The blog

Why I hate Kazaa

A new article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base points out an incompatibility between Kazaa and Windows XP Service Pack 2: 878485 – You cannot open Sharman Networks Kazaa version 2.52 in Windows XP with Service Pack 2.

Sadly, there’s a newer version of Kazaa available that fixes this problem. My personal experience? I have been called to work on many computers on which Kazaa was installed. Every single one, without exception, was infested with spyware and riddled with other problems. When I take on a cleanup job as a consultant, part of the contract requires that the client remove Kazaa and promise never to reinstall it.

Think I’m exaggerating? Ask Dave Winer what he thinks of Kazaa: “I did something realllly stupid this morning.”

Gee, few problems with SP2

CNET News.com reports:

A new study released this week from consultant AssetMetrix found that the typical company can expect at least some SP2 compatibility issues on about 10 percent of its machines that run the software.

“There will be some, what I would consider, transitory issues,” said Steve O’Halloran, managing director for AssetMetrix’s research arm. “In most cases the software just needs a little configuration (change) and the incompatibility goes away.”

Transitory issues. A little configuration change. Sounds pretty good to me. Don’t you think so? From the same story:

[C]omputer makers say the upgrade has not resulted in the support headaches that they had feared.

“We would have expected our call volume to increase significantly,” said Bob Cote, vice president of client services at Gateway. Instead, Cote said that Gateway is getting fewer than 100 calls per day related to SP2.

Many PC makers credited the results to advanced planning and Microsoft’s listening to their advice to stagger the release of the software upgrade. …

A Dell representative said the company was prepared for an increase in support calls, but so far has seen only a brief spike. “We saw a little bit of an uptick when the service pack first became available, but call volumes today are within the norms,” Dell representative Jennifer Jones said.

Gateway’s Cote said most of the support calls have been general inquiries, with customers trying to decide whether to upgrade or wait. “We’re recommending that they go ahead,” he said…

Note: I found this entry via a blog entry at Dan Gillmor’s site, headlined “Windows Service Pack: More issues.” Funny. I would have written a different headline.

Q&A: SP2 and performance

Reader Mark Roberts asks: “does sp2 make winxp boot slower. I think i am experiencing same. “

Mark, I’ve read hundreds of first-person reports on SP2, and I have not seen any reports of performance problems. In fact, a few people say they think some things are actually faster, and that’s my experience as well.

If you’re experiencing slowdowns, you may have an auto-starting application, service, or driver interfering with startup. I would use Msconfig’s Startup tab or a similar utility to disable as much as possible and see if the problem persists. Then start adding items back a few at a time and see if the problem reappears.

Is Google dying?

Daniel Brandt of Google-Watch says Google is dying. Or, more accurately, its abaility to index pages on the Web is severely broken:

On sites with more than a few thousand pages, Google is not indexing anywhere from ten percent to seventy percent of the pages it knows about. These pages show up in Google’s main index as a listing of the URL, which means that the Googlebot is aware of the page. But they do not show up as an indexed page. When the page is listed but not indexed, the only way to find it in a search is if your search terms hit on words in the URL itself. Even if they do hit, these listed pages rank so poorly compared to indexed pages, that they are almost invisible. This is true even though the listed pages still retain their usual PageRank.

I have been complaining about this since April 2003, and it has become more visible in 2004. There is no method to Google’s madness, which is another way of saying that this phenomenon is not characteristic of any particular type of site. It is happening across the entire landscape of large sites. […]

I first noticed [this problem] in April 2003. That was the month when Google underwent a massive upheaval, which I describe in my Google is broken essay. When that essay was written two months after the upheaval, it would have been speculative to claim that the listed URL phenomenon was a symptom of the 4-byte docID problem described in the essay. It was too soon. But sixteen months later, the URL listings are beginning to look very widespread and very suspicious. It’s a major fault in Google’s index, it is getting worse, and it is much more than a mere temporary glitch.

Basically, Brandt claims that Google’s index is limited to approximately 4 billion pages by the numbering structure it uses. Now that its index of listed pages has reached trhat limit, the only way for a new page to get added is for an old, obsolete one to fall off.

If this is true (and the argument appears to be quite plausible and well reasoned), then this is sobering indeed.

Glad I didn’t buy into the IPO.

Longhorn wish list

You haven’t read much about Longhorn (code name for the next version of Windows) here. I’ve been to plenty of public demonstrations and discussions of Longhorn, along with a few private briefings. Most of what I saw was interesting but obviously very early and unfinished. I’ve installed and experimented with some alpha versions of Longhorn. Everything was rough and ragged (as you would expect for pre-alpha code) and I had better things to do than tinker with highly unstable software. Besides, unless you’re a software developer or hardware designer, knowing a lot about Longhorn isn’t going to help you.

Today, Mary Jo Foley reports that Microsoft plans to “gut Longhorn” so that it can ship an operating system upgrade in 2006:

After the cuts, Longhorn won’t look much like the early builds that Microsoft has been distributing to date. But it should run existing applications.

According to developer sources, Microsoft is cutting back Longhorn client’s planned feature set so as to be able to make its current delivery targets: Beta 1 by next year and final release some time in 2006.

Microsoft is expected to announce officially later on Friday its future roadmap for the desktop version of Longhorn. And while developers and customers who expected they’d be required to rewrite their applications to take advantage of Longhorn may be happy with Microsoft’s roadmap changes, others who were banking on promised Longhorn features, such as the next-gen Windows File System, will be far less so.

The end result? Longhorn is going to be a lot more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary Windows release.

I have no problem with that. The core of Windows XP is pretty darn good. Adding a few cool new features and a select handful of major changes, without affecting backward compatibility with Windows XP, would make me happy. If Microsoft does nothing else with Longhorn, they need to fix the user permissions model, which encourages – even forces – users to run as Administrator all the time.

A secure operating system should provide at least three user modes:

  • Administrator – reserved for system management tasks such as installing hardware drivers, upgrading operating system components, and installing programs that need to run with system-level permissions.
  • Trusted User – this is the type of account you and I should be running under all the time. It should allow me to install signed programs and drivers, run any installed program and use any installed device. It should prompt me to enter an Administrator’s credentials when I install unsigned software or use a program that has system-level rights.
  • Limited User – With this type of account, I should be able to run software but not make any system configuration changes. An Administrator should be able to configure which programs I am allowed to run but I shouldn’t be able to install any software and I should be allowed to access only signed drivers that are already installed.

Right now, Windows XP offers Administrator and Limited options only. Few people choose to run as a Limited user, because the experience is unpleasant. Anyone who can dupe an Administrator into installing a program can take over their box. That’s the biggest change that has to happen in Longhorn.

Second biggest usability tweak to fix is the ability to transfer programs along with files and settings. Right now, if I move to a new PC, I can transfer all my files and most of my settings, but the programs have to be re-installed from scratch. That’s no fun. There should be a Windows standard way to “package” an installed program for transfer to another computer, with required program files, support files, DLLs, Registry settings, and so on able to come along for the ride.

Honestly, I don’t care that much about Win FS and Avalon. They’re cool, but they can wait. Fix those two things and Longhorn will be worth the upgrade.

Order SP2 on CD

You can now order the Windows XP Service Pack 2 on CD. I recommend that you get one of these CDs, even if you already downloaded SP2 and installed it yourself. You can use the “official” CD to install the upgrade on computers belonging to friends and family members who don’t have high-speed connections or who are technically unsophisticated and afraid of the process.

There’s no charge, by the way, not even for shipping and handling. Currently, the CD is available only for the English language version of SP2. Other versions will be available next month.

The decline of the PC press

I used to be managing editor of PC World, so I think I have some right to say that a story now running on the Today @ PC World blog, Win XP SP2 Halts 15% of Systems, Survey Says is irresponsible nonsense. I don’t know where the author went to school, but he needs to go back and learn some of the fundamentals of journalism. Here’s a quote:

System administrators who have been installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 on their own PCs and on test systems are reporting the results of their practice runs to the SANS Institute Web site–and the failure rate seems to be pretty high.

While the vast majority of the 752 people who published feedback (as of this blog entry) had no problems, 15 percent of these competent technology professionals complain that severe problems prevent the PC from being used after they installed the service pack. About half of those say they had to rebuild the entire system from scratch after they ran SP2.

Let’s go through a few things here:

First, this survey is not statistically weighted, so generalizing with the bold headline “SP2 Halts 15% of Systems” is unsupported by any evidence. On the contrary, the survey’s respondents are, by definition, going to be weighted disproportionately in the direction of those with problems. Sysadmins and computer users who have trouble-free experiences with software do not go out on the Internet looking for information about that software. The group in a self-selecting survey such as this one consists disproportionately of people who had problems, went looking for answers, and found this survey.

Second, see there in the second graf where the author says “15 percent of these competent technology professionals complain…”? Go and read the survey for yourself. Do you see anything that required a test of technical competence? This survey is open to the public, and characterizing the respondents with any degree of accuracy is impossible. Even the site’s sponsor, the SANS Institute, acknowledges that “we will not verify submissions for accuracy (we just can’t).” A reporter interested in accuracy might say that the site has a reputation for attracting sysadmins with more technical knowledge of computers and networks than a general-interest site such as PC World’s, but that’s about it.

In fact, that whole “technically sophisticated” thing cuts two ways. In my experience, power users are more likely to experience problems with any upgrade using any operating system. Why? Because they’re willing to use bargain hardware, install unsigned drivers, and experiment with all sorts of software.

I’d be willing to bet that many (not all, but many) of the specific problems reported by the respondents to the SANS survey involve blue-screen errors. Those errors are almost certainly caused by faulty drivers (hardware or system-level software, such as AV or CD-burning software). A less-likely scenario is that the blue screen is caused by a faulty hardware component such as a bad RAM chip, but my money is on a bad driver. Anyway, installing SP2 didn’t cause the problems they experienced; it simply exposed those problems. The bad driver was a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. What they need to do is figure out where the driver is that’s causing their problem and replace it with a proper version, after which they can install SP2.

But anyone reading this story, especially if they focus on the headline and don’t think about the details, will assume that there’s a 15% chance that installing SP2 will hose their system. That’s nonsense, and PC World shouldn’t be spreading that message around.

SP2 now on Windows Update?

According to Brian Johnson, Service Pack 2 is now available via Windows Update. If you’ve been waiting, this is your opportunity. Unlike the full download, the Windows Update version is tailored to your Windows version. It’s still large, but it is considerably smaller than the full download.

Update: I just checked on my unpatched test system and WU is still not showing availability of SP2. It is available via Automatic Updates, however. I’ll keep you posted.

SP2 rollout delayed

Mary Jo Foley says Microsoft Pushes Back Automatic Delivery of SP2:

August 16 was set to be D-day for the automatic delivery of Microsoft’s Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).

But at the last minute, the Redmond software vendor decided to push back by at least nine days the Windows Update/Automatic Update launch date for its collection of security fixes and features. Microsoft cited customer demand as the reason for the delay.

So if you’re waitig for Automatic Update to kick in, you’ll need to wait a bit longer.