Bad Windows

This is typical Windows firewall.

Not since Windows ME or Mac OS X 10.0 have I observed a more troubled consumer operating system. This is a difficult post to write, because I really don't want to beat on Microsoft about Vista yet again. But yesterday's continuation of the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit and several conversations I had today are reasons to look at what Microsoft got wrong and why the company should make things right.

Simply put: Windows Vista is a train wreck, but it didn't have to be. Unfortunately, my "Wow" moment was accepting Windows Vista for what it is. Vista will succeed in the marketplace because of the huge infrastructure built up around the operating system. But that doesn't mean most people will like using Vista, or even ask for it.

To be absolutely, unequivocally clear, major analyst firms like Gartner, IDC and NPD say that Vista has had no perceptible impact on PC sales. None. A successful operating system would create PC sales pull. Vista is anything but. Microsoft can spew off about license shipments all it wants—now more than 60 million for Vista—but counting means little when the majority of PCs ship with the operating system anyway. That's not a customer choice, but the option presented to buyers.

When OEMs like Dell and Lenovo break Windows rank and ship Linux on desktop computers, something isn't right with Windows.

Read more at Microsoft Watch 

The poor performance and compatibility woes of Vista are driving more people to the open source alternative of Linux.

Granted, Windows Vista does look pretty, but to use an old analogy I've coined and remarked to others before in regards to Vista . . .

'Vista is like a prize show dog. It's really pretty to look at with its shining coat and perfect teeth and proud stance, real pretty. But underneath all of that glitz and glamor, it's so horribly inbred and broken that it doesn't know who or what it is half the time.'

Most of the Linux community would probably agree with that statement, point to the inadequacies and compatibility issues with Vista. Furthermore, Linux users would proudly boast of how the Linux desktop has had 3D effects for years, and that the Microsoft OS just trying to play catchup with their Aero Glass interface and desktop effects and widgets and so forth.

One fellow by the name of Cole Crawford might agree. He is an IT strategist at Dell who had recently delivered an address entitled "The Linux Desktop—Fact, FUD or Fantasy?" at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo currently taking place in San Francisco.

Read more at neoseeker 

Shack0ption writes "An unpatched flaw in an ATI driver was at the center of the mysterious Purple Pill proof-of-concept tool that exposed a way to maliciously tamper with the Windows Vista kernel. The utility, released by Alex Ionescu and yanked an hour later after the kernel developer realized that the ATI driver flaw was not yet patched, provided an easy way to load unsigned drivers onto Vista — effectively defeating the new anti-rootkit/anti-DRM mechanism built into Microsoft's newest operating system. Ionescu confirmed his tool was exploiting a vulnerability in an ATI driver — atidsmxx.sys, version 3.0.502.0 — to patch the kernel to turn off certain checks for signed drivers. This meant that a malicious rootkit author could essentially piggyback on ATI's legitimately signed driver to tamper with the Vista kernel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A publisher of nude model photography is suing Microsoft for putting links and images of the company's content in search results taken from other Web sites that are illegally reproducing the material.

The company, Perfect 10, previously filed similar suits seeking injunctions against Google and Amazon.com Inc. over alleged copyright infringement.

The latest suit alleges that Microsoft's MSN image search feature creates unauthorized thumbnails of content owned by Perfect 10 and includes links to see a full-size versions of the images for free. The suit also says that Microsoft's MSN search engine makes passwords available to the company's perfect10.com Web site.

Read more at LinuxWorld 

"Windows Vista has probably created the single biggest opportunity for the Linux desktop to take market share, Cole Crawford, an IT strategist at Dell, said in an address titled, 'The Linux Desktop–Fact, FUD or Fantasy?' at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here.

"For example, a number of companies have moved back to Windows XP after deploying Vista, Crawford said, before quoting Scott Granneman, an author, entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as saying, 'To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it…'"

Read more at eWeek

Microsoft's Sam Ramji slammed the door on virtualizing Microsoft's newest desktop operating systems (XP and Vista) on Linux yesterday. In a speech at LinuxWorld, the director of Microsoft's open-source software lab claimed that "we haven't seen significant demand for Linux applications on the desktop or for desktop virtualization on top of Linux."

Specifically, Ramji was referring to feedback from enterprise-level customers and its Interoperability Executive Customer Council. However, one has to wonder why Microsoft is blowing off the enthusiast community. There are plenty of Linux users reading Maximum PC in print and online, for example (just count the number of Diggs for any Linux article on this website), and Linux is getting a greater market share at the desktop level in both the enthusiast and corporate markets. Dell, for example, started bundling PCs with Ubuntu in late May, and Lenovo has just announced it will start preinstalling Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 on its T-series notebooks starting in the fourth quarter of this year.

Read more at MaximumPC 

In a move that will likely only further confuse the situation surrounding Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Microsoft has posted for public download two updates that were released to beta testers last month. The patches improve Vista performance and reliability, along with the operating system's compatibility with drivers and hardware.

Read more at BetaNews 

Marcion writes "Some handy Japanese guy called Hamachiya discovered a bug in Internet Explorer. Under certain conditions, an asterisk when used as a wildcard can crash IE as soon as the user attempts to go to another page." The article claims the "five HTML tags and a CSS declaration" crash IE7 as well as IE6, but I couldn't get IE7 to fail. This page says that as of June, IE6 was at about 37% market share and IE7 under 20%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MICROSOFT HAS ISSUED two updates for Vista, rated 'important', that address performance and reliability problems. The updates have a combined size of 5.7Mb and both require a system restart. They have yet to be made available through Windows Update. Both 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista are affected.

The fixes have been floating around in beta guise for a few weeks, but fall well short of being the rumoured Vista SP1 discussed on the sort of forums that discuss such things. Downloading and installing the patches is quick and easy apart from the annoyance of two restarts. No noticeable performance or reliability improvements are immediately apparent on the two machines we tried it on (2 Gig 2.7GHz Core 2 Duo and 768MB 2.4GHz P4), but they were already pretty fast and reliable anyway.

Read more at theINQUIRER