COMPUTER CURRENTS
But it would be nice to know what Microsoft does when it installs updates
JAMES HEIN
I updated my PC to XP SP3 today and it took quite a while to complete. The restart was also a little slow but then I guess it was updating a bunch of settings on the restart. A little DOS window popped up and displayed a number of "parameter in error lines" which was a little disconcerting, but everything seems to be working okay so far.
My PC at work is a 3GHz Pentium 4 machine that I imagine would be struggling if I had Vista, but even with the new SP3 installed seems to run reasonably fast. If I open too many programs is starts to slow down, and when Windows has some updates it wants me to install things also seem to go slow, almost as if to encourage me to reboot. Immediately after installing I was naturally prompted to download a long list of updates and patches but that was expected. I have noticed that over the years we get told less and less about what a program or an installer is doing. Years ago there was always an install log that popped up telling you what files had been changed. There is probably one of these still there but you don't get told about it.
It's the same with updates. There used to be a little progress panel telling what was being installed but that seems to have been turned off as well by default. They could be installing all kinds of stuff on your machine and you would not know about it anymore. Of course, Microsoft has been caught sending information about your PC back to head office, stuff that really has nothing to do with Microsoft products. Not to be outdone Apple seems to have caught onto this idea and is also reportedly sending information back to head office about product use.
Apple used to always be the standout when it came to dubious practices, but in the past couple of years things have changed and not only is it starting to behave like a MS clone but it has caught the attention of the hacker community and more and more problems and holes are being discovered. Perhaps Apple should never have moved to Intel CPUs.
Feeling lucky I also started the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 update, which turned out to be a rather large file (831MB with the Framework 3.5 update). I recommend the .ISO download if you are going to update more than one machine. There are a number of improvements and hopefully it will stop a few of the problems I have experienced when using the development platform.
For some reason some are still trying to come to grips with the concept of legal P2P. This is somewhat unders- tandable given that for years we have been told in true 1984 fashion by the RIAA that P2P is bad and DRM is good. P2P however is just a technology, and one that is part of the Web 2.0 general framework. It is simple a mechanism that allows people to contribute information and share it. Sure, some of this sharing has been at the expense of a few music and movie companies profits but there has also been sharing of photos, ideas, reports and other digital representations of digital stuff.
As I wrote a while back, the UK is set to follow South Korea in offering a legal P2P music network. Some are reporting this as an unlimited music service that will "pay record labels for songs illegally downloaded by its customers." Start with this idea and add a pool of money raised by subscription, advertising revenue and donations that get divided up according to music exchanges on the network. The recipients of the money are then the artists and music companies. If they are getting their cut then the "illegality" of the concept is somewhat moot.
Yes, there will be some unlicenced songs in the mix when you are opening up the network to "everything" and everyone then this material is a subset of the whole. What is happening however is that there is now a revenue stream created back to those who should be getting some payments. Given that P2P is here to stay there might as well be some leveraging of the process.
Industry news
The Olympics are over but one news article caught my eye about the opening ceremony. If you look closely at the opening ceremony when the athlete carrying the Olympic torch is lifted up to light the torch one large screen on the ceiling shows a typical Windows Blue Screen of Death. Some wags have suggested that this is a pirated version of Windows but since Lenovo supplied the machines OEM and the product is XP Embedded I doubt that. The blog source has multiple shots with time codes and another blogger has the shot of the screen with the torch bearer next to it. If true this would have to be something of an embarrassment for Redmond. The screen was showing for around an hour.
Just how powerful do you need your notebook to be? You'll have to wait a while, but Dell has a quad-core, 17in. notebook queued up ready to release soon after Intel gives it the chips. The M6400 will support up to 16GB of RAM and 1GB of GPU RAM. Two drives will give you 1TB of storage and the machine will support two 30in. monitors of you so desire. It also comes in bright orange. I'm guessing that this will satisfy most people's power requirements.
Open source coders have been backed in the EU by a recent decision handed down that just because the author decided that their code was free, the rules they apply to it must be followed. This typically includes a request to attribute the author, note in your code where the code came from, etc. The ruling essentially means that if you don't follow the conditions you lose the licence and rights to use the code. Sounds fair to me.
For those who are secretly against the RIAA, it recently paid a record $108,000 in fees over a lost case. This was the Tanya Andersen "gangsta rap" download case where it was found that she had not done any sharing. It also set a precedent, the RIAA now has to provide actual proof that someone downloaded shared files. This is a lot harder to do that just show that sharing had occurred.
It seems that eBay is starting to drive sellers away with higher charges, fewer services and payment restrictions. While I don't see eBay crumbling in the near future, it does give other sites like Wigix, Silkfair, Etsy and Oodle a boost. But, like anything on the Internet, if a tipping point is reached, it could all go horribly wrong for eBay sometime in the future.
Finally for this week: USB 3. Intel has released the Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification. This allows USB host controllers to communicate with a software stack, allowing developers to communicate with the USB 3 hardware and build controller chips for devices. Intel is hoping that USB 3 will form the core for HD device communication supporting 4.8Gbps data transfer speeds. 2009 is the earliest we can expect to see any devices, but Microsoft, AMD, Dell and nVidia have already voiced support.
Email: jclhein@gmail.com.
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