Bad Windows

On the Lost island? Back in January at CES, Bill Gates previewed a few nifty features that would only appear in the Ultimate – ie, the most expensive – version of Vista. The crowd oohed as Gates demonstrated Dreamscene, which uses a movie clip as desktop wallpaper, and ahhed as he showed off Groupshot, which will take the best bits of different photos and stitch them together.

Extras, said Gates, would be made available at odd times for download to Ultimate users. All sounds cool, right? Well, six months after launch, Ultimate users are still waiting to be wowed by the Extras. As a comment on Ed Bott's blog noted, so far Ultimate feels a lot like the Plus! collections of extras that Microsoft used to sell for Windows 98 and Me (tinyurl.com/2pr2b7). So far there's been one additional game: Texas Hold'Em. It's poker, and to be honest it's nothing special. It looks pretty, but so do the other card games that come with all flavours of the operating system. I prefer Spider Solitaire, which shipped with all the versions.

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Google has chalked up a victory over Microsoft in a legal battle over its rival's operating system, Windows Vista.

Under pressure from competition authorities, Microsoft has agreed to make it easier for Vista users to switch from the built-in desktop search tool to using Google's alternative Google Desktop function. The capitulation is a blow for Microsoft because it had trumpeted its improved search tool – which combs through a computer's hard drive and the users' emails looking for information – as a key selling point for Vista.

Google's concern mirrored the long-running competition complaints over how Microsoft integrated its web browser, Internet Explorer, and other applications with Windows to the detriment of other software developers.

Microsoft has been operating under a Justice Department consent decree since a 2001 settlement, and Google said Vista violates the promises of good behavior that Microsoft made at that time. More than a dozen US states had also been examining Microsoft's behaviour, weighing the possibility of legal action in support of Google.

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Linux users can, at times, be the worst kind of ingrates, whining and complaining about what they perceive as missing features in a free operating system.

My advice to all such whingers: spend 10 days using the latest version of Windows and you'll realise that you are living in a world of relative bliss.

I asked my editor, Stan Beer, if he had a Vista pack for a cursory look, out of sheer curiosity. You hear so much about Vista on the net but there's a good deal of truth yet in the old saying, "seeing is believing."

At times I could not believe what I saw during the 14-odd days that I played around with both versions of Vista Ultimate – the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Microsoft has admittedly set the bar pretty low for this new avatar; the marketing blurb on the pack says "the most secure Windows ever." I couldn't help a snigger when I glimpsed this – the same slogan was used to try and sell Windows XP.

There are certain names which come to mind when associates the word "security" with XP, names like Sasser, Blaster, Sobig aand so on. Not to mention the fact that there was a second service pack issued for XP in August 2004 – well over three years after it was launched – which had 810 fixes and updates.

I was thus prepared for low-key peformance with lots of eye candy. I was disappointed. At the end of the testing, when I gratefully used a CD of the latest Ubuntu release (and I don't have a very high opinion of that as regular readers of this column would know) to wipe Vista off my drive, I realised that even those expectations had been too much.

But enough of generalisations, let's get down to some specifics. I had to build a new box to install Vista (for which iTWire picked up the tab). I kept it minimal but these days even the word minimal has been redefined – an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600 and 2 Gig of DDR2-667 RAM isn't exactly low-spec in any dictionary. I used an all-in-one motherboard with an nVidia geForce 6100 onboard. A 250-gig Western Digital SATA drive and an LG DVD rewriter were the other components.

A note to the reader: I wasn't looking for special effects, bling or eye candy; I was looking for genuine improvements.

Before I installed Vista, I checked the hardware by installing a Linux distribution – that's something which I do with every box I build. This time I used PCLinuxOS and incidentally noticed that it has much to recommend.

Back to the world of Windows. One improvement is actually present in Vista – disk formatting takes much less time than it did in XP. The installation takes a little longer than any modern Linux distribution – 64-bit was expectedly a bit faster than the 32-bit version.

Read more at ITWire 

Will Microsoft's concessions over Vista's desktop search default be enough to forestall additional investigation into the company's practices? Whether Google is mollified may not be the point on which the answer to that question turns. The European Union and some U.S. states' attorneys general may just be getting started with fresh challenges for the software giant.

Earlier this month, it looked for a while as though there might be another wave of multi-jurisdictional investigations against Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft reminiscent of the antitrust saga that began in 1998. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latest News about Google had been complaining — first behind the scenes, then publicly — about the lack of access for third-party search engines in Microsoft's latest operating system, Vista.

Antitrust authorities on the state level were starting to sniff around. On Wednesday, though, Microsoft announced it would make changes to Vista that would satisfy Google's concerns.

Under the new agreement, Vista users can choose whether to stick with the built-in tool provided by the Vista OEM (original equipment manufacturer) or use another company's product as the default for desktop search.

Microsoft insisted from the beginning that Vista allowed users to use whatever search platform they wanted. However, the tweaks the company just introduced make that choice easier to implement.

For instance, the user-selected default desktop search will now appear on prime desktop real estate. It will show up whenever Windows launches a new top-level window to provide search results and appear on the Start menu.

Also, vendors will be able to register their desktop search programs for this default, as ISVs (independent software vendors) are able to register third-party Web browsers and media players as the default in Windows.

Read more at Technology News 

"Microsoft security executive Jeff Jones has disclosed that in the first six months of Vista's release, the company has patched fewer than half of the operating system's known bugs. Microsoft has fixed only 12 of 27 reported Vista vulnerabilities whereas it patched 36 of 39 known bugs in Windows XP in the first six months following its release. Jones says that's because "Windows Vista continues to show a trend of fewer total and fewer high-severity vulnerabilities at the six month mark compared to … Windows XP," but he did not address the 15 unpatched flaws."

We don't have a Vista Business DVD of our own to confirm this one, but we'll just stick with the tried and true "it's on the internet, so it must be true" mantra. Apparently a blogger named Kwisatz has uncovered a "secret" photo embedded into the hologram that encompasses the Windows Vista Business DVD. This being Microsoft, the photo naturally depicts three total nerds, grinning excessively at their own cleverness. Of course, this could be a total Photoshop, but somehow we find such an embedding eerily plausible, so we're going to stay cautiously optimistic that this is real. Hit up the read link for full res versions of the discovery.

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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols presents a rebuttal to an eWeek article that steered people away from open-source software. "1) Microsoft is the safe choice Safe? Safe!? Come on. Microsoft's products are infamous for not being safe. Vista was supposed to be soooo much more secure than earlier versions of Windows. I said that was nonsense when Vista was first coming out. And what do we now see? Why, this month alone, we see that there are four flaws. Three of the flaws could let information slip out if users visit malicious pages using IE, and with the fourth vulnerability, all you have to do is view a malicious e-mail with Windows Mail, and ta-da, you've just been hijacked. I hope you enjoy your PC being part of a botnet."

Linux-based websites perform better than those hosted on Windows servers, according to new research.

WatchMouse, a Dutch firm that monitors server performance, based its research on a survey of more than 1,500 European websites. The company said that although the websites it surveyed were more frequently based on Microsoft's IIS web server platform running Windows than on Apache running Linux, the latter option performed better in terms of both uptime and load time.

The research showed a marked preference within the UK for Windows-based systems, at 59 per cent of all systems surveyed.

Linux accounts for only 17 per cent of the UK total, with Solaris at 15 per cent. BSD trailed behind at three per cent and Unix at one per cent.

German firms are less keen on Windows-based web servers. Less than 20 per cent of websites in Germany run on Windows-based systems.

WatchMouse also noted that, overall, two-thirds of the websites it surveyed had an availability of less than 99.9 per cent, representing downtime of at least eight hours per year.

Read more at silicon.com 

Service Packs can be good and bad for Microsoft. On one hand, they fix vulnerabilities, upgrade the usefulness, efficiency or functionality of components, and sometimes add new features. On the other hand, consumers, and especially corporations, will often wait until an SP is released before upgrading to the new product, assuming that the first generation of a release isn't quite ready for prime time.

Some have even wondered if Microsoft's various Update services have made service packs obsolete. Some of that speculation has been spurred by the fact that Microsoft has been very tight-lipped about an SP1 for Windows Vista, leading some to wonder if service packs would be foregone totally.

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"The RIAA has moved their main Web site www.riaa.com from IIS on Win2003 to Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat. It appears that the move did not go smoothly as it resulted in an 8-hour downtime starting yesterday around noon, according to Netcraft. And the RIAA is still showing a 'temporarily under construction' page. They also moved their DNS from the small company that had been hosting them for the past 4 years, Tomorrow's Solutions Today (TST Inc.), to Mindshift Technologies. One can only guess what happened here, but the move seems to have been sudden and unplanned. They still haven't moved the riaa.org, riaa.net, and musicunited.org domains — those are still pointing to the TST nameservers that no longer accept queries for those domains. TST Inc. deserves credit, however. They seem to have managed to host the RIAA quite successfully for the past 4 years.

Read more at Slashdot