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June 30, 2006

"Confooozed" about Windows Genuine Advantage? You should be.

Over at the forum, we've been discussing WGA Notify, and to put it politely, the developments in that are enough to confuse the daylights out of even literate users. In fact the long experienced Brian Livingston just said in his Issue 78 Windows Secrets Newsletter that he's probably sitting in front of his screen, "Watch(ing) for downloads in the night".

What's the current fuss about Windows Genuine Advantage? Well, you see, there are two parts in this - Windows Genuine Advantage (which is a mechanism that has been in operation now, for a year or more) and WGA Notifications (which is new). They may share some files in common, but they're not the same thing.

We've borne the inconvenience of WGA for some time now - it's a nuisance but that's about the limit of aggravation it instills. WGA Notify however is getting under the skin people who are charged with maintaining a security posture in corporate IT and to those home and corporate individuals who are intent on keeping Microsoft Windows machines patched and secure.

Initially, when you want to get an added value (free) component or tool from Microsoft, the company wants to verify that you are a valid customer. If you use Internet Explorer an ActiveX program will transparently identify your copy of Windows. If you don't want to use IE (and use Firefox for example), you need to manually download and run a program that calculates a code. You then type this code into a textbox provided on the webpage and if that is approved, you can proceed to get your tool. Long winded but not something to get upset about.

Later on, the Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool (KB892130) came to reside on our Windows machines - some of us saw it creep in, some didn't. We thought, it's digitally signed, it's from Microsoft, let it be.

WGA Notifications however, is quite different. It is a new initiative, composed of several files. It was a beta (or what Microsoft now calls a pilot - Beta has too many unsavoury nuances) and it was delivered as part of a batch of Critical Security Updates to Windows. You were supposed to be the voluntary guinea pig and see an agreement banner - the truth is, when Microsoft says that something is Critical, many of us just take their word for it and click "Ok".

Then, things started getting interesting. Because it was a pilot procedure, Microsoft might have wanted this to be an instrumented version - that is, it was designed to "phone home" to Microsoft servers. To do what? Ask for further directions? Pass Microsoft some info about your machine? Prove that it was working successfully? We don't know.

This attempt to phone home was being picked up as alerts - by home users who ran a software firewall. By people who use machines secured by the coporate network firewall. Making all this seem underhanded rather than some poor implementation or a concept gone wrong.

There's been so much hubbub that Microsoft has come up with disable or removal instructions. The instructions themselves do not appear to have been comprehensively tested. They would be alright in the hands of a IT support technician, but they're terse, they leave out some obvious steps (like asking the user to ensure the screen has been set to "Show Updates". And frankly, they're really manual and technical at this point in the Windows lifecycle when someone in Redmond could write an automatic uninstaller with both eyes closed. Maybe one of the 9000 bodies they have on the Windows Vista team?

The instructions ask you to delete LegitCheckControl.DLL - true, it is part of WGA Notify but it is also part of WGA. So, once you complete this removal of WGA Notify, you have also hobbled WGA. And you need WGA because there are really important Windows Updates that you may need in the future (the Australian Commonwealth Games daylight saving adjustment patch notwithstanding).

Brian is so incensed by this carrying on, he's even recommending that people tell Microsoft what it can do with the previously well respected, official and free Microsoft Windows Updates system, take a walk and go Shavlik. Over-reaction? Maybe. But Shavlik, although well presented and well known to IT technicians, might be too much information for the Windows newbie.

 What are you going to do?

Posted by Anandasim at 08:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Google Checkout - passport to world domination?

Remember Microsoft Passport, when Bill Gates planned to put a cash register on every desktop, taking a cut of every transaction? Remember how it was envisaged as a 'single sign on' system so people didn't have to remember hundreds of passwords and usernames in order to go shopping online?

Looks an awful lot like Google Checkout, doesn't it? As the Google video puts it: "Online shopping seems quick and easy. Until it's time to buy. There are always lots of forms to fill out. Not to mention all those passwords and user names you're supposed to remember?" Google Checkout promises to take care of all that, plus protect you from fraud and other nasties.

We've already exceeded our credit card limit, so we don't dare to look for the "speedy little shopping cart" that signifies a Google Checkout merchant. But we can't help but wonder if the same little oversights that blighted Passport might re-emerge with this new model.

Google clearly has big plans. But the alarm bells are ringing over at ZDNet.

Who knows whether ultimately it will succeed where Passport failed. What's your view?

Posted by cw at 01:26 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Hurry. Vista beta is closing

If you want to try the Windows Vista Beta 2, you're going to have to pull your finger out. According to Microsoft blogger, Ian Moulster, if you don't start your download overnight, and pick up a product key, you'll miss the cut off point.

Posted by cw at 11:20 AM | TrackBack

June 29, 2006

Inside Fortress Apple

You probably won't be able to read it if you don't have a subscription, but the Wall Street Journal's story on Apple's secrecy culture under Steve Jobs is fascinating. Employees, partners and even major customers are kept in the dark, and workers are locked out of all campus areas other than their own. Entire projects - even entire departments - can co-exist on the campus for years with other workers being none the wiser. Code names are changed slightly between departments, to help identify the source of leaks.

The regime discourages major companies from committing to Apple products - according to one, "You could no longer strategically position the institution to take advantage of Apple products. You ran the constant risk of purchasing stuff that was soon to be obsolete." - but with the company focusing increasingly on the consumer market, it seems to work - when Apple does announce something new, it gets maximum PR.

What we also found fascinating was the indication in the story that Apple might be at odds with its employees over sales commissions. You can pick that up in the following excerpt from the story:

In late 2002, representatives of Argonne National Laboratory, a government research center in Argonne, Ill., visited Apple headquarters for a confidential product briefing, according to an executive summary prepared by Apple. The document was shown to a reporter by Stephen Bates, a former Apple sales official who says he was fired last year in a dispute over commissions. The representatives were eager to learn more about product plans for "high-performance computing," in which many PCs are linked together to handle complex computing chores. But Argonne representatives didn't learn enough to help them determine whether the products could fit into the lab's computing project, according to the summary.

"They were frustrated that Apple did not give them any indication of future directions," says the summary. "One of the attendees said that he didn't learn anything he didn't already know from the Web and chat sessions."

In written customer comments included in the document, Rémy Evard, now Argonne's chief information officer, said, "With other companies, ranging from small companies to Microsoft and Intel, I learn an awful lot more useful info for my time investment than we got here." In an email, Mr. Evard confirms his comments, adding that he has made such comments to Apple more than once.

Apple can be closemouthed about even seemingly picayune details. Several years ago, David Sobotta, Apple's former director of federal sales, says he accompanied a top technology official of a large National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility to Cupertino. In a meeting one Friday with an Apple product manager, the official wanted to know when Apple would release a version of one of its Mac laptops that could connect to Apple's external flat-screen displays. The product manager declined to say, according to Mr. Sobotta, who joined Apple in 1984 and says he was fired last year over a dispute involving sales commissions.

The following Monday, Apple publicly announced a laptop that included the very feature the NASA official had asked about three days earlier. The official didn't respond to requests for comment. But Mr. Sobotta says the NASA official -- a major customer, who spends millions of dollars a year on Apple products -- was miffed.

Posted by cw at 10:29 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 28, 2006

Sony virus writers arrested

British police have arrested three men accused of running a botnet which recruited business PCs, using trojans to open allowing access to commercial information.

The interesting thing - as Jeremy Wagstaff reminds us - is that the viruses piggy-backed on the DRM rootkit that Sony BMG installed on its customers' computers.

Posted by cw at 07:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Lego Mindstorms NXT

I have always been a fan of Lego as a great educational tool and the fact that I grew up with it I think gave me some rudimentary engineering skills that probably helped me in my first job that let me play with these.

I had hoped earlier this year to be one of the lucky 100 who scored one of these Lego Mindstorms NXT to test run but alas it did not happen, so I will have to wait until August for the public release, a birthday and maybe some donations towards the AU$429.99 price tag.

With 30,000+ photos of Lego over on Flickr it is still quite a popular pastime for many. Adam Savage from the popular Mythbusters series on SBS said in an interview at The Sneeze about his kids “So I figure, it’s Lego’s until they’re old enough for a cell phone”. I never felt an urge to be a sculptor or excavator operator but what bought this post about today was a set of photos of M.C Escher’s Impossible Staircase over on the FinaBlog built with Lego bricks. I have a jigsaw puzzle of the staircase and that was complex enough for me, building that with Lego bricks must have been mindboggling

Posted by Stephen at 04:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 27, 2006

Microsoft goes 'Phisher' hunting

Microsoft appear to be starting to act against phishing scams around the globe with their first prosecution successfully through the courts, it will be worth watching to see how they perform when it comes to prosecuting someone or group who does not reside within the United States.

Source: IE Blog Hi, I’m Aaron Kornblum, Internet Safety Enforcement Attorney at Microsoft, and a member of Microsoft’s global team committed to help fight cybercrime and protect our customers while they are online. As a parent, former Air Force prosecutor and civil litigator, and now in-house corporate counsel focused on Internet Safety, I am increasingly concerned by the proliferation of cybercrime and, in particular, online fraud such as phishing. My IE colleagues have invited me to share with you the news of a milestone just reached in Microsoft’s Global Phishing Enforcement Initiative (GPEI): the sentencing of a convicted phisher to 21 months imprisonment and $57,000.00 restitution to victims in a federal prosecution directly supported by Microsoft.

Posted by Stephen at 08:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Nasty Westpac phishing scam

There's something chilling about the latest phishing attempt that popped into our Inbox yesterday.

"Dear Westpac Online Limited customer", it read, "We are constantly striving to provide you with more convenience, control, and security to assist in managing our services. As part of our ongoing efforts to make it easier for you to use our online services, we have revised the Westpac Online Internet Banking Terms and Conditions that you reviewed and accepted when you began to use Westpac Banking services. No additional action is required by you to continue to use your online services. To review the changes, click on the link below ..."

When you click on the link, it seems to duplicate the Westpac sign-in screen perfectly. We wouldn't be at all surprised if this effort in social engineering convinced some Westpac customers to blithely type in their account number and password.

Posted by cw at 12:27 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Forget the wife: your PC understands you

Our worst fears have been realised. They've now come up with an "emotionally aware computer" that can apparently read your face like a book. It "sees" you through its camera lens, and by tracking 24 facial "feature points", such as the edge of the nose, the eyebrows and the corners of the mouth, can interpret a total of 20 key facial movements, including a nod or shake of the head, a raise of the eyebrow or a pull on the corner of the mouth.

According to Peter Robinson, professor of computer technology at the University of Cambridge, the EQ-enhanced computer could help improve driver safety, and help people with autism, but - as if we couldn't guess - "there are potential commercial uses, such as picking the right time to sell someone something".

Won't it feel a little, well, off-putting, to know that your computer is staring at you? That it's trying to work out whether that facial twitch that you've suddenly developed indicates pleasure, pain, or something else entirely? Will it understand irony? Will it become neurotic, just like us?

Already the artificial environments of MMORPGs like Second Life are beginning to blur with, if not become a preferable reality for some of those who play them. Could this spell the end of a good deal of human discourse? Maybe we'll spend our evenings playing poker with the PC.

And we're reminded of those "intelligent agents" that were supposed to be ever so friendly to their humans, who would dispatch them to do all sorts of business over the Internet. As we recall, when one of these agents discovered that its owner's hard drive was full, it helpfully deleted - without wasting time by a asking permission - a whole lot of files and directories. On the whole, we're not in favour of encouraging this sort of familiarity. Particularly if the bloody thing is waiting for an opportunity to deliver a sales pitch.

Posted by cw at 11:50 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 26, 2006

Travelling? Get the best exchange rate

Practically everyone we know is going to Europe during July. We'd join them if we had any money, but what with being a poor journalist/blogger, we can't even afford the airport tax. We're not embittered by this. We're perfectly happy to point out to these travellers how they can get the best exchange rate.

Posted by cw at 12:46 PM | TrackBack

June 24, 2006

On misplacing things

We're pretty sure it was just after lunch on Wednesday when we noticed the latest casualty in our unconscious war on objects. We were standing on the doorstep of chez Bleeding Edge at the time, having just returned from a quick steak sandwich at one of the local cafes. We put our hand into our right trouser pocket and discovered that the front door key, and the collection of other keys, garage door lifter, LCD torch etc that we keep on a fat key ring wasn't there.

It wasn't in the left trouser pocket, either. It wasn't in either coat pocket. It wasn't in the shoulder bag in which, like many journalists, we carry important tools of our trade: notebooks, pens, pocket shorthand dictionary etc. It was, we suspected, somewhere on the other side of that door.

We presumed that, as part of our usual meticulous practices in preparing to go out, we'd forgotten to pick up the keyring. We don't always forget these keys. Sometimes we instead forget the mobile phone, particularly when we're expecting an urgent call, but we forget the keys frequently enough to have gained an intimate familiarity with all the features of our front porch, while pacing up and down in a mixture of fury and despair.

Fortunately, having grown tired of the consequences of this routine oversight, we'd recently bought one of those devices that allows you to keep a spare key outside, in a small chamber protected by a combination lock. So, rather than standing outside in the cold waiting for one of the more responsible members of the family to rescue us, we opened the gadget, retrieved the key and let ourselves into the house.

What we should have done, right then, was conduct a search for these errant keys. Unfortunately our tiny little mind got absorbed in various distractions, and the effort of meeting the weekly column deadline, so it wasn't until about 7pm that night, when we were - how often does this happen? - running late for a table tennis competition, that we remembered the missing keys. A frantic search of the usual places of concealment didn't uncover them, so we were forced to use a spare car key. Unfortunately we didn't have a spare garage door lifter, so we lost more time manually opening and closing the garage door, and maintained our record for late arrivals.

The team had a rare victory that night, so we weren't particularly irritated, when we got home, to have to park in the rear laneway, walk around to the front to retrieve the spare key from the chamber - we were becoming more grateful for its existence by the minute - let ourselves in the front door, walk through to the rear garage and open the garage door etc.

What we should have done, of course, when we were back inside, was immediately institute a search for the missing keys. That way, we would have avoided the last-minute panic on Thursday morning when we again [SIGH] couldn't find the keys.

Fortunately the Bleeding Edge spouse was home when we returned, just after mid-day, so we were able to phone from the back lane, and get her to open the garage door. Her presence was crucial, too, to the next phase in our strategy in these matters ... blame someone else for hiding the missing object. We'd convinced ourselves that she must have picked up our key ring by mistake, and left it in her handbag, but alas she must have disposed of the evidence. We couldn't find a trace of them in her bag, on her desk, in her coat pockets etc. We couldn't find them in any of our coat pockets either. We ransacked the entire house. Upturned the interior of the car. Inspected the dog's bedding, explored all manner of fantastic scenarios. But. Couldn't. Find the damned keys.

On Friday night, when we came home in the evening to prepare linguine alle vongole for the Bleeding Edge daughter and son-in-law, we found ourselves back on the front porch again, as a result of establishing the weak point in our strategic positioning of that external key chamber, with its little combination lock. We'd ingeniously placed it in a position where - in the hours of darkness - we couldn't read the numbers on those little combination wheels.

Rang the Bleeding Edge daughter to discover she was 20 minutes or so away. We were going to get even more familiar with our porch. It only occurred to us, as we hung up the phone, and the little light went out, that the illuminated screen might just give us enough light to negotiate the combination lock. We must have looked a little odd, holding the phone up to the combination lock as if to let it make a call, but - joy oh joy - it worked. We were in!

Is there anything more pathetic, we wondered, on Saturday morning, as we went back to the cafe where we'd had that steak sandwich, than someone begging a waiter to please look for some missing property? He couldn't find it, of course. They put all lost property in their till, and it wasn't there. Somebody else's lost key was there, however, so if you've had a steak sandwich recently, and haven't been able to get into your car, you might like to check with them.

Back home we went. We wrote on the back of an envelope all the movements we'd made during the week. Had we perhaps lost the keys on Tuesday night? No. We'd driven home that night and hadn't had any problems getting in to the garage. It had to have happened on Wednesday. But on Wednesday, the only place we'd gone was to the cafe, and they didn't have any keys.

What had we been wearing that day? We checked the wardrobe and discovered that an overcoat was missing. We don't often wear that overcoat, but we had a vague recollection of putting it on once during the week. Hmmn. Is there anything more pathetic, we wondered, as we once more walked back up to Fitzroy St, than someone begging the waiter if by any chance at all, they happened to have a missing overcoat. As a matter of fact, up there on top of a cupboard, there was an overcoat. Bleeding Edge's overcoat. And in the pocket, guess what we found?

Posted by cw at 12:59 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 22, 2006

How to cheat good

Here's some handy pointers for the plagiarising generation we mentioned below. No. 8 is a doozy.

Posted by cw at 10:13 PM | TrackBack

Get your workhorse PC specs

Just sent out the latest Workhorse PC specifications. If you're a subscriber, and it hasn't arrived, please let us know. If you're not a subscriber, and you'd like to know about the best price/performance PC available, why not apply some of the savings Bleeding Edge alerts you to, to a good cause.

Our subscription rate has dropped off in the past two weeks - to one a week - and the blog is again contemplating a grim future. We'll keep the forum going - although that costs too - but without subscriptions, we're going to have to apply our time to revenue-earning activities.

And remember, over in the Forum, gto_pontiac has his own view of PC components.

Posted by cw at 09:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 21, 2006

Those thieving TV viewers

How are we to interpret the Australian TV networks' continuing war against the Personal Video Recorder community? As this article reveals, the Nine Network is intent on crippling PVRs and Microsoft's Windows Media Centre Edition, and like them, Ten and Seven are fiercely resisting publishing an Electronic Program Guide.

The comments from Seven spokesman Simon Francis are quite revealing: 'If [an EPG] is developed, it must come with assurances and conditions," network spokesman Simon Francis says. "Precise start times (in an EPG) would allow people to burn DVDs of our programs like crazy and push them out over the Internet."

He must be dreaming, surely?

The sort of people who are interested in burning DVDs like crazy and pushing them out over the Internet [why would they bother burning DVDs if they planned to push content out over the internet?] aren't going to be deterred by not having an EPG. Wouldn't they simply record everything, then cut them up into programs? And any EPG that doesn't have precise start times isn't much of an EPG. You'd still have to pad out recordings, so what, precisely, is the point?

The truth is that they're not really trying to frustrate pirates. They're trying to frustrate the average viewer. The aim is to make it as difficult as possible for them to avoid the commercials.

As Ice TV's Peter Vogel points out, they would be far better off taking a share of the EPG revenue. They would have been even better off backing a local TiVo operation, and taking a share of both the hardware and the ongoing services. The reason they didn't do either can only be attributed to a form of hubris. They really believed they could hold back the tide of technology, aided by the eagerness of successive Australian governments to do their bidding. It won't work this time. Not even in Australia.

It will be interesting to see how much money the networks are prepared to burn trying to resist the inevitable.

Posted by cw at 11:51 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 20, 2006

Sharing your calendar

Oooh! Now you can publish your Google Calendar, even to people who don't actually use Google Calendar [and really, everybody should think about using it, because it's surprisingly good].

All calendars now have a simple web page that you can point people to, and you can even incorporate one into your own website, profile page or blog

Posted by cw at 11:32 AM | TrackBack

When copying is a right

What we have here, it seems, is a quaint, and unnecessarily rigid attitude to work. Specifically, other people's work. Professor Sally Brown, of Leeds Metropolitan University has discovered that today's students do not necessarily see anything wrong with copying.

According to Professor Brown, these bright young things have a far more pragmatic view on the matter. They say things like "if they are stupid enough to give us three assignments with the same deadline, what can they expect?" and "I just couldn't say it better myself".

Which seems sort of reasonable, when you think about it. You know, if, like, other people have done the work, what's the point of someone else doing the same old stuff?

Those stuffy academic types call it plagiarism - the meaning of which we're going to ask someone else to look up one of these days - but it's a generational thing, isn't it?

Young people aren't confined by old-fashioned concepts like "copying". They're part of the new group mind. Once you've put in all that work firing up your browser and typing some well-chosen search terms into Google, why, of course you have a perfect right to use what comes up. Don't you? Is it any different from ringing the New York Public Library?

It even makes good business sense. It's not as if people have an exclusive right to this stuff.

Posted by cw at 10:57 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 19, 2006

Illusory communications

Barry Sonnenfield, director of Get Shorty, RV, and the two Men in Black films, also writes about personal technology for Esquire magazine. He had some fascinating things to say about movies in an interview with Walter Mossberg the Wall Street Journal's D All Things Digital conference. But what particularly interested Bleeding Edge were the comments he made that might challenge your views about family intimacy and the digital world.

MOSSBERG: You talked about the Internet being isolating, but the Internet is also used as a social network. You don't think the Internet can have communities and can be a community to talk about, "Hey we saw 'RV,' and this is what we think of it"?

SONNENFELD: It's a different social organism, but I'm not sure it's as good a social organism. I was talking to a buddy of mine who works at Sony, and we were both talking about how when we were growing up, we didn't see our fathers that often. They were both salesmen, they came home after dinner; they worked half-days on Saturdays. But we both felt incredibly close to our fathers. I saw my father, not that often, but we were very close, because the time we spent together, we took the D train to 145th and up to Yankee Stadium, we saw hundreds of baseball games together. But my point is we felt very close to our fathers and didn't see them that much.

I am home with Chloe all the time. When I'm not directing, I take her to school, I pick her up from school, I hang out with her. You know, I'm there for weeks and months at a time.

Yet, Chloe -- and my buddy Doug's kids -- feel that they don't feel as close to us because when we are in the room with them...I've got a cellphone, a BlackBerry, a computer. Ten years ago, I remember playing Barbie -- Chloe was like four at the time, and she was very demanding and wouldn't let me use certain voices for Ken. The phone rings -- I'm playing -- and I go to answer the phone, and Chloe's four and she says, in a secretarial voice, "Is Barry available for David O'Connor," who is my film agent. And I thought, oh my God, my four-year-old daughter already knows the name of my film agent....

That's what worries me about the Internet. I don't think that interconnectivity of the world through electronics is necessarily bringing us closer together, as a society or a world or as family. In a sort of abstract way it does. In a soulful sort of, you know, karmic way, it's the opposite, and that's what scares me.

Posted by cw at 11:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 17, 2006

Windows Live Mail 'Land Rush'

Microsoft have been building the next generation of their web based e-mail service Hotmail called Windows Live Mail; Hotmail offered a 2MB mailbox as standard, Windows Live Mail are giving you 2GB straight up of the bat, Drag and Drop, Right-Clicking, Anti-Phishing, Junk E-mail and Rich text editing. If you have ever used Outlook Web Access, the backend on a Microsoft Exchange Server you will find it a very familiar and powerful experience compared to standard Hotmail e-mail interface. You can see what the new interface and features are over here and as soon as I get a signup link I will post that here on the blog. Oh it is completely FREE also and just as the standard Hotmail service there is no POP3 access.

On Tuesday at some time in the US Microsoft will be making available the domains @live.com and @windowslive.com available for users worldwide to register and start using the new mail service. There has been great interest in this another internet land rush to get a hold of yourname@live.com or yourname@windowslive.com and get away from your old myname45@hotmail.com. Currently there is no way to migrate your old mail, contacts or other data you have in your Hotmail account so it is a fresh start for now on a new e-mail address, once up and running you can get over to your Hotmail account and let your contacts know your new e-mail address.

The land rush has been so highly anticipated that all over the web early last night it was either leaked or someone was creative enough to find a way to jump the queue and after no doubt Microsoft noticing many new users signing up they quickly closed that down. So I would expect john@live.com may have already been snapped up.

If you are keen on getting the toad@live.com e-mail address to use with the new service and starting to move away from the old Hotmail interface and start using a much richer interface for your e-mail online, I would suggest you start by getting an e-mail address that is not assigned with @hotmail.com or @msn.com and be ready to ride early next week. The process so far appears to be you create a new LiveID (MSN Passport) for an e-mail account that is not assigned to either a @hotmail.com or @msn.com address such as your free FastMail account which can be assigned as a ‘backup contact' for password retieval if you forget it. And after the registration process completes Microsoft releases the toad@fastmail.fm account from the Windows LiveID service and you can continue to use your toad@fastmail.fm as you always have. This process may change due to the 'sooners' last night so don’t take the instructions here as the official 'land rush' rules.

If you are not particularly fancied to having a ‘Microsoft ‘@live.com e-mail address and would like to still use the service for your e-mail you can go over to Windows Live Custom Domains and attach your current internet domain name’s mail records onto the new service and have yourname@yourdomain.com.au using the Windows Live Mail interface. If you are going to use an existing domain you own I would recommend reading the Windows Live Custom Domains FAQ to fully understand the implications of moving your current e-mail internet domain over to the site as once you do this you will no longer have access to your e-mail from the location it is delivered to currently.

Posted by Stephen at 04:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 16, 2006

Some days, you can't win

You know, there I was, alerting people as to the intent of beta software and the jargon behind that - not to engender fear, but to reconcile expectations and actions. And what does good ol' Microsoft do? Foist WGA on us all. Brian Livingston has the skinny. We're also chatting about it at the forum.

Posted by Anandasim at 05:53 PM | TrackBack

Bill Gates ... going, but not yet gone

The question we're all going to have to ask ourselves today, fellow PC users, as we ponder the announcement that after 2008, Bill Gates is no longer going to be parking his Porsche in the Microsoft car park - that he's going to, you know, retire - is this: "Can we get along without him?"

After all, he's been around since 1975, when most of us hadn't even heard of such a thing as a PC. Unless we happened to be arrested by one. And Windows were things you had to wash. [It's probably hard to remember this, but in those days we actually had time to wash windows, rather than spending all our available time fixing our PCs]

For more than 30 years, Bill's been, sort of, our leader. Bill's introduced some of us to DOS. Introduced us to the Blue Screen of Death. Illegal Operations. Anti-competitive conduct. So it was only fair that he should also have introduced himself to an awful lot of our money. Surely?

It gave us something to aspire to, didn't it, keeping track of how much money the world's wealthiest man was accumulating? In fact, we're pretty sure that in some mysterious way, Bill Gates paved the way for the aspirational voter.

What will be his legacy, do you think? Will you miss him?

Posted by cw at 02:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Linksys - no longer a great wireless router

This week's Windows Secrets newsletter from Brian Livingston recommends the Linksys WR54G series of routers in a review of Internet security [ in which it rates ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite the top security software and WebRoot Spy Sweeper as the best anti-spyware tool].

Brian probably wouldn't feel so sure about that if he'd read Tom's Hardware's report on the latest WR54G release. The heading sets the tone: "Yes, the Linksys WRT54G V5 Really Is a Lousy Router".

It's not just that Linksys has replaced the Linux software which spawned a busy alternative firmware industry [Sveasoft, HyperWRT, Ewrt, DD-WRT, and OpenWrt for instance].

It's not just that the new units contain half the RAM and Flash memory. They also suffer from packet loss and problems with P2P, failing to support any more than 16 continuous connections.

As they point out at Ewrt, the WRT54G/GS version 5 routers can be identified with serial numbers starting with CDFB or CGN7. Don't buy them.

The WRT54GL model still uses Linux, but it didn't perform all that well in Tom's Hardware testing. They recommend, instead, that you look at other top-performing routers. The Netgear RangeMax 240 seems to be the pick of the field.

Posted by cw at 01:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Broken windows conversation broken

Robert Scoble drew the world's attention to "a great post" on Philip Su's blog, The World as Best I Remember It, on MSDN. Su, a Microsoft staffer who had managed developer teams in Windows for five years, explored reasons for the delays in shipping Microsoft Vista. Too bad that Philip quickly reacted by pulling the post, on the grounds that "what started as an opinion on the challenges of managing large software projects has turned out to be a rallying point for detractors, which isn't interesting or productive."

Philip claimed to have removed it "of my own volition, without any external pressure whatsoever", but that also turned out to be a rallying point for detractors in the comment thread at Scobleizer, many of whom speculated on other motivations for the sudden end of the "great post".

What happened next was that the post was reinstated, with the explanation that it was only removed for editing. Then - uh-oh - it came back down again.

However, over at Mini Microsoft, readers learned how to resurrect the post. What you do is add Su's feed to your Bloglines subscription.

Posted by cw at 09:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 15, 2006

Blogging a dead horse

It's sort of interesting enough, we guess, and the journalist clearly worked hard to get fresh voices on the state of blogging in Australia. But, honestly, if we see Darren Rowse and Trevor Cook quoted one more time as authorities on the topic we will gag. And for that matter, can we not get Cameron Rent-a-quote Reilly silenced?

Indeed, in our opinion, blogging - well, at least this sort of blogging story - simply isn't news any more. Let's move on. Let's write about something else for God's sake. Or is it just us? Maybe you still find it fascinating.

Posted by cw at 04:29 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

Releasing the video handbrake

Today's MacMan looks at the issue of converting DVDs to the iPod (on the Mac), and comes up with the [free] Handbrake.

Bleeding Edge has another suggestion [also free]. iSquint. You'll see a Handbrake Lite link on the site, which you might find, umm, better than Handbrake. Despite the tongue-in-cheek description: "a horribly-mangled abomination of HandBrake, jettisoning its non-crucial features with the one-track goal of creating iPod-sized movies from DVDs". But iSquint is awfully good:

It's many times faster than QuickTime Pro, works with almost all popular video formats, and it's infinitely free-er.
It's also really easy. Just drag in your file, and click Start.
You can also choose "TV" or "iPod" size, set your quality, or even go all-out by playing in the Advanced drawer.
On a 1GHz G4, iSquint can convert most video files to iPod-screen-sized videos in realtime.

And if you want the ultimate video conversion package for the Mac, the author, Tyler Loch, worked on VisualHub, which among other truly admirable things, allows you to fit 18 hours of video onto a single DVD, without any noticeable loss of quality. And the instructions seem pretty clear:

1. Choose what format you want to convert to.
2. Drag in the file(s) you want converted.
3. Click "Start".

Definitely worth the $US23.32 purchase price.

Posted by cw at 10:50 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hot news: we're switching to Intel

You're going to have to wait until next week for the latest quarterly review of the Bleeding Edge workhorse PC specifications, but to reward your loyalty, and perhaps convince you to sign up for a subscription - $25 is just a fraction of the savings you're going to be making due to our efforts - we thought we'd give you an early tip: we're moving from the AMD platform to Intel.

The chip that's achieved what we doubted would happen until perhaps September, when Conroe started to heat up the market, is the Intel D805 2.66GHz dual-core CPU. You can pick one of them up for $175, which is still compelling despite the fact that gto_pontiac has picked up the overnight slashing of AMD 64 prices. At $144 for the 939-pin version, that's a $21 saving. But it's not enough to change our mind. [There are, however, differing opinions.]

That represents horrible news for AMD, but very good news indeed for the PC buyer.

Posted by cw at 08:22 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

You mean there IS such a thing as an [almost] free lunch?

Here's a thought that might cause you to choke on that pastrami on rye. According to a Sydney-based operation called EzyBite, your daily work routine of one sandwich and a latte could cost you $2000 a year. EzyBite allows you to calculate your own, personal eat yourself poor plan, which might just influence you to have a chat with your employer and suggest that they might sign up for the EzyBite program, which puts your sandwiches, coffee, mandarin and cranberry juice or whatever on to a tax-free basis, and at the same time, eliminates the time you spend waiting in lunch queues. God we love the Web!

Depending on the individual arrangements you have with your employer, the plan, which requires you to pay $30 a year for a card and consume your purchases at work, is either funded with pre-income tax dollars deducted from your salary - depending on your tax rate that could cut the cost by up to 48.5 per cent - or as part of a bonus scheme. We know that similar schemes at companies like Fairfax allow employees to use pre-tax purchase schemes to buy laptops, but somehow we never imagined the humble sandwich figuring in a plot to wrest some of our cash out of Smirking Pete Costello's clutches.

We're awaiting details as to whether there are any Melbourne sandwich bars and employers who've already signed up for the deal. Given that EzyBite is part of the international hotel group Accor ((Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure, Ibis, Etap and Formule 1), we expect that if it hasn't already happened, it won't be long arriving. We can feel a healthy appetite coming on.

Posted by cw at 07:43 AM | TrackBack

June 14, 2006

Going after Office?

Concurrent with the huge public beta of Windows Vista has been the public beta of Microsoft Office 2007. Many people are scrambling to try out Vista, because it features major updates to the Windows XP look and feel. Significantly, it also catches up with the Linux culture of restraining users from installing things willy nilly.

Microsoft Office has been "ho hum" for a long time. Some people note that Office 2003, although cosmetically more "with it", has a menu and command structure that harks back to say Office 4.3 - that was probably the first time the Office Suite was named - previously Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access were simply sold as single packages.

Office 2007 will be a landmark. The classic menu structure has given way to "The Ribbon" (shades of Star Trek Generations). Some people will find this change abrupt - Jensen Harris hopes it does not require re-training. I dare say some in corporate IT might be frightened out of their wits by staff who really need training or staff who want more time to fend off the deluge of good intent modernisation.

Significantly, there are new additions to the new "full" Office Suite.

If you remember, recent additions to the Office Suite have been Infopath (a baby some people reportedly couldn't see the point of except to flex some XML muscle), Visio (a mature product which every Business Analyst or Six Sigma belt-wearing wanna-be scrambles to learn) and that curious enhancement over the simple networked file store, Sharepoint Server. Oh, and Stephen's favourite OneNote

This time, Sharepoint 2007 is reported to have been massively beefed up. Can't see yourself using it or resourcing one? Too much IT department involvement and finger in the pie to get instant gratification? Well, why not try Ray Ozzie's Groove? Without an overhead of an IT team, previous versions of Groove have been able to connect people across the Internet, allowing text and voice chat, dispersed yet synchronised shared files and offering "let's whiteboard together" features. Haven't heard of it? If you're a small business with one or two person offices separated by the tyranny of distance, get some broadband and start putting together some business edge.

Forget about the kerfuffle over whose XML document format is faster, more full-featured or more Open in Standard. Even forget about the terrible duo's tussle over the ball called "Create PDF" - there are many issues that are cause célèbre to the IT architect and to the score card counter. But for you, Dear Reader?

• Take a piece of paper.
• Write down only the points that impact you, your work and your business. Maybe you want Word to do better numbering and that's a big issue. Maybe, in the scale of things, that's just an irritation along the way. Like a pebble in your shoe.
• Get Office 2007 beta onto a spare machine and drive it. Including Groove.
• Come back to the paper you wrote and remind yourself what is actually important to you.
• If you're committed, you could always Send a Smile or Send a Frown.

See you on Veridian III

Posted by Anandasim at 10:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The sad abuse of good intentions

Stephen's posted an interesting warning over in the forum about a nasty little trap for millions of people who've innocently been clicking on links to a site that pretends to be collecting signatures for a petition against animal abuse in China. In fact the site triggers an exploit that capitalises on a security hole in Windows.

It's an example of social engineering, where cynical people use human nature - and sadly, too often, good intentions - against individuals and institutions.

Worth reading. Worth avoiding. Oh. And it also makes some interesting accusations about Google. Which is no doubt why he didn't post it on the blog.

Posted by cw at 10:22 AM | TrackBack

On signatures

In the comment thread below, Newman's just interpreted Anandasim's signature - "Ancora imparo - abbiamo tutti qualcosa da imparare". What he came up with was "I am still learning. We all have something to learn."

There's an interesting history to that signature. Originally Anandasim's signature was "ancora imparo". The literal translation of that could be "I am still learning", but it's generally associated with Michelangelo's declaration, made when he was approaching 90, which changes the meaning slightly to "Still I am learning!" It happens to be the motto of Monash University.

I haven't studied at Monash, but I had read about Michelangelo's comment. So I answered Anandasim's signature with a little Italian, "abbiamo tutti qualcosa da imparare" - "We all have something to learn". And he added it to his signature.

Fascinating, huh? I wonder if there's a fruitful line of research here? I do not, and have never used an email/forum signature. But I'm always interested in reading the phrases that people find compelling enough to appropriate. What, exactly, does a signature signify? Do we learn from them? Should more of us use them? What stops some of us from doing so? And have you seen any signatures that are worth quoting?

Posted by cw at 10:05 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 13, 2006

Spyware: can we have a little more information please?

Look. The BBC is definitely contributing to the public's awareness of net nasties with stories like this one about help for spyware. It mentions Scandoo, a beta search engine that rates the comparative safety of Web pages, and the anti-spyware initiatives of Suzi Turner.

But the story doesn't have any links, dammit. But the story's links are off the side, and easily overlooked. Can we possibly have them IN the story please? Or at the bottom?

Posted by cw at 12:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 12, 2006

Making Coasters

In the midst of Vista frenzy, I went out and made an impulse purchase of another DIY internal mount, DVD burner. Yes, I know, they're quite cheap now, and the media is less than 50 cents (AUD) per piece easily, so, why not? Well, buying CD and DVD burners for me has always been risky - in retrospect, I should have really followed Charles's excellent recommendation on the current favourite model.

You see, if the burner's able to make coasters (a euphemism for destroying yet-to-be-useful discs), then you're looking at someone who is well capable of doing that. I've just done it again - made coasters I mean. Now, you can read up all about it, do your homework by using a search engine (even those that operate like you know, offshore), read about lab tests (that you've never heard of) on media categories (that you've never heard of either). But, that's too much work isn't it? Takes out all the fun?

Promising myself not to fall into the same trap again, I've made some mental notes on the selection process. Let's hope I keep to these, next time.

1. Make shortlist of stocked models are in your vicinity. Get price lists and catalogues. Do make an effort to remember cold numbers like 4166B.

2. Do put those model numbers into web searches and skim through some reviews. You don't need to go all geek and learn up jargon and acronyms - possibly you could read just the concluding paragraphs.

3. Look out for re-badging - typically, there will be a few brands who actually manufacture, there are also several very well known brands who re-badge or who commission manufacturers to make equipment for them. The point? It may be that re-badging clouds the issue of what you actually get in your hand (the retailing brand can decide to switch suppliers, switch actual models, switch hardware completely and still call it model xxx).

4. There is a difference between an OEM unit and a retail packaged unit - if you haven't bought PC parts before except through mall outlets like Harvey Norman, you'll not have come across the phenomenon. OEM units are actually naked units (taken from bulk packed boxes), loosely wrapped in plastic bag, with a CD (maybe) and no instruction manual (maybe). Retail packaged units come in presentable cartons, with burning software, manuals, even warranty forms. You may decide to eschew the comfort of retail packs .

5. Some people just buy the hardware - they're not interested in the DVD burning software (much). On the hand, if the freebie DVD burning software satisfies your needs, you save yourself an equivalent amount of money because you avoid spending on full featured software. Particularly for the OEM units, simply listed as model numbers in a price-list, it will not be obvious what software is bundled. Now, you could make yourself a pest and ask the shop to unwrap each model so that you could tabulate a comparison of the software value. Or not. Maybe forum participants might establish a running record to save you from the ire of the shopkeeper.

6. If you're one to magpie DVD movies from all around the world, you might be put off by the fact that you can only change the DVD region 5 times. The availability of hacked Region Free firmware might significantly affect your purchase decision. Or you might decide not to void your warranty by fiddling in this manner.

7. Having handed over the money, you take the burner home, plug it in, mount it and the moment of truth arrives. Will it make coasters? At what rate? Will it achieve the speed advertised nominal speed? More importanly will it do that with the blanks that you have bought? At this point, you could be amazingly blissful or heavily crestfallen.

8. If you are indeed making coasters, some of the burning software simply says "Eh, failed. Here's a coaster". Other times, you be the recipient of some obscure codes. Hurry over to to look up the SCSI Key Code Qualifier table.

9. Regardless, you might now be so intrigued that you want to lab-test your burner and prove beyond doubt, it's performance or lack of with DVDInfoPro - it tells you about your drive, about your media. You may find that media that was borderline previously doesn't work at all. Fervently intrigued, you might want to tabulate media characteristics since media is heavily re-badged.

Aah, now, what do you do with the coasters you've made?

Posted by Anandasim at 05:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Scoble leaves Microsoft for the new IP TV goldrush

Bleeding Edge is right now preparing a presentation for students of the Australian Film Television and Radio School on the impact of IP-based digital media ... at the invitation of Jason Romney, who's been a tireless evangelist in the field. If we needed further evidence that we're facing what former Intel CEO Andy Grove called a "strategic inflection point" - and given we've been predicting this for the past couple of years, we really don't - the decision by Robert Scoble to resign his job as the public face of Microsoft to join a video blog start-up would be it.

It's about 18 months since we wrote a column for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald awarding the King Canute Prize to Harold Mitchell for his claim on the ABC's Insider program that Personal Video Recorders would have no effect on the revenue stream of free-to-air TV, because "people like to watch TV commercials".

In other columns, and on this blog, we've been trying to point out that time-shifting - through the use of PVRs and BitTorrent downloads - together with video blogs like Rocketboom, are unmistakeable indicators that the stranglehold enjoyed by media barons has already been broken.

As we pointed out in a recent column: "In the more leisurely economies of the past, the exchange that took
place between the broadcaster and the viewer was relatively benign. The network imposed what was essentially a tax on time, in which the viewer paid for his entertainment with those mindless minutes spent watching
commercials.

"Unfortunately, today's economy has completely altered the exchange rate. It isn't just that the amount of entertainment that these days can be squeezed in between the commercial breaks seems to have shrunk
dramatically. There's also the opportunity cost: adjusting one's life to suit the network schedules requires a considerable sacrifice."

The advertising industry has already begun to wake up. Rocketboom, for instance, is now making $US85,000 a week from its advertisers.

All these developments underline just how pathetic the Packer empire's response - suing the tiny EPG company IceTV - is. They've been treating their audience with contempt for far too long, and now they're going to pay for it. As we pointed out recently, we can't remember when we last watched anything on Nine.

In the past couple of weeks, we've seen more of the tectonic plates slipping. The US network CBS has joined NBC and the ABC selling their shows on the iTunes Music Store. Essentially this is video on demand on training wheels. The shows are available in the US at $1.99 a throw, but the future is ad-supported downloads - ironically, probably using BitTorrent.

Free to air TV is just going to have to learn to live with a diminished share of the audience - although this will take a lot longer in Australia, due to the fact that our Government has allowed Telstra to drip-feed the nation with bandwidth. Terry Heaton suggests it's a critical time for local media, which is struggling to come up with solutions. Hiis point is this: "The foundational understanding that broadcasters MUST get their arms around is this: Revenue isn't the problem; audience is the problem. Fix the problem." Australian TV faces the same problem. It has alienated its audiences by stuffing as many ads as possible into the programming, cheating them by recycling shows they've already seen without notice, and ignoring their published schedules. To say nothing of constantly showing them junk. Judging from their response to the brewing crisis, they seem utterly clueless as to what might be done to win back viewers.

By the way. The latest edition of PC User magazine includes an article on how to convert video to PDA format. Not that we believe too many people are going to be watching video on handhelds. Not regularly, anyway.

And Bleeding Edge's ADSL service got shaped last month, because we were downloading too many shows from the BBC.

Posted by cw at 03:37 PM | TrackBack

Vista download via Bittorrent

With the massive popularity of the Beta 2 CPP of Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 downloading, Chris Pirillo and Jake Ludington have setup http://www.vistatorrent.com so you can download it using BitTorrent. Full instructions are on the site on how to download Vista Beta 2 with a BitTorrent application and the ISO download is signed with a MD5 hash signature so you can verify that you have the correct file after it has finished transferring. You still need an official installation key from Microsoft to get up and running which you can get from here. The site is also NOT endorsed by Microsoft.

Vista Team Blog - We are experiencing extremely high download demand at this time. The wait time to start the download is very long and many customers may be unable to access the download site. To guarantee participation in the Customer Preview Program (to receive both Beta 2 and RC1) we recommend you use the DVD kit order option above.

For more information ‘How to use BitTorrent ‘ you can read up on it from cw’s post here.

UPDATE: As expected Microsoft have issued Chris and Jake with a 'cease & decist'.

Posted by Stephen at 03:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Keeping Windows 98 SE updated (up to a point)

The latest Bleeding Edge column email (which gives subscribers some additional support options for Nero) also includes a lead on a useful resource for readers who want to keep Windows 98 SE as up to date as possible. We thought it might be a useful follow-up to Anandasim's post on Windows 98, and an indication of why subscribing might be a good investment.

That clever Nero Lite installer we wrote about in the column was written by a Dutch programmer, MDGx. If you take a look at his site, using the link we included, you'll see that his other project is an ongoing effort in the service of the Windows 98 community. Microsoft has never released a service patch for Windows 98 SE, but MDGx has given users that, and more.

His Unofficial Windows 98 Second Edition Service Pack 2.1a is freeware (only for Windows 98 SE English) and it's supported by an active forum. Have a good look around, and you'll find some great resources for the Windows 98 SE die-hard. And some drivers for USB storage devices.

Definitely worth looking at, if you - or that old PC - are hooked on Windows 98 SE.

Posted by cw at 08:22 AM | TrackBack

June 11, 2006

Microsoft long-life bugs

Some users of the FeedDemon RSS reader have been reporting an annoying bug that caused a CPU load spike when they were updating feeds. So FeedDemon's builder, Nick Bradbury, did a bit of digging and discovered that Microsoft has known about the WinInet bug in their operating system for almost three years.

That post unearthed the fact that the Melbourne developers of the Awasu RSS reader had made the same plea for that bug fix way back in February 2005.

Not only had Microsoft ignored those pleas, it's even passed the bug on, intact, to the new Vista OS, which led Bradbury to observe that the fact that Microsoft has treated the matter with such insouciant disregard gives developers a bad name.

That seemed to stir some consciences over at Microsoft. David Powell, Microsoft's product unit manager, Windows networking developer platform, responded in the comments "I am so sorry this thing has caused you grief," and promised to get it fixed. The thing about the Web is that it seriously amplifies the sound of squeaking wheels.

Posted by cw at 05:07 PM | TrackBack

June 10, 2006

Oh No, not Windows 98 again...

We sometimes see questions from participants in the forum on Windows 98. The year is now 2006 - that's 8 years since the model year for that version of Windows. If you're still using Windows 98 and connecting it to the Internet, Microsoft wants to remind you that this Windows is way past it's use by date. It's so "yesterday" they say they can't fix it anymore. They've already extended their planned end of life date once, from the original date of January 16, 2004.

Whilst Win9x is a nightmare for current generation developers and their tools, there are doubtless people in the world, merrily running Windows 98 on hardware that won't handle Windows XP, much less the forthcoming Vista. Some do it because that's the only machine they have or want to have, some do it because their technical equipment and software only works on that platform (and an upgrade is out of the question), some do it because they have nostalgic games.

Microsoft does mention in their MS06-15 article that if you persist in using it with an Internet connection, that you might try blocking TCP/IP Port 139 and 445 at your perimeter firewall. Problem is, it could be that the people who continue to use Windows 98 won't have a clue or want to purchase an out-of-the-box NAT router / firewall / wireless access point. Or if they dedicated a boat anchor PC to a home made firewall, they don't have a PC to run Windows 98 anymore.

So, are you affected? What are your plans? Who're you gonna call?

Updated: If you feel the need to congregate, hang out or otherwise bond with like minded brethren (non gender biased intent), register at the forum and post away.

Posted by Anandasim at 08:36 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

It's All Greek to Me

In the light of mountains (well, gigs then) of beta and alpha downloads being released to the public, it's worthwhile to navel gaze on how the software industry has evolved. Alpha and Beta are two terms used to describe software that is truly half-baked (no two ways of looking at this). Another term is RC - Release Candidate, which one expects, is the penultimate version before release to production (which Microsoft calls RTM - Release To Manufacturing). All may have suffixes - 1, 2, 3 meaning - little increments of change. Microsoft also has another term now, CTP - Community Technology Preview - CTP builds do not go through the same rigorous testing that beta builds undergo.

In one way or another, many software makers carry out these teaser releases. Opera is running one on their 9.0. Firefox is running one on their 2.0 (Cybernet has even made that portable so that you can test it without dirtying your machine's precious registry or system files), Microsoft has their IE7.

We have of course, the Microsoft Windows Vista Beta, (discussed on this blog), and the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta. When you do sign up for Office 2007 Beta, look around and you'll see the kitchen sink syndrome. There's Visio Pro 2007, Project 2007, OneNote 2007 and a new member to the Microsoft fold - Groove. (For those of you who haven't seen the light, say the words with me - Lotus Notes - Ray Ozzie - Groove - Ray Ozzie - Windows Live). Not to forget the Expressions trio. If you decide to put on your other hat, you can also play sysadmin and run Project 2007 Server, Sharepoint 2007 Server or Groove Server.

Then. there are betas that you don't need to install to test, like the Google Spreadsheet (and other Web 2.0 apps that run in your browser). They're not for you to buy though, they're for GMY (Google-Microsoft-Yahoo) to Venture-Capitalise.

So what do you need to join in the fun? Well, it would be nuts to install all that on your working, production PC. But some people do. Another PC would be good. Trouble is, do you have another machine as good as the one you're using because, you'll need that to run Vista. Either that or wear your removable hard disk rails down to the bone as you swap vigorously. The other betas, you might be able to coax into running in an Altiris SVS layer. Or VMWare Player. Both free.

On the other hand, you could just run whatever is your current Standard Operating Environment. That, some wicked people say is always in beta.

By the way, this is being written by a new Toadie.
Truly
Ananda Sim
Ancora Imparo - abbiamo tutti qualcosa da imparare

Posted by Anandasim at 12:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 09, 2006

My Vista Installation

Over the past weekend I have re-formatted my network at home to boot up with Vista build 5384 which is as far as I know the same build number as the Vista Beta 2 CPP program released yesterday. I have setup two computers running Windows Vista and a Windows Longhorn Server. So no doubt as I start to use Vista in a networked environment I will be at times including what I can about Longhorn Server in the network as per the Microsoft NDA I am under for the beta programs. My e-mail and web server are now in an isolated network from the new network that is still running safely on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server and Exchange 2003 Server.

After much data shifting over the past month or so working up to this, I have now got copies of my data stored on hard drives in USB2 enclosures and as such my data is quite protected from a nasty if it came along and I only have 'data drives' plugged in when needed, again just isolating devices in the network that need protection in the case of a disaster happening.

The Vista/Longhorn Network is simply two PC's running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition Beta 2 Build 5384 and Longhorn Server 2007 Enterprise Beta Build 5384 (GUI). With all of the data moved and isolated I was able to start the entire process with a clean slate hitting reset or pulling the plug and starting again without having to concern myself about protecting data. I would strongly suggest that you install Vista on a separate hard drive to that of your primary operating system so you can start-up and shutdown either operating system disconnecting the hard drive that is not in use from the power and SATA/IDE cable eliminating the chance of cross contaminating either hard drive from any un-foreseen issues that may arise as we are still talking about Beta software and things do go wrong always at the most in inopportune moments.

I will get out the screenshots for installing Vista when I run through how to setup Vista in a Virtual Machine using Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2 and VMWare Server, once I get them installed myself and can then bring my virtual machines 'back up online' that I have such as a WSUS server for keeping local copies of Microsoft/Windows Update on the network and a XP Visual Studio Development Machine that I write and play with code in.

With 4 clean systems sitting on the benches all firing and ready to go (the 4th machine is of a mate of mine who quite happily came over to see how Vista would go on his machine). We fired up the first two boxes with the Vista Boot DVD entered the Registration keys and clicked 'Advanced' at the disk configuration and removed any partitions that were on the currently installed drives, created the partitions and formatted them in the 'advanced' section more as integrity checking our install process rather than just clicking install which was all we did next and away they went, reboot, reboot, enter your username, region, locale, time zone and your desktop opens up and you are done. I lost the install race though I won a couple of other comparisons later and with the overall second place it starts making me contemplete that 'Virtualization Enabled CPU' purchase again that I have started to ponder upon in the forum and that just blows the budget straight of the bat at the thought of what I would want to add to that CPU, Dual Raptors RAID Boot Array, SLI 512MB Graphics... It aint gonna happen for a while yet.....

First step after you boot is too get Windows Update up and running so you can get your device driver updates that are 'designed' for Vista, I am yet to use a single driver that came on CD with my hardware, all my device drivers are either supplied with the Vista ISO/DVD or are installed during the first Windows Update, these are primarily updated display drivers, updated audio device drivers and TV card drivers.

In a 'future' post I will go through some of the advanced networking configuration I am using that shows of some of the new ways that two Vista PC's networked together can do things together. Network Discovery, Network Maps, Network Diagnosis, Windows Media Player 11 Playlist sharing, Media Centre Recorded TV sharing, Photo Sharing and what ever else may turn up as I run thought it all and we may have to just skip the PC2PC Syncing though. For now if you chnage your network card to a configuration that is in the same C-Class address space(Eg IP Range 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.2, 192.168.1.3 etc) as your current network and your IP address for your Gateway and ISP DNS servers that should get you up and running with your existing broadband connection to head over to Windows Update, if you use DHCP from your Modem/Router you should be right to go straight away.

As I am running Windows Vista without Anti-Virus protection, as I have found that both the Trend Micro and Computer Associates Beta AV packages put too high an overhead on my system so I am going without at the moment. I am yet to try the offering from McAfee as all three of these beta products were only released last week and in the same term again "It is beta software!". Just using Windows Defender and Windows Firewall for protection along with my internet gateway protection I feel I am quite safe until someone writes a virus that can take down Vista which no doubt many of the unfavourable of society will be hatching ideas to try and succeed with this, though the first 3 month impression is it will be a tough call as security is excellent from what I have used thus far and only time will tell and we can only cross our fingers and hope that Microsoft have now got the pre-internet computer and post-internet computers of today worked out properly.

In the next few days some of the tasks that I need to perform are a Windows backup to DVD of my data from a USB HDD device to DVD using the new Windows Backup that fully supports 'Shadow Copy' and can backup to a network connection, USB device CD or DVD including spanning across multiple DVD's and from as far as I can tell if you have 500GB to backup best you get down and grab 150 blank DVD's and limber up the arm muscles for a long and gruelling haul of DVD disk swapping.

When I do the backup I will be doing screen shots so that you can follow along visually and as a picture tells a thousand words I will be able to write a little less on things that can be explained easier by looking at a screenshot.

Windows Update

Windows Update - Updating

Windows Update History

My Network

My Network Map

Vista now includes independant application volume control which is one of those little things that gives control back to the user of what comes blearing out of the speakers.

Posted by Stephen at 04:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Starting up Vista

The Bleeding Edge Chief Toad has asked me to come on over and write a few entries on the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, slated for release early 2007, and with the overnight release of the Customer Preview Program (CPP) making Vista available, you can download and try the Beta 2 version yourself if you have some 3-4 gigabytes of spare bandwidth available.

A thorough background on me would go back too many years for this post so in brief, in 1995 I sat for my Novell Certified Network Engineer (CNE) and not too long after that I was maintaining a Windows NT 3.51 Server with a Borland Database ... yep, go figure. Since then I have been heavily involved with server platforms in large and small enterprises, primarily in the networking and internetworking areas, and due to a shortage of Novell networks these days I am mainly using Microsoft Windows in some form.

Microsoft have done a great deal of work with Windows Vista to improve the experience of the computer user, including the user interface, file management and security.

The new ‘Aero Glass’ user interface in Vista is far more than just eye candy. The New York Times themselves have worked with Microsoft to create a custom application for reading the NYT online to help bridge the gap from the differing experiences of reading your news online compared to the actual the traditional printed page. The reader dynamically resizes the content within the application to continually give the user the best reading and viewing experience that is not available in a traditional internet browser today utilising WinFX and XAML which form parts of the ‘Windows Presentation Foundation’.

The British Library are developing an interface to read virtual copies of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codecs and many other priceless books in the archives will become available over time and no doubt from many other libraries and collections around the world. Mercedes AMG are letting you customise your own Mercedes advertisement with the car specifications of your choice and then seeing ‘your’ car in action bringing advertising on the internet to a level that television cannot deliver.

The above screen shots are taken from See Windows Vista, so if you have broadband internet access for a visually stunning demonstration of what Microsoft Windows Vista can do for the home user or the enterprise head on over and check it out.. A demonstration of the NYT Reader is available on Microsoft’s on10 web site.

Managing your data with Vista has introduced great new functionality in navigation and searching with features such as instant search, slider views, metadata integration which all make to include finding and orginising your data far easier than what you can do today.

A topic that rightfully deserves its own post and in depth analysis is the security model that Microsoft have implemented into Windows Vista and is what I would expect many people have been waiting for a long time to have ‘out of the box’ and workable for the average user. With Vista you are logged in is a ‘standard user’ and not as an ‘administrator’ giving you the security protection against virus, spyware and malware infecting the core of your operating system as the executed nasty when triggered only has access with-in the security context of the currently logged in user and cannot access system protected regions as only administrators have these access privileges. The Windows Vista Firewall is now fully supports inbound and outbound protection where as previously in Windows XP the firewall was only one way filtering. Internet Explorer 7+ is different to that of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP and 2003 as it also has greater security ties within the operating system of Vista and runs with-in its own security context again isolating it from the local user account and the Vista core operating system.

Windows Vista - Get Ready contains all the links you should need in evaluating if your PC can run Vista and registration links to download or be sent a trial copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 CPP. Again if you have not yet had a look at See Windows Vista, I urge you to try and have a look.

Intel Vista Ready CPU Guide
AMD Vista Ready CPU Guide
nVidia Graphics ready GPU's for Vista
ATI Graphics ready GPU's for Vista

In coming posts I will cover some other great ways of how Vista is moving along the Windows experience, including 'Guided Help', Sidebar, Gadgets, Problems and Reporting, RSS, System Restore, Networking and many other features. Let me know what you would like to see and I'll do my best to cover a wide range of topics and features for home, business, novice and expert users alike.

Posted by Stephen at 10:25 AM | TrackBack

Google's new Firefox sync tool

Google's just released a great new extension for Firefox. The Google Browser Sync extension allows users to synchronise all their bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and persistent cookies across all the computers and operating systems on which it's installed.

It also remembers which tabs and windows you had open when you last used Firefox, and gives you the option to reopen them. There's a downside to this, of course. It takes longer to start up Firefox, but Google promises to work on reducing the lag.

It couldn't have been better timed, what with a lot of people no doubt trying out Vista on a separate machine. [You are trying it out on a non-critical PC, aren't you?]

Oh. And if you're sick and tired of all those Flash ads, FlashBlock is another great extension. [From Amy Gahran, who also has some other ad-avoidance techniques, by way of LooseWire.]

Posted by cw at 09:18 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Get your Vista beta ... today!

It looks like Microsoft might meet the latest delayed deadline for Vista, what with the fact that it's finally released the public beta of the new operating system. Well, most of what's left of it, anyway. It looks like you're going to have to wait for PC-to-PC synchronisation, due to "quality concerns", which we think translates to "It doesn't work properly". Still, there's 3GB of other stuff to download, so you might want to check your traffic stats before you get too enthusiastic. [And if you're using Optusnet, Big Pond, aaNet, Exetel or AAPT, gto-pontiac has a helpful suggestion for you, over in the Forum.]

Still, according to Stephen, Vista actually does work pretty well, and he's preparing a series of posts for this blog that you might find an invaluable guide. The first one should be up Real Soon Now.

Posted by cw at 08:18 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 08, 2006

Finally, my computer understands me

In a change from our regular schedule, it’s not Charles, the Chief Toad, here, but Jeremy Howard, the Bleeding Edge toadling. For those of you who have only recently come to the Bleeding Edge pond, you may not know about me – please see my first article to find out more.

The reason I haven’t been seen for a while, is because I have been battling with RSI again. Whilst my health is now much improved, I’m trying to avoid typing so that it doesn’t happen again. Instead, I’m using voice recognition.

Normally, I use Dragon Naturally Speaking. The Chief Toad has written about this before. However, I’ve just arrived in Boston for a three month trip, only to discover that I had forgotten to install it on my new laptop. Rather than purchase a whole new copy, I thought instead that I would try using the voice recognition built into Microsoft Office. Many Microsoft Office users don’t even realize that voice recognition is installed – however it has come free with the software since Office XP. Having said that, the version in Office XP was almost unusable.

I’m now using voice recognition in Office 2003 for the first time. In fact, this entire article was dictated using it. I’m very impressed. In my unscientific opinion, the recognition accuracy is just as good as Dragon Naturally Speaking v7 (v8 has come out recently, but I haven’t tried it). I am dictating directly into Microsoft Word, and the software is providing a full set of correction, selection, and movement tools. Microsoft’s speech recognition continues to learn and improve as you use the software. For instance, this is the first time that I have used it; in the first paragraph that I dictated, and there were three or four dictation errors. However, so far in this paragraph, there have been no errors. So, already the dictation accuracy is improving.

If you would like to try using Microsoft speech recognition yourself, firstly, get hold of a good noise-cancelling headset. Then, open up Microsoft Word, and press F1 to bring up the help window. Type "speech recognition" into the search text box, and follow the simple instructions. If you have any questions, please use the "comments" link beneath this article, and I will do my best to answer them.

Posted by Jeremy at 10:43 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 07, 2006

AMD Live! A free-to-air TV killer?

AMD's lifted the veil on its AMD Live! technology at Taiwan's Computex show. Going Live! doesn't necessarily require AMD chips. Basically it's a software platform, that will allow users to access, manage, distribute and stream all forms of media from one PC to another - or for that matter a PDA - anywhere.

The demo showed a TV show that had been recorded on a PC in Colorado being streamed to a laptop on stage. The software then streamed it to a PDA ... automatically reformatting it for the new devices. You're never going to have to miss an episode of House again, because you can manage your recording remotely, via Web browser. We're sure that Eddie, having just sacked all those Nine staff, will just love this!

And AMD hopes to generate sales with low-power versions of its CPUs running on as little as 35W without loss of performance. That will mean way quieter home media centres, because they won't need all those noisy fans.

Posted by cw at 07:25 PM | TrackBack

Allofmp3.com fights back

As Western forces surround the Russian music download site Allofmp3.com, threatening to starve them out by denying the entire country entry to the World Trade Organisation unless the music stops, Bleeding Edge has been receiving despatches from our correspondent in the front line [thanks Sean] which reveal that in the best traditions of Leningrad, the Russians are fighting back.

The deadline for the defenders seems to be September this year, when Russia replaces its existing, somewhat relaxed copyright regime. Over at Slyck News, there's a report of a statement from the owners of Allofmp3.com which suggests that they have already begun negotiations with rightholders, and have been increasing their prices to reflect payments of royalties.

According to Slyck News, the statement [which we haven't been able to find on the Allofmp3.com site] declares the following:

1. The site AllOfMP3.com belongs to a Russian company and for 6 years it has operated within the country, in full compliance with all Russian laws. Throughout this period the various government offices have scrutinized site's legality and have not found any breach of the law. So far there has been no decision by any Russian court contesting the site's legality.
2. The Russian site AllOfMP3.com is not operating or advertising its business on the territory of other countries.
3. The site AllOfMP3.com does regularly transfer substantial amounts of royalties to the Russian organizations for collective management of rights such as ROMS and FAIR, which have granted the site licenses to legally deliver music through the Internet.
4. The site AllofMP3.com reserves the right to take all steps necessary to protect its business reputation. We call upon everyone to take a thorough and unbiased view of the site's legality.
5. On September 1, 2006 the changes to the Russian copyright legislation will come into force. Since January 2006 the site has been making direct agreements with rightholders and authors at the same time increasing the price of the music compositions and transferring the royalties directly to the artists and record companies. The aim of AllofMP3.com is to agree with all rightholders on the prices and royalties amounts by September 1, 2006.
6. We believe in the long term and civilized business based on respecting the law, considering the customers' demands as well as the interests of both national and international rightholders.

It's signed by the Allofmp3 administration in Moscow, and dated June 6 (an auspicious date in the annals of the fight for freedom).

If the music industry had any sense, they'd co-operate. Allofmp3 offers a rapidly growing distribution method which in our opinion would quickly all but kill illegal downloads. But our experience indicates those hypocrites who run the show are intent on crushing all opposition, so they can continue to rip off music lovers and artists in the manner to which they've become accustomed.

It would be somewhat fitting, if in doing so, they forced the community to replace their model with something that doesn't hold it to ransom. It wouldn't have been the first tyrannical movement to meet its end on the Russian front.

Posted by cw at 12:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 06, 2006

HP pulls plug on telecommuting

Forgot all that crap about social networking, work-life balance and "always-on" workers. Hewlett Packard is turning back the clock on telecommuting, ordering its IT staff to show up at the office, or face the sack. The decision, which runs completely counter to modern trends in which companies have found it cheaper to house workers in their own homes, won't just deprive employees of home comforts. It will also force many of them to find new homes, because HP is also making offices harder to find, having decided to shrink the number of its designated workplaces from 100 to 25.

The move, which some see as retrenchment by stealth, is the idea of new, highly-paid CIO, Randy "Meeting Mad" Mott, who views offices as a sort of learning centre, in which, when they're not attending meetings, experienced employees instruct poorer performers in more effective practices.

Mott, regarded by Wall Street as a genius in operational efficiency, based on his tenure at Wal-Mart Stores and Dell, says that the office allows management "to put teams together that can learn very aggressively and rapidly from each other". Reports of already crowded HP offices suggest that things might get very aggressive indeed, with employees having to learn rapidly how to find a desk and other resources. This possibly has escaped Mott, who we noticed in one interview lists interacting with his peers and expanding his knowledge of business and IT as leisure activities.

Mott's wisdom supersedes that of the company's founders, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, who saw flexitime as a key to HP's success. In his book, The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company, Packard wrote: "To my mind, flextime is the essence of respect for and trust in people. It says that we both appreciate that our people have busy personal lives and that we trust them to devise, with their supervisor and work group, a schedule that is personally convenient yet fair to others.''

Critics say that while the move could allow HP to shed older employers - who might have the experience Mott is talking about, but don't salute as smartly as younger folk - we can't help but wonder whether it will go down well with Generation Y, in particular, who have demonstrated a tendency not to work for companies which don't allow them a better balance between their work and personal lives.

And it could cause a backlash from customers who might not like the idea of a new HP with Wal-Mart-style service.

Posted by cw at 10:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 05, 2006

Allofmp3: legal or piracy?

We'd love to know whether the Russian music download site Allofmp3.com is legal or not. The recorded music industry association says it's not, of course, and is trying vigorously to shut it down. Now the New York Times has weighed in on the debate, and declares that ... well ... who knows?

Allofmp3 claims to have a licence from the Russian royalty collection agency, ROMS, but according to Eric Baptiste, director general of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, the umbrella organisation for collecting societies, "These collecting agencies are thieves and frauds because they accept money while pretending to represent artists."

Vladimir Dragunov, a Moscow-based legal adviser to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a group that represents major and independent music labels, said the District Court of Moscow rejected a case against AllofMP3 on May 16 on technical grounds, but the decision was being appealed. Sergei Marchenko, a spokesman for the Moscow prosecutor, said his office was continuing to investigate AllofMP3.

Warwick Rothnie looks at Allofmp3's legality from the point of view of Australian consumers, and suggests that ... well, who knows?

Hmm, how do ss 44D etc. apply to those actions? Certainly, they say quite broadly that copyright is not infringed, but have you imported a "copy" (check out the definitions of "copy" in s 10(3)(c) and "record" in 10(1). Did allofmp3.com have the power to authorise your actions from the owner of the Australian copyright? Did it even need it - go back to s 10AA?

When the laws that govern these transactions are so unclear, how can the consumer be expected to decide? And what about the fact that Australian customers can order albums from Allofmp3 by SMS? It's a bit more expensive to do it that way - $5 an album - but it works quite well. What interests us is whether by being the intermediary for these transactions, Telstra (or whoever your SMS provider is), is aiding and abetting piracy. No doubt there'll be an equally incomprehensible law that absolves them of all responsibility.

Posted by cw at 03:47 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 04, 2006

Beware the Bus Uncle

What do you think is the moral of Bus Uncle - the latest Internet cult video? It shows an ugly attack by a middle-aged Chinese nut case on a young man sitting behind him in a Kowloon bus.

The young man had tapped this individual on the shoulder, and asked him to lower the volume of his mobile phone conversation. The resulting bullying tirade, complete with obscenities, indecent references to the young man's mother and threatening gestures, was captured by another passenger who happened to have a video phone.

As millions of people downloaded the video, it led to a mini-boom in T-shirt, mug, notebook, book bag and even boxer shorts sales and a media frenzy, including this magazine interview, which revealed that Bus Uncle was a particularly troubled man.

So what should we take away from this incident? Don't lose your cool, because you never know when you're on candid camera phone? Or, as we've been wondering, having recently witnessed an ugly verbal assault a by a middle-aged man on a 10-year-old boy who'd walked across his line of vision during what was obviously a particularly tense table tennis match in a public hall, some older males might be in need of anger-management classes? Or, perhaps, that people who talk loudly on their mobile phones in public places might tend towards unpredictability. And it might be better just to move to the back of the bus.

Posted by cw at 12:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 03, 2006

Firefox update patches holes, breaks Roboform

The new Firefox version 1.5.0.4 fixes 13 security holes, which is a good thing indeed, but unfortunately the RoboForm toolbar no longer works.

We've been using RoboForm increasingly to memorise log-ins and passwords, having finally been convinced by Jeremy Howard that it was absolutely indispensable for the online lifestyle, so having it snatched away from us like that is most inconvenient. We had the most recent adapter, so we're not sure what's going on.

Obviously, this is one of the downsides to the growing fashion for imbedding applications into the browser.

Posted by cw at 06:35 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 02, 2006

iPod Nano rage

When Jano Gibson found the software update for that new 4GB Nano stopped the cute little machine from working, he [she?] vented his/her frustration on the Smage's Mashup blog. Which led to a comment war. In 264 posts, Apple lovers have been fighting it out with the miffed.

Amanda, for instance, got on her high horse with all those whingers, proclaiming:

Instead of whinging at other people that your iPod doesn't work and you'll never buy Apple again, why don't you take some time to research a product? Bother to look at help on websites. Try a product out at a store so you know what it's like. Whinging that something is useless won't fix it. Whinging that iPods are trash won't change someone's point of view who has had 15+ years of good experience with Apple products.

Of course it won't, Amanda. Some people have not only never seen the slightest fault with any Apple, ever, they get extremely pissed off with anyone who has. And Amanda was particularly cross about the fact that the people complaining weren't doing so with perfect syntax. "More than half of you need to learn how to spell and use grammar correctly," she pouted. The effect was spoiled just a touch by the fact that Amanda is subject to the occasional glitch in her own spell-checker: "If you're writing about your iPod 'Nanno' then I'm more likely to blame you for incompetance than your piece of hardware/software."

Gosh we do love a public brawl. Some curious things emerge. A lot of people, it seems take such a dim view of Apple's software competence that they never update it. We suspect this could lead to some problems down the road.

We particularly liked Colin's observation:"Welcome to being an Apple customer. Stop whinging and take it like the sheep we are. :-)"

Posted by cw at 09:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 01, 2006

Better blogging

It looks like all the teething problems associated with the shift to Site5 have been resolved, so we're rushing headlong into the next action item [we seem to have been thoroughly GTDed] which is a re-design of the blog.

We're planning to increase the number of voices, add some features, including some subscriber-only features [have you thought about subscribing, by the way?], and make things more obvious and easier to use. But you probably have one or two ideas yourself. Like this, for instance. Is that a good idea? Feel free to give us your ideas.

Posted by cw at 08:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack