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45 minutes ago, intelman wrote

What is up with DirectWrite? How come it looks fine on some pages and horrible on others? To me this is the most significant change of the web. Text readability on digital displays will only become more important.

Firefox 4 also seems to have adopted this notion that we should be using directwrite.

This blog entry by the IE team might share some light on that: Nov 3, 2010: Sub-pixel Fonts in IE9.

2 days ago, Ian2 wrote

I've censored this for Channel 9 but my daughter, who is 9, can see the uncensored version right now.

Surely 4 letter words have some auto alerts?

I understand parental concerns, but I don't want "auto alerts".  I'm an adult, and I want to be able to see what the "top songs" and "top videos" are without an alert being thrown in my face about it.  If the Zune team wants to add more partental controls* that a parent can turn on if he/she wishes to, then that's fine, but don't inconvenience the rest of us that don't need to be shielded from what the top videos actually are.

* The Zune desktop client already does have some protections.  I don't know the extent of it, but if you subscribe to a channel and receive an "Explicit" song as a result, you can't play the song unless you are signed in.  If you try to play the song while not signed in, you get an alert: "Must sign in to Zune with your Windows Live ID to play explicit songs" or some such.  Which I find to be a pain already, but I've accepted it (no choice in the matter).  But I don't think adults should be involuntarily "protected" from song titles while browsing the zune marketplace.

@GoddersUK:

More likely they know that 99% of people don't read it anyway.  Anyway, there's a print button if you want to print it out, not to mention the scroll bar.

I have two computers, both have the same default printer.  The first computer is XP/IE7, which reproduces the crash every time, and I sent the crash report (I don't need to cancel the Print dlg, the crash occurs as the Print dlg is coming up).  The second computer is Vista/IE8, which never produces the crash.

magicalclick said:

Only you. Mine is always fine and I just tested it. Meaning you may have got a virus. My bro got a virus that change Google, Live, and other search result of the link. It looks fine, but they are point to some junk sites.

Has anyone else foun that Live Search has been completely broken for the last few days?  Frequently the search resuts are just a blank page; or at times only found images are shown,; or zero results are found (wrongly) so a list of suggested searches is given, and clicking any one of these just delivers a blank page?

This has happened for me for days now, with IE. Firefox, and Chrome, using live.com, MSN toolbar, search box of the various browsers, etc.

For example,
I just now did a search for 'venus williams' (unquoted) and get a blank page all the time.
If I search for "venus williams" I get two 'news' links but nothing else.

The problem seems to only affect "Web" search.  News, Images, and Video search appear to work fine.

The problem doesn't appear all the time.  I just now did one more web search for "venus williams" and got actual results.

evildictaitor wrote:



littleguru wrote:  Next UAC takes like hours when I try to open OrcasBeta1VSTS_VPC_8PartsTotal.part01.exe (the first file of the Orcas Beta 1 SFX RAR archive) -- it is 700 MB, but why does UAC take that long? CPU doesn't even go up... Looks like a bug to me! I have no AV installed!

The problem here is quite subtle.

When you open an executable file, the process manager has to load the entire program out of memory before it can execute it, which for 700 megs can be a reasonable amount of time, but is still less than a second.

The problem now is that UAC needs to discover whether it should ask you for a permission hike. The best way is to scan that 700 MB for the manifest file. If this is near the beginning (i.e. is a vista file with embedded manifest) and this returns no, then we just set up the process and away we go.

If there is no manifest, we scan the entire file. This can take some time, but is still only in the region of 400ms per gig of executable. If we don't need to elevate permissions, then we can now set up our process nearly a second after we double clicked.

The real problem comes if we do need to elevate permissions.

Firstly there is no way to send user-level memory to administrator-level memory. This means we immediately dispose the 700 MB of user-level memory and set up a new process in administrator memory and reload the file. There's another second gone.

But wait, it gets worse. Because UAC is actually a second process, if too much time elapses between when it wants to start up and when it gets to the point where UI is available, any user interaction might force focus elsewhere - and this means that the UAC gets minimised.

Which means that for large executables with no embedded manifest which need elevation, you might end up waiting 3 seconds or more to see that anything at all is happening, and even when you do you might have accidentally minised the UAC dialog, and you'll then need to wait for the toolbar icon to appear before you can get on with your program.

To reiterate:

Small executables = very fast.
Executables with manifests and no elevation = very fast
Executables with manifests and elevation = slow
Executables with no manfiests and no elevation = fast
Executables with no manifests and elevation = very slow.


Btw, a good way of speeding up admin-needing apps with no manifest is to open a command window with admin permissions (small exe = fast) and then ask it to open the offending app, which gives it admin permissions by default, and can therefore just run the damn app. If you're making a big app (>100mb) that needs admin permissions and isn't an installer, split it in half, and get the first one to get admin permissions and immediately launch the second half.




Edit:
I've just realized I've replyed to a eight month-old thread. Stop necrobumping!!

magicalclick wrote:

I am not so sure. Some one can potentially leave a back door for hackers. And it is hard to evaluate every single line of code to make sure that doesn't happen.

If you want open source stuff, it should starts with applications that has been the same since WIN95. Like calculator and Paint. There is an Paint .Net open source project though. It is associated with MS too.

MS does support open source community, as codeplex is the example. But to ask MS to open up their own stuff to the public? It is not a good idea.

Seems that TimeMachine isn't ready for Prime Time either.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1013

Schadenfreude isn't exactly becoming in a person, but it's only natrual in this case; Apple and its fanboys brought this on themselves with the constant bashing, the Win9x BSOD icons, etc.

creditcard wrote:



AndyC wrote:  creditcard wrote:  What is the orginal problem? Code is released under non-GPL license Code gets GPL'd Bug is found Patch is released under GPL Original code now has to be patched in a different (and thus potentially less optimal) way for original license to avoid GPL copyright issues. Repeat from step 2

Copyright typically covers the specific implementation and not how it was implemented. What you are thinking of is patents.

Microsoft so far is the only company or entity I've seen that releases software with these anti-copyleft restrictions. And people wonder why people hate Microsoft so much. Plus, it is a major reason why HD Photo will fail. Firefox and Safari (Webkit) are distributed under a copyleft license.