now shifting to the 750GB size. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before the 1TB drives drop to the $120-150 level and take over the sweet spot.

Back in 2005, I had a total of about 1TB available on all available systems. Today, I have three or four more computers than I did then, and as I look around my office I figure I now have close to 10 terabytes of total storage available, half of it on three machines. More than 2TB of that is in my CableCARD-equipped Media Center system, which has a 500GB main drive, plus data drives of 750GB and 1TB (the latter in an eSATA enclosure).

I also have two Windows Home Servers, each with more than 1.5TB of storage. (Why two? One is always in service, running production code, while on the other one I play with add-ins, beta releases, and other stuff.)

Music, movies, recorded TV, backups … it all adds up.

My author copies of Windows Vista Inside Out, Deluxe Edition just arrived. Three boxes that I get to trip over until I find a good place for them.

To celebrate, I’m giving away signed copies to two people. All you have to do is respond in the comments of this thread with two things:

1. The title and a link to a post on my ZDNet blog, with a comment of 50 words or less about why you recommend that post to other people. (You’ll get two entries for your comment if you format it using HTML so that the title of the post is a clickable link.)
2. Also in 50 words or less, tell me about a feature or capability in Window Vista that has improved your productivity.

Sorry, due to shipping costs, winners must have a mailing address in the United States. Contest is open until Monday night. I’ll pick two names at random from among all entries that follow the contest rules and contact you via e-mail, so be sure to leave a real e-mail address in the comment form (no, I won’t spam you, sell your address, or publish it).

Josh is concerned about Sysinternals Live, which was opened to the public yesterday:

Maybe I am just being paranoid , but this very plain site that is hosted on a non-Microsoft.com domain name scares me.

Well, sysinternals.com is a Microsoft-owned and operated domain. It’s no different from live.com or technet.com or foldershare.com or many other domains. One thing that can set your mind at ease is that all the files are digitally signed using Microsoft’s code-signing certificate:

If you launch from saved bookmarks, you’re also safe from typo-squatters. And here’s a cool Windows Vista technique you can use to make access even easier:

1. Open the Computer window, right-click any empty space, and choose Add a Network Location from the shortcut menu.
2. In the Add Network Location wizard, select Choose a custom network location and click Next
3. In the Internet or network address box, enter \\live.sysinternals.com\tools and then click Next.
4. Give the shortcut a name and click Next.
5. Click Finish to save the shortcut and open it in Windows Explorer.

If you open the shortcut in Step 3 using Internet Explorer, in XP or Vista, it should open in Windows Explorer. Here’s what the directory listing looks like. It’s important to note this is a WebDAV share, not a conventional Windows folder share. That means it’s accessible via HTTP (corporate firewalls like that) but behaves like a folder.

You’ll notice that live.sysinternals.com appears as a computer in the Network folder (left column). In this case I typed some terms in the Search box to filter the list of search results.

Because I saved this as a network location, I can return to it any time from the Computer folder in Windows Explorer, where the shortcut is under the Network Locations group.