More on Media Center performance

Thomas Hawk has an interesting analysis of how Windows Media Centrer Edition is doing today. In Media Center PCs So Far Not In Starring Role, he points to a Reuters article and writes:

There are two major problems that I see with Media Center Edition as it stands now.

The decision that was made NOT to aggressively pursue HDTV capabilty early in the process and still eludes the product today while satellite and cable providers are aggressively offering HDTV DVR products and even getting into the business of marketing HDTVs directly.

The fact that as it currently stands, Media Center Edition demos horribly in my home due to the extremely slow performance of “my music”. As a hopeful evangelist for the product every person that I show the system to in my home, and there have been many, are put off by the long wait times associated with playing music on the system.

Until these shortcomings are addressed, I agree with the article that Media Center will not see widespread adoption.

I have more than 12,000 songs on my Media Center PC and do not see any of these performance problems, as I posted several weeks ago.

I’d be interested in doing some tests to see what the nature of Thomas’s issue is. But perhaps one reason Microsoft doesn’t appear to be addressing this as an issue is that it is hardware or format-specific.

As for HDTV, I agree with Thomas that this is a stumbling block for adoption of MCE. After all, the same early adopters who are drawn to Media Center are also going to lust after HDTV performance and resolution. But the cable and satellite companies really hold all the cards on this issue. If I want anything other than over-the-air HD, I have to use a PVR from my cable company or buy DirecTV with Tivo. There is no other way to get the HD signal from the cable box or satellite decoder to a third-party PVR. And that’s the way the cable and satellite companies want it, because it means they have lock-in.

As it stands, I now have four choices for my living room:

HD-PVR from my cable company (inadeuate storage space and terrible software)
Media Center (wonderful with music and pictures but expensive and only does over-the-air HDTV)
TiVo (awesome interface but doesn’t do HDTV at all)
DirecTV with Tivo (very expensive to buy, and much more expensive than cable for me).

So which set of compromises do I make?

Update: Thomas adds some great comments below. He also has some more performance-related questions about Windows Media Player here.

Is anyone from the WMP team reading this? Scoble? Matt Goyer? (I’d link to you, Matt, but your blog is broken…) Anyone?

Why are people confused about PC security?

Maybe because they read articles like the one in this morning’s Washington Post, entitled Trouble Can Be Downloaded Along With Music. The competition is pretty fierce, but I rate this as a strong contender for the worst piece of computer journalism of 2004. The author clearly understands nothing about music downloading, viruses, adware, spyware, and related technologies. But that doesn’t stop him from delivering eleven paragraphs of pure confusion.

Here’s a sample:

[T]echnology security experts warn that many of this holiday season’s millions of newbie MP3 player owners don’t know what dangers lurk behind some music.

“The risk has skyrocketed,” says Kraig Lane, group product manager at the computer-security products manufacturer Symantec. “The bad guys are putting evil agents into music files and even videos that we are downloading. Music files especially. And you don’t know it’s there.”

The big problem is that some music services — particularly the free and legally questionable peer-to-peer (P2P), file-swapping networks like Kazaa, BearShare and LimeWire that connect millions of home-computer users — deliver something in addition to free software and music. They sneak in adware — or, even worse, viruses and spyware.

Even reputable online music stores sometimes install adware….

The author then goes on, just a few sentences later, to mention iTunes, eMusic, and Wal-Mart’s music store. Do any of those services deliver viruses? No. Do any of those services bundle adware or spyware with their software? I don’t think so. But anyone who reads this story is bound to be thoroughly confused, and alarmed for no good reason. My goodness, they better not download any music, and they better buy some software to protect themselves from all that evil adware and spyware. Hmmm. Which software to buy? Well, the only “expert” quoted in the story is some guy from Symantec, and the author approvingly mentions not only Symantec’s online spyware-scanning service but also its Norton Internet Security.

And what’s this crap about “evil agents” in music and video files? You mean downloaded files that claim to be music files might actually be executable programs? Or does “evil agents” mean something else? We simply don’t know. But if the guy from Symantec says to be afraid, well, we should be afraid. Oh, and we should buy Symantec’s software, right?

Good lord, no wonder people get confused by this stuff.

You can help

This past summer, Judy and I visited the Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii. We learned an amazing amount about this terrifying force of nature.

Which is why we were so spellbound by today’s devastating quake and tsunami in South Asia. I was happy to learn that my friend Woody Leonhard, who lives in hard-hit Phuket, is OK. But 11,000+ people were not so lucky, and literally millions of peopleare homeless tonight.

If you have a few dollars to spare, I urge you to send some to Save the Children. They do good work, and they need our help now.

Got a notebook? Get this…

One of the best purchases I made in 2004 was Kensington’s unusual and incredibly well designed notebook holder. It’s a simple platform that contains USB, keyboard, and mouse ports. You slide your notebook PC into the bracket, plug in one USB connector and a power cable, and you’ve instantly transformed your notebook into a desktop. The bracket hides the notebook keyboard elegantly, and the notebook screen ends up at a perfect height, just as if you had a separate flat-screen monitor.

If you own a notebook, check it out. Amazon has this item for an excellent price, with free shipping and a $10 rebate.

More Dell: For better or worse

I used to work with Jeff Prosise years ago, although we haven’t seen each other in a while. So I felt a little extra twinge of sympatico when I read his account (via Scoble) of Dell Hell:

A few weeks ago I wrote that my system was mysteriously rebooting itself from time to time. Little did I know that that was just the beginning of the biggest PC pain I’ve ever experienced. I’m finally back up and running tonight after three days without my primary PC. Here’s a summary of what happened–and a word of warning to anyone who buys an on-site service warranty from Dell.

The thing that surprised me most about this story is that it wasn’t the power supply on his Dell 4600 that went bad. I’ve had lots of reports from people who had their systems mysteriously die shortly after the warranty expired. They’re especially unhappy that no one in Dell’s worldwide support empire seems to understand that this is a common problem.

Anyway, Jeff’s story is yet another illustration of how difficult it is to work with Dell’s support bureaucracy. He was persistent, and got what he needed. And the same thing happened to me recently. Remember my neighbor Jerry’s Dell 4100? Its case fan (a proprietary part) died, and I couldn’t find a replacement anywhere. Way more than a dozen calls to Dell turned up no help and only frustration. Until I finally connected with Diego, a “case resolution” specialist who works out of Dell’s Buenos Aires office. Diego listened to my story and promised he was going to see it through and make sure I was taken care of.

Sure, I said. I’ve heard this before. And then guess what? Diego came through. It took a week for him to track down the part I needed. Every morning I got a phone call in which he informed me of the status of the search. When he finally found the part (at a third-party company), he gave me the details, told me to order it, and promised that he would have my charges reimbursed. And he did exactly that. Parts arrived, computer fixed, charges reimbursed. I got one final call this week from Diego, just checking to make sure that everything was OK.

If anyone at Dell is reading this, please make a note. This is how customer service is done. I shouldn’t have had to call so many times or lost my temper to finally reach someone who could solve the problem. But I’m glad I stuck with it. Thank you, Diego.

Bellissima!

Thanks to Mavromatic (a blog I had never heard of before) for this pointer to the Teatro D1 – The Super Media Center 2005 PC.

Unbelievable! This is one sexy Windows Media Center PC. The TEATRO D1 is like any finely crafted Italian product. It sports a built-in 7″ 1280×720 VGA touchscreen, dual layer DVD burner and 500gb of HD space. You can record two shows at once (also has a FM tuner). The TEATRO D1 has integrated Wi-Fi, great for older homes where Cat5 is not easily pulled. I can’t read Italian so it’s hard to navigate the OnCinema site to find out more information… like pricing… but I expect this thing to be in the $3-5k range. The TEATRO D1 comes in silver (pictured) and black. It seems like all the really cool stuff in this space is coming from our friends in the EU. Which kind of makes sense, since Europeans have always been known for there love for quality and sexy styling… I guess we are known for $29 Target DVD players and Cheetos.

I’ve been studying Italian this year, so I was able to stumble around the Web site, understand most of the text, and determine that this baby would set you back a cool 5000 Euros, which at current exchange rates is about $6750. Mamma mia!

The good news is that you can buy a similar looking case from A-Tech Fabrication and build your own for considerably less. They’ll even install the touch screen for $400…

Thanks to James Fee at Digital Media Thoughts for the pointer.

Security alert for Windows XP

Here’s a disturbing report of a Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability in Internet Explorer, from Secunia. Note that installing SP2 alone will not protect you from this problem, although it does offer a useful tool to fix it temporarily.

Clicking the test link on their page opens an IE window that contains their own content, with “https://www.paypal.com/” displayed in the Address bar and an authentic-looking SSL padlock icon in the status bar. (Clicking the test link in Firefox does nothing.)

This test page, of course, does nothing. But if it were an actual phishing attack, it would be possible for a bad guy to convince you to give up personal information like a password or a credit card number in the mistaken belief you were actually at a Web site belonging to your bank, PayPal, Ebay, or another trusted site.

To protect yourself until a patch is released, do the following.

From Internet Explorer, choose Tools, Manage Add-ons. (If you don’t see this menu choice, you don’t have SP2 installed, and you have bigger problems!)
Scroll down the list and select DHTML Edit Control Safe for Scripting for IE5.
Click Disable.
Click OK to close the dialog box, and then restart IE.

Even if you normally use Firefox, I recommend that you take this precaution until a patch is available.

If you have an application that needs to use the DHTML Edit control, there’s a fix that allows this ActiveX control to be used safely, but it’s too complicated to list the instructions here. Leave a comment if you are in this situation.

If you use an earlier version of Windows, you should disable ActiveX.

Update: The DHTML Edit Control is in every version of Windows XP, but it won’t appear in your list of add-ons until it’s actually loaded by a page. Go to the Secunia test site and click the link to their test. After you do that, you can disable this control.

Your jukebox, uncensored

I’ve seen this several places, and it’s a cool idea:

Open up the music player on your computer.
Set it to play your entire music collection.
Turn on the “shuffle” option.
Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty.
Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

Here’s my list (album names in parentheses). It could have been much stranger.

Dusk, Lara and Reyes (Two Guitars One Passion/Spain)
Green Onions, Booker T & The MGs (Elemental R&B/Shimmies and Shakes)
The Boy Feels Strange, Melissa Etheridge (Never Enough)
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, Bob Dylan (MTV Unplugged)
Ramblin’ On My Mind, Jesse Colin Young (Greatest Hits)
Seek Up, Dave Matthews Band (Remember Two Things)
Trip to Skye/Darach Debrun’s, Eileen Ivers and John Whelan (Celtic Odyssey)
Sun Risin’ Blues, Big Joe Turner (Big Bad & Blue: The Big Joe Turner Anthology Vol. 1)
Tangled Up in Blue, Bob Dylan (A Million Faces at My Feet, bootleg)
Allowa Kirk/Traditional Strathspey/Princess Royal/Douglas’ Favourite, Ashley MacIsaac (Fine Thank You Very Much)

Thanks to A View from the Classroom, The Hypothetical Wren, and 42 for the idea.

Charge for security features? No, no, no!

CNN reports that Microsoft may charge extra for security software:

Microsoft Corp. disclosed plans Thursday to offer frustrated users of its Windows software new tools within 30 days to remove spyware programs secretly running on computers. But it might cost extra in coming months.

In a shift from past practice, the world’s largest software manufacturer said it may charge consumers for future versions of the new protective technology, which Microsoft acquired by buying a small New York software firm. Terms of the sale of Giant Company Software Inc. weren’t disclosed.

No, no, no! Security features in the operating system should be free. Period. Anyone running Windows should get the code that prevents their computer from being compromised. The goal should be 100% adoption, and charging extra for security features means settling for significantly less than that goal.

Anti-spyware software compared

Just ran across this comprehensive Feature Comparison of popular anti-spyware programs.

As spyware and adware have become increasingly powerful and difficult to remove, developers of anti-spyware programs have added a wider range of functionality to their applications to give users more powerful tools as well as greater control over those tools. Moreover, although anti-spyware applications have long resembled standard anti-virus applications in many way, they have also started to acquire their own distinctive set of features in order to help users deal with the unique problems posed by spyware and adware. Given the bewildering array of programs and features available to users looking for anti-spyware applications, users may find it difficult to usefully compare anti-spyware programs and their feature sets.

Giant Anti-Spyware, which Microsoft just purchased, gets particularly high marks. Unfortunately, the product was pulled from Giant’s Web site as soon as the acquisition becamse official. It’ll be interesting to see what it looks like when it returns in January.