Google has published a list of Software Principles that it wants to promulgate as a formal definition of the term spyware.

I’ve said before that I’m troubled by the casual use of this word, and I think this debate is healthy. I’d sure rather see some form of definition before the U.S. Congress charges into the fray with something incredibly stupid, especially a weak law that would preempt well-crafted state laws.

Excerpts from Google’s “proposed principles”:

• We believe software should not trick you into installing it.
• When an application is installed or enabled, it should inform you of its principal and significant functions.
• It should be easy for you to figure out how to disable or delete an application.
• Applications that affect or change your user experience should make clear they are the reason for those changes.
• If an application collects or transmits your personal information such as your address, you should know.
• Application providers should not allow their products to be bundled with applications that do not meet these guidelines.

Now, Google has a vested interest in this subject, because it doesn’t want its add-ins to be affected by an ill-considered ban. Still, it’s a good starting point for a discussion.

(via Techdirt)

In fact, we crazy people who write computer books would have been a rich pool of test subjects. Boing Boing reports: Hourly shots of coffee beat a cup

Tossing back two shots of coffee each hour may provide more sustainable stimulation than gulping down a large cup in the morning, scientists from Rush University Medical Center report in the journal Sleep. In the study, sixteen men stayed in windowless rooms for nearly a month while the researchers screwed with their circadian rhythms. From a Scientific American article about the findings:

“In the new study, the scientists… tested the effects of administering an hourly, low dose of caffeine equivalent to about two ounces of coffee to one group, while the second group received a placebo. The caffeinated men performed better on cognitive tests than the control individuals did, and dozed off less often. And though they received the same cumulative dose as subjects in previous, single-dose studies, taking many small doses minimized some of the negative side effects that caffeine can have, such as tremors.”

In the past two weeks, I’ve received panicked phone calls from two friends whose computers suddenly stopped booting. In both cases, the most likely culprit was a hardware failure, but it’s also possible that the damage was caused by a virus or by corrupted data on the hard disk.

One friend had a current backup, and the other didn’t. One is taking this opportunity to junk his old PC and restore his backed-up data onto a shiny new one. The other is about to spend hours or days trying to rebuild her system and recover data from an old, crashed hard drive – no fun.

The one obvious lesson in all this, of course, is back up your data. But a second lesson almost got lost in the noise. Both of these crashes were at least partially caused by disks formatted with the FAT32 file system. Converting their boot disk to NTFS might have prevented one or both of these crashes. NTFS uses a journaling system to keep track of all disk activity and automatically recover from errors. It is far more robust than FAT32, which runs ScanDisk if you so much as look at it sideways. It’s also more secure, but that’s a secondary benefit for most people running Windows XP at home.

At any rate, I bring this up because I can’t imagine why any sane person would continue to use FAT32 with Windows XP these days. (If you dual-boot, you’ll need to use FAT32 for Windows 9X, but not for XP.) So here’s a little information for you.
Continue reading “Why you should use NTFS” →

Aaron Pratt has published am open invitation for friends and complete strangers to spam his Gmail account.

How long does it take to fill up 1 Gig of storage with spam? How well do Gmail’s junk filters work? Let’s find out! Spam my shiny new G-mail account at prattboy@gmail.com Give my address to spammers, newsletters, annoying people, whatever, and let’s see how long it takes!

It’s an amusing conceit, but it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how spam filters work. Newsletters and annoying people are not, by definition, spam (which is unsolicited commercial email). In fact, if someone gives Aaron’s email address to a marketer (let’s not call them a spammer yet), don’t they have a right to at least send an email to Aaron asking him to complete the opt-in process? If they use a single opt-in, of course, he’s in at that point.

And from Aaron’s comments, it appears that some people are forwarding their spam to him, which in the process removes a lot of the spam’s spamminess. If I receive a piece of spam and forward it to you, it will come from me, through my email servers, with a legitimate set of mail headers. By contrast, the original spam was probably (almost certainly) sent with forged headers, through a server that was either an open relay or a hijacked zombie PC, and in either case it was probably on someone’s black-hole list.

If Google filters spam exclusively on the basis of content, they’re about five years behind the times. And I think we can be pretty sure that that’s not the case. So if a lot of spam seems to be sneaking into Aaron’s Gmail inbox, well, it may not be all Google’s fault.

Fun read. But not even close to a legitimate evaluation.

According to News.com, Microsoft has announced a roadmap for its next generation of servers and confirmed some dates for the next version of Windows for the desktop as well. The successor to Windows Server 2003, Longhorn Server, won’t be out until 2007 or later, says Microsoft:

“The software maker said last week that the client and server versions of Longhorn are being developed in parallel, but added later that the additional testing needed for server software would cause that version to lag behind its desktop counterpart. Microsoft has a goal of shipping Longhorn desktop by mid-2006.

Expect the usual ration of snarky commentary from the Anyone But Microsoft crowd in response to the other announcement in this story: the first Longhorn service pack (2008) and update release (2009) are already on the schedule.

Ah, what the hell, I’ll start: There’s no word on when the first Longhorn virus will be shipped.

Peter Rysavy at Tabula PC has posted a long essay called Tablet troubles and stumbles – discussed and rebuked. As the title suggests, it synthesizes several recent blog entries by Mary Jo Foley and Robert Scoble that do the point/counterpoint dance about the viability of the Tablet PC.

Peter says: “Mary Jo Foley penned a great article about the troubles of the tablet. It’s a really good read, and it covers all those obvious problems that are apparent these days. Like Lonestar being delayed due to SP2 being pushed back, the confusion and disappointments stemming from the many no-shows in the retail and campus demo tours, the very poor retail marketing, and the recent renaming of the updated OS, which really nobody seems to understand. You know, all those things that the common person sees and hears out there in the real world. The ones that make him or her not get a tablet.”

I share Peter’s frustration to a degree, but I think the problem has a different cause than just poor marketing on Microsoft’s part. The Tablet PC is one of those products that you can describe until you’re blue in the face, but people don’t get it until they try it. And the average student or business person simply doesn’t get to try a Tablet PC. The floor models at your local Best Buy, if they even have one, are bolted to the shelf. Even if you can get your hands on one for a few minutes, you can’t really appreciate its utility until you start using it day in and day out. And the only people who get to do that are those who have the money and the daring to take a flyer on a new technology. In other words, the bleeding edge.

I think the build-up of momentum for the Tablet PC is going to take another couple years. I certainly don’t see it going away. Lonestar (Service Pack 2) will help a lot, because it really does improve the tablet experience dramatically. But prices have to come down enough for more people to take a gamble on this technology and allow their friends and associates to see it in everyday use. When the students on either side of you are using a tablet every day for a whole semester, it makes it easier to see why it works.

I believe Microsoft is in this for the long haul. The adoption curve will not be steep but gradual. For Peter and the others who are using the technology now, enjoy the feeling of being out in front.

Chris Kunicki’s excellent Newsgator Reading Tip for Outlook 2003 (set up a separate PST file for your newsfeeeds, and use Search Folders with it) reminded me to share one of my favorite Outlook 2003 tips, which I’ve never seen elsewhere.
Continue reading “Outlook tip of the day” →

OK, I want one of these new Alienware systems.

Although the price tag is about three times what I’d be willing to pay.

Yahoo! News reports that Microsoft’s monthly Security Alert for May is “refreshingly short”:

“The single new vulnerability revealed does allow for remote code execution by an attacker, but with many limitations on the attack, leading Microsoft to classify the problem as ‘important.’ “

After last month’s extra-long list of updates, this is good news. Could it be that the Trusted Computing initiative is finally paying off? Or is this just a blip?

Official link is here: Security Update for Windows XP (KB840374).

Phillip Torrone at Engadget has an interesting how-to on Overclocking Your Pocket PC.

“Why would you want to do this? speeeeed of course, up to 50% faster in some cases, but you can also (in theory) get better battery life and better performance if you underclock your device when you don’t need all the speed and overclock when you do.”