Category: Windows

Six new fonts for Longhorn

Here’s something to look forward to – The Design Desk at Poynter.org has a preview of six new Windows fonts:

Lh_caibri

Beginning in 2006, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading.

The new ClearType Font Collection incorporates improved ClearType and OpenType technologies, and a boatload of research, to improve the structure and the clarity of the letter forms. Basically, that means a story will be easier to read because the letters and words won’t be as soft and mushy looking.

The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sans serif, and a monospaced face for use in programming environments. They are intended to be text typefaces as opposed to display faces that are used in larger sizes for headlines. Some of the new fonts are suitable for print as well as on-screen applications.

Scroll to the end of the story to see a snippet of each font or look at the samples here. It’s easy to see that these were designed to be easy on the eye and crisp on the screen. People who are looking forward to Longhorn are expecting massive, killer features, but the accumulation of small touches like these have just as much impact.

IBM invents “jumper cables” for BSOD rescues

Amit Singh talks about a cool new tool that his group at IBM Research demonstrated at a trade show earlier this month:

[It’s] a “personal jumper cable” to counter the “Blue Screen of Death” on PCs.

In a pinch, the Linux-based technology “transforms” a personal device, such as an MP3 player, a USB pen, or even a cell phone, into a powerful “Rescue and Recovery” device that can be used for things such as:

  • Booting a PC “from” the personal device
  • Accessing data from the PC’s unbootable drive
  • Accessing specific backups located on the personal device
  • Providing an emergency productivity environment (e-mail, Lotus Notes, web, …), even if the PC’s drive is completely dead
  • Rebuilding the PC’s drive
  • More …

An iPod mini was used in the PartnerWorld demonstration.

Let’s see… A Linux-based tool running on Mac hardware driving a Windows-based PC. I believe that may be about as cross-platform as you can get!

(Link via Geek News Central)

Microsoft finally clarifies Product Activation story

An Israeli blogger named Aviran Mordo gets a letter from Alex Kochis, Senior License Compliance Manager at Microsoft Corp. with “clarifications of the Windows XP Product Activation changes and how it will affect end users.” (I wonder why I didn’t hear from Alex?)

In brief:

  • Users of genuine Windows will experience no impact
  • The intent is to dissuade the theft or misuse of the Certificate of Authenticity or accompanying product key
  • Honest resellers have requested that Microsoft close this loophole so that they can compete effectively and they are extremely supportive of this effort

On Monday, Microsoft disabled Internet activation for all Microsoft Windows XP product keys located on COA labels that are adhered to PCs from large, OEMs who have direct licensing agreements with Microsoft. Directly licensed OEMs are authorized by Microsoft to customize their branded re-installation and recovery media so that if installed on the hardware it shipped with the Windows XP operating system will not require end-user activation.

Internet based product activation will remain available to all customers using products that require product activation today. The only attempts at activation that will be rejected are those using product keys that were pre-activated for the hardware they shipped with by OEMs on behalf of customers.

The intent is to dissuade the theft and misuse of COAs, and therefore, protect customers from counterfeiters and pirates. Honest resellers have also requested that Microsoft close this loophole so that they can compete effectively and are extremely supportive of this effort.

Of course, he could have just sent a link to my page on the subject, which explained Product Activation in detail. Once again, this is an example of Microsoft doing a reasonable thing, communicating about it in a terrible way, and then having to clean up the PR mess afterwards.

(Via Neowin.net)

An update on the Windows Media Player security snafu

eWeek’s Ryan Naraine has an excellent update on the “poisoned Windows Media files” controversy that I’ve been covering here for the past few weeks. (See this post for a roundup of the confusion over the WMP10 update; and see “Someone at Microsoft doesn’t get it,” which I posted on January 14, for details on the problem itself and Microsoft’s response.) Ryan writes:

Redmond has hemmed and hawed on its response to the threat and the circumstances of the latest admission isn’t sitting well with security researchers.

When the first red flag was raised in early January, Microsoft made it clear that the use of rigged .wmv files to exploit the DRM (digital rights management) mechanism was not a software flaw.

A week later, the company reversed course and promised new versions of WMP within 30 days. “While this issue is not the result of any exploit of Windows Media DRM, we do recognize it may cause problems for some of our customers,” the company said in a statement. To help mitigate these problems, Microsoft said the software would be tweaked to “allow the end-user more control over when and how any pop-ups display in the license acquisition process.”

I’ve just re-tested some samples of the infected Windows Media files using the latest build of Windows Media Player 10. I can’t see any difference in behavior. Meanwhile, as Ben Edelman has already documented, anyone using Windows Media Player 9 Series is still at risk, and the Windows Media Player 10 update is not listed as a Critical Update. Microsoft now says they will issue a “down-level patch” for Windows Media Player 9 users. No word on when it will be available.

Ben and I are quoted extensively in this story. As I told eWeek, I can’t figure out why no one from Microsoft bothered to call or e-mail Ben, Eric L. Howes, or me, back in January, when all of us had conducted extensive tests and published our findings. I’m also baffled that Microsoft’s Security Response Center hasn’t taken ownership of this problem. As I told eWeek, “If Windows Media Player is going to be a part of the operating system, it has to play by the same rules as the rest of the Windows team.” That means taking reports like this one seriously and making sure the update actually fixes the problem.

Why is IE7 such a big freakin’ secret?

The Internet Explorer team has a weblog, but unlike so many of their counterparts in other Microsoft product groups they seem allergic to actually using it for more than teasers and marketing doublespeak. Yesterday’s post on IE7 Platforms and Outlook Express is unfortunately typical:

We currently plan to make IE7 available for Windows XP SP2 and later. This will therefore include availability not only for the 32bit version of Windows XP SP2 but also for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 SP1 both of which are due to be released soon. As Dean commented in his original IE7 post on this blog we have heard the requests for support of Windows 2000 but have nothing to announce at this time…

We’ll share more details about IE7 as we get further along with the project.

No, no, no! The time to share more details about your thinking is now. Tell us what you have planned. Give us a rough idea of timelines. If you’ve heard widespread requests from the community and you don’t plan to address them, tell us why you won’t or can’t do those things. You have several hundred million customers. Why not share a little bit more?

The Longhorn team has been talking publicly about its plans for a couple of years. There are Longhorn road maps that spell out exactly what the broad outlines of the product will be. The IE7 team is a few months away from releasing a beta, which means they probably already have locked-down feature lists and quite a bit of code written. And yet they act like their product plans are classified Double Top Secret, Eyes Only.

The “we have heard the requests for support of Windows 2000 but have nothing to announce at this time” line is especially galling. Translated, it means, “Yeah, we’ve been thinking about this, but we’re not going to tell you a word about why we might or might not do it. At some point in the future, we’ll announce a decision, and it’ll be too late for you to do anything about it. Now please stop bothering us, we’re busy writing code.”

IE has a lousy reputation right now, which is why IE7 has been pushed into this year instead of waiting until next year. Want to rehabilitate the browser’s reputation? Start by trusting your customers.

Update: Be sure to read the comments posted at this entry on the IEBlog. I’m not the only one who thinks the IE7 team needs a double dose of cluefulness. In fact, I was pretty gentle, compared to commenters who said:

  • “This post is weak arrogant and full of hot air”
  • “Stop treating your readers with so little respect. Please blog more professionally. If you don’t have time because you’re working on IE7 I suggest you hire a full-time IE marketing type person who will post regularly and actually answer questions and respond to comments (not just for IEBlog, but elsewhere too). In fact, do it anyway, IE badly needs people with ‘marketing skills’.”
  • “I want you to win me back to IE, but you aren’t trying very hard.”
  • “ieblog, OTOH, just posts ‘We can’t say anything about anything’ repeatedly. This is absolutely ridiculous, there’s plenty to talk about without going anywhere NEAR future releases. I’ve seen dozens of good suggestions for blog posts on here. Sort it out.
    PS Your competition blogs far better than you:
    http://feedhouse.mozillazine.org/”

Windows Product Activation: The FUD continues

Geek News Central writes this morning:

Customers who purchase a computer from 20 of the industry’s leading manufacturers will have to phone home to Microsoft and announce their intention to use the operating system that came with the computer they just bought.

No, they won’t. Details here and here.

Likewise, ComputerWorld Canada writes:

Starting February 28, the company said, customers who want to re-install Windows XP would need to call a customer service representative to activate the operating system.

This one is technically true but extremely misleading. If you reinstall Windows XP using the original CD on the original computer, you don’t need to activate it, over the Internet or over the phone. The implication is that everyone who buys a PC from a major OEM will have to jump through hoops every time they have to reinstall their operating system, and that’s simply not the case.

I’m not trying to pick on these two publications or the many others that have gotten this story wrong. Microsoft has done an absolutely terrible job of publicizing the details of this change. Whoever is in charge of media relations for this new initiative has dropped the ball completely.

The worst part is that this sort of misinformation gets widely dispersed and it also gets picked up and cached by Google. In short order, it becomes conventional wisdom. It must be true, because it’s been printed in so many places.