A lot of must have seen the advertisements on MS Vista where they talk about the wow factor. Well today I used it on a clients machine and it certainly made we go wow. Read on for the details…
I had a 90 MB file that I needed to extract on their system (224 MB uncompressed), so I copied the file to their system,right clicked and chose extract. Then came the wow factor. Vista told me that it out need ~13 hours to extract the file. Waited for a few mins and it didn’t go down. It really was going to take it 13 hours + change to extract it. Certainly made me go wow.
I didn’t take a screen shot of it at the time, but then as I was telling my cousin about it, I decided to blog it so needed to take a screen shot. When I took the following screen shot it was telling me that it would take 5 days to extract. I waited for a couple of mins in case it was just exaggerating like Windows XP and it would show the correct time in a few mins. But alas it kept showing me the same time.
So here goes:
MS Vista WOW!!!
BTW, just as a comparison, my Windows XP system on a 1 GZ system with 512 MB of RAM takes ~2 mins to extract this file. Haven’t timed it on Linux yet. And this vista install is a running on a new machine thats pretty powerful. And i am not the only one who saw this. Another guy was complaining about it on one of the forums that I visited. His file was taking ~15 mins to extract on vista while on Linux it took about 11 secs to extract.
Ah well. I think I can do without the wow in my life. Pretty happy with Debian and XP for my systems. Don’t think I will be upgrading to Vista anytime soon.
- Suramya
Can’t figure out what the big deal is about DRM? Check out the following site, it will give you a visual representation of what DRM is and how it would affect everyday objects/tasks.
Flickr: The DRM is Like… Pool
Thanks to Open… for the link.
- Suramya
Anyone care to explain what exactly this is supposed to do other than annoy fans?
Congress raises broadcast flag for audio
- Suramya
Thats one way of looking at it:
- Suramya
A couple of days ago I had a slight problem with my internet connection, basically what was happening was that I couldn’t access google.com and associated sites (Orkut, gmail etc) but I could access everything else with issues so I spoke to a Comcast representative and she told me to run the following command on my Windows XP laptop (I told her I was using XP because I didn’t want to get into an argument with her that the problem was because I was using Linux.):
regsvr32 softpub.dll
I ran the command and it didn’t fix the issue. So I decided to un-register the dll using the following command:
regsvr32 /u softpub.dll
as I wasn’t sure what this dll did and didn’t want to register random stuff on my system. I ran the command and everything was fine for a couple of days, I could browse the net without issues and everything seemed to work.
Then all of a sudden after a couple of days I get an error message stating that my version of windows could not be validated so I must be running a pirated version of XP. The funny part was that I had installed WGA two months ago on the laptop and it had validated the license and the license is valid. So I went to the Windows update site and tried to validate my copy but ActiveX refused to run. It told me to try a manual check where it downloaded the ActiveX and then tried to run it but that also failed… Finally I tried a check using an executable I downloaded but that validated my license as valid. Now I was confused and tried to force a validation test but every time the system would refuse to run ActiveX and the validation would fail.
After beating my head on the issue for a little while I finally remembered the dll that I had unregistered a while ago so I went through my command history and found the command to re-register it and went ahead and registered it. Then I had to reboot the box and when it came back up I was finally able to run the online validation tool which verified my version of windows was valid. After it verified it I had to reboot again and that fixed the issue.
Moral of the story: If you don’t know what a dll does then don’t uninstall it.
Second Moral of the story: Its a good habit to keep a log of all the commands you run, and any changes you make to the system. Having this will save you a lot of time an energy when something gets messed up.
This is all for now, will post more about my experiments with computers and the messes I caused later.
- Suramya
As some of you know Vista is supposed to come out next year and its going to require a big upgrade for most of the users. Now in a move to alienate even more of its customers MS has changed its licensing terms, limiting the number of times that Windows Vista can be transfered to, to ONE. Thats right One, Uno. In the older versions of windows if you bought a new computer you could install your old version of windows on it provided you uninstalled it from the old computer. With the new licensing you can only do it once so if you upgrade your computer more than once you need a new Vista license.
Hows that for utter stupidity. It is supposed to restrict piracy but the only thing its going to do is annoy regular users. A lot of people upgrade their computers a lot and if MS thinks it can force people to buy a new license every time they upgrade its sadly mistaken. Its going to be a pain for everyone involved and the only people it won’t affect are the software pirates as the pirated version will probably have this check disabled.
I know I transfered my windows XP license from my original 350 Mhz system to a 1.1 ghz system to another system before it got its final home in the machine its on now (All the older systems are now running Linux).
If I had vista I would have had to spend additional money to install an OS that I have a license for on a system that I am going to be using. You know what, I think I will stick with Linux and XP for now. I wasn’t planning to upgrade anyways but with news like this I have even less incentive to try it out.
Original Article: Microsoft Restricts Vista Transfers
Update: Some more thoughts on the new MS Licensing: Lxer.com
- Suramya
This is just hillarious. Basically the new MS Live Beta installer wants you to close the MSN installer so that the MSN installer can continue installing(See the pic below). I havn’t tried installing it on my system because I don’t like MSN and don’t want it to mess with my system.
MSN Paradox…
Source: Reg reader traumatised by MS Live Messenger paradox
Thanks for the laugh guys.
- Suramya
There have been rumors to the affect that Google might be releasing a new service that allows users to store unlimited amount of data on their servers and access it from anywhere… While this sounds really neat and useful there are a couple of issues with it that you might want to think about (If you are planning on using it. I am not)
1. First as soon as the data is off your computer and on google’s they have full access to it, they can scan it to generate targeted ads. (They already do that with your email). If a google employee wanted to they could read you private documents (You tax returns, your love letters, your whatever… ). Not saying that they will just they can.
2. Storing it on Google’s servers will make it easier for law agencies/lawyers to get search access to your data using a subpeona. Adam Fields has a good writeup on why storing your data on google is a bad idea.
So if you still want to store stuff on google feel free to, but I am not. I might store encrypted files for a short time if I needed to free up space for something, but for a more long term solution I will stick to my DVD burner. 
Original Article: Google: A giant hard disk in the sky?
- Suramya
Interesting new policy is in works in the Westchester County (NY). It actually makes sense as long as they don’t extend it to include all WiFi access points instead of just ones run by comercial businesses. (Check out gWiFi.net for a list of free and open access points.).
Westchester County (NY) executive Andy Spano is sponsoring legislation that would require commercial businesses that offer wireless hot spots to have firewalls and other security measures in place if they also collect sensitive customer information. The legislation would require companies to separate the confidential data they hold from the networks
that offer wireless access. One analyst has observed that whether a network is wireless or wired, organizations should keep sensitive data secure. The proposed legislation is believed to be the first of its kind in the United States.
Original Source: Sans.org NewsBytes
Additional Info:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C1882081%2C00.asp
http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39153963,00.htm
http://www.fcw.com/article91313-11-04-05-Web
http://www.westchestergov.com/whatsnew/pressfr.htm
According to Bruce Schneier’s blog a group of researcher’s from Berkeley have developed a process that lets them identify the keys being typed by analyzing an audio recording of someone typing at the computer for about 15 mins.
There was some research done on this earlier but their method required specific training tapes where the system knew what keys were pressed and when to configure the listener before it was able to accurately deciper the input. In this case the training tape is an actual recording of a target.
This brings an interesting possibility for hackers/crackers to steal passwords/information by setting up hidden mic’s etc.
Saw a technique somewhat like this being used in a TV show called ‘MI-6″ (Or was it MI-5? It was 3 am… ) In it one of the spies gives a special cufflink to the target and gets him to type her resume out. As the spies knew what was on the resume they were able to get a readout of each key (They didn’t explain what readout’s they were taking in too much detail) and once they got that they were able to see what ever the target typed on the computer in realtime as long as he was wearing his cufflink. Neat eh?
But before you start panicking, remember the bad guy’s still have to either get physical access to your system and/or the area around your system in order to bug it and you know the law: “Physical access is root access”.
So to lower the risk of this attack all you have to do is follow the same basic rules you have been following about not granting unknown people access to your workplace and keep an eye out for people carying video camera’s and mic’s.
To make the risk go away completely play loud music to drown out the typing sound when working on sensitive data.
Original Source:
Schneier on Security: Snooping on Text by Listening to the Keyboard
Link to the Paper: Snooping on Text by Listening to the Keyboard (PDF File)
- Suramya