Microsoft has made the release candidate of Windows XP Service Pack 2 available for download by anyone.
As beta software, it’s of very high quality. I’m confident enough, in fact, to run it on the computer I use every day. If you’ve got a broadband connection, why not try it out? According to Robert Scoble, Microsoft Geek Blogger, they “really appreciate your bug reports and other feedback.”
I haven’t talked about it yet, but I’ve been working extensively with Windows XP Service Pack 2, which just reached the Release Candidate 1 milestone. It’s a very big deal, with major improvements in several key areas, including security and wireless networking.
Paul Thurrott has posted a Screenshot Gallery on his SuperSite for Windows. It’s worth a look if you’re curious about what’s coming.
I’ll have much more to say later.
From the aptly named Techdirt comes this story: Your Computer Is 400 Times Dirtier Than Your Toilet Seat.
“…your telephone, computer keyboard and mouse probably have 400 times the germs as your toilet seat. The thing is, people wash toilet seats… but they tend not to do much to clean or disinfect the things they keep their hands touching all day, every day.”
Eeeeewwww.
Windows Update doesn’t search for Office patches automatically, so if you use Office XP you need to go get it yourself: Office XP Service Pack 3.
Can’t wait to hear how many things Woody finds wrong with it.
The Windows XP Task Manager shows a list of all running programs. You can pop up this list by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete or Ctrl+Shift+Esc. The Applications tab shows every running program and corresponds to the items shown on your taskbar.
Much more useful is the list on the Processes tab, which shows every program and service running, even those that are hidden. This is a great way to see which programs are sucking up too much CPU time or memory. It’s also an excellent technique for determining whether you have a spyware/adware or Trojan horse program lurking on your computer.
Deciphering the entries on the Processes list can be tricky, because all you have is a list of program names to go by, and those names aren’t always descriptive. To decipher these listings, bookmark the immensely helpful Start-up Applications page put together by Paul “Pacman” Collins for Pacman’s Portal. After reading the brief introduction, you can go straight to the list itself.
If you hate RealPlayer, or RealOne, or whatever they’re calling it these days, as much as I do, this rant is a must-read:
“When you install Real Player, you can either choose an express install, or custom install. If you pick express install, Real Player simply installs itself with every option and feature turned on. If you choose the custom install, the process is a blend between an installer and a Pokemon-like game of gotta-uncheck-all-checkboxes.”
Amazingly, the author got several anonymous replies from frustrated employees at Real, who forwarded several internal memos. (You can read the leaked memos here.)
The whole thing should be mandatory reading for anyone in the software business who wants to learn how NOT to treat their customers.
This kind of stuff drives me nuts. CNN has a story today headlined Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail. (Update: This story was taken from the AP wire service and was slightly edited by CNN. But still…)
In the first paragraph, the story reads: “…Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying ‘stamps’ for e-mail. … At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn’t significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.”
Of course, if you keep reading you realize that those statements have no basis in fact. Later, the report says, accurately, “…Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. … Instead of paying a penny, the sender would ‘buy’ postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender’s good faith.”
No money. No penny per message. But it’s much sexier to put out the distorted message that greedy Bill G. wants more of your money.
Back to J-school, CNN.
A friend forwarded an e-mail that claims Bill Gates wants to charge everyone a penny in “postage” for every e-mail message sent. Welcome to the world of urban legends, where the message is only casually related to the truth.
This is not an updated version of the ancient “US Postal Service 5-cent tax” urban legend. Nor is it related to the old “FCC Internet Tax” myth. The new story is a distorted and oversimplified summary of one of many proposals currently making the rounds to combat spam. Bill Gates mentioned it in a speech, but it’s not his idea nor is it at the top of Microsoft’s list of preferred solutions.
Under the most common variations of this type of plan, personal email would continue to be free, but bulk senders would be forced to pay a penny or so per message. In the idea that Gates has mentioned, any unidentified sender would be forced to offer a monetary amount for you to read an email. If you identify the person as a friend, there’s no charge, but a spammer would have to pay, conceivably as much as 20 cents per message that actually gets read. It’s a complicated idea and I doubt it will ever take off. Details are in this USA Today story.
An alternate proposal from Microsoft Research is called the Penny Black project. Under this scheme, message senders would have to pay a price in CPU cycles or some form of math challenge (which would be solved by the computer, not by the user!). This would result in an imperceptible slowdown for the average person, but would seriously impact someone cranking out thousands of messages a day.
There’s also a controversial proposal called the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which is designed to stop e-mails with forged “From” addresses; it works by checking the IP address of a message sender to determine whether it’s authorized to use the SMTP server from which the message was sent. A Microsoft version of that called “Caller ID.” You can read about it here.
Bottom line: Free e-mail is here for the foreseeable future. Any truly effective solution to spam is going to take a long time to implement, and it’s going to be fraught with unintended consequences. If someone tells you they have a foolproof solution, they’re trying to fool you.
From Techdirt: Comcast Finally Takes Action Against Zombie Machines.
Well, it’s about freakin’ time. As one of the linked stories notes, five specific IP addresses alone were responsible for more than 45,000 pieces of spam. It isn’t difficult to identify an infected machine by its behavior, and giving the clueless user a stern warning followed by a block on their ability to send mail is the right idea. In fact, shutting down their Internet connection completely until they clean up the virus is an even better idea.
Now, all Comcast has to do is get their support staff on board. My sister and her husband are Comcast subscribers. A couple weeks ago, they lost the ability to send e-mail. I spent several hours on the phone with them and told them they were probably blocked. But when they called Comcast support, they were given a variety of incorrect and sometimes comical answers. The best one was that they had “clogged the e-mail server” and would just have to wait a couple days until the messages had cleared out. Riiiiiiight.
That, of course, was ludicrous. After several hours getting escalated to various people, my sister finally got to the abuse department, which notified her that their account had been blocked for sending spam – apparently because my brother-in-law had sent a newsletter to 500 subscribers. Gee, it would have been nice if Comcast would have sent them a notice of the possible violation of terms of service first…
One of my all-time heroes, Neil Young, just did an interview with Wired. Great stuff.
On fans who trade bootleg shows: “When I play a new song in concert, it’s immediately uploaded. Everyone has heard it before I put the record out. For a while, that was a negative thing for me. But with Greendale, I started using it deliberately.”
On lawsuits: “I can’t control what people do. I don’t want to.” (RIAA, are you listening?)
On MP3s: “MP3 quality sucks.” (Yeah, which is why I won’t pay anyone 99 cents for a compressed audio track that sounds like garbage in my living room.)
The man is a genius.
