Entries for earnshaw

Experience the Thrill [Experience the Thrill]

earnshaw — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:13:56 GMT

CEO Ballmer.

in reply to Experience the Thrill

Spend $259.00 -- Get Nothing [Spend $259.00 -- Get Nothing]

earnshaw — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:12:51 GMT

Is Microsoft capable of distinguishing between a bug report and a request for support? Not in my experience.

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W7 and Visual Studio 2008 Like Oil and Water [W7 and Visual Studio 2008 Like Oil and Water]

earnshaw — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 23:40:23 GMT

Now that I've committed one partition on one machine to W7, I find I am unable to use Visual Studio 2008. The Internets (cf. Our Former President)) show people discussing this matter with early builds of W7 back last winter and spring. On my machine, at first Visual Studio 2008 had trouble running MT.EXE. So, I inadvisedly deinstalled Visual Studio 2008. All attempts to reinstall under W7 were thwarted with an error code 2908. This is accompanied by a derogation of the "package" that I am trying to install. I proved that wrong by successfully installing the package under both Windows 2003 Server and Windows XP. One the one hand Microsoft marketing wants people to migrate to W7. On the other Microsoft slaps people hard who do. Paid support over at Dell referred me to Microsoft technical "support" who advises that "support" won't be available for W7 until October 20, 2009, or thereabouts. Should I swear off W7 permanently or will Microsoft explain why their premiere compiler suite doesn't work properly on the latest in operating systems? Just asking. No harm intended to the jobs of people at Microsoft or the corporate entity itself.

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W7 RTM Upgrade Matrix [W7 RTM Upgrade Matrix]

earnshaw — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:50:09 GMT

Where is the upgrade matrix? What SKUs of Vista will upgrade to what SKUs of W7?

Windows Vista™ Enterprise cannot be upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate. You can choose to install a new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate instead, but this is different from an upgrade, and does not keep your files, settings, and programs. You’ll need to reinstall any programs using the original installation discs or files. To save your files before installing Windows, back them up to an external location such as a CD, DVD, or external hard drive. To install a new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, click the Back button in the upper left-hand corner, and select “Custom (advanced)”.

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Digital Rights Management in Windows [Digital Rights Management in Windows]

earnshaw — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:01:35 GMT

As an external observer, it appears that certain Fair Use rights of Copyright audio have been foreclosed by Microsoft, without notice. It is clear that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act put Federal teeth into protecting the rights of music and movie publishers against people who illegal share high quality copies of their material. And, of course, it is only to be expected that something had to be done to stop free distribution of material that cost something to make and, on which, something should be earned by the originator from the sale of every copy. A Windows feature call Secure Audio Path has been around for a while that protects against illegal copying of certain copyright works by reversably encrypting the binary representation of sound from the source to the sound card driver. Interlopers hear random noise. Back in the day, you could hookup a tape recorder and make a copy of the radio station playing in your town. That was called Fair Use, and Congress mandated that manufacturers of magnetic tape put a surcharge on blank tape, as it was assumed that every blank tape would be filled with copyright material. These days, you cannot record the sound coming out of your computer's speakers, because the fear is that what is playing is copyright material. And who are you to record that? You might (gasp!) sell it on eBay. So all sound, with and without pictures, is assumed to be copyright material and is off limits to every Windows user. And without notice from Microsoft. The value of Windows to me would be enhanced were it possible for me to digitally record what comes out of my computer's speakers, which, in my lonely case, is not copyright material. But, it is no longer possible, despite no admission of that fact by Microsoft.

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"I Had No Idea You Could Do That With Windows Vista" ["I Had No Idea You Could Do That With Windows Vista"]

earnshaw — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:18:32 GMT

"I Had No Idea You Could Do That With Windows Vista" Precisely... This is a customer comment from the Mojave experiment. Only after Apple puts on a series of commercials poking fun at Vista does Microsoft set out to demonstrate Vista's new features and advantages. The initial effort in that direction was to sell the thing and let users sink or swim. Of course, Vista works pretty good. You only have to go out and buy a new computer if you want it to perform. And "certified able to run Vista" computers were sold despite the fact that Vista wouldn't run well on said computers. The user interface is something software designers pay not enough attention to, especially when they devise to rearrange an environment that has become familiary to 10s of millions of end users. Designers deign not to produce a map so that users who are used to doing something one way don't have to spend hours discovering how it is done now. And my copy of Vista for 64-bit computers does occasionally lock up.

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Timesharing [Timesharing]

earnshaw — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:09:51 GMT

I have decades of experience with what were called timesharing systems. Much effort was put into making each user's experience satisfying. Many users would logon to a single computer (perhaps several CPUs and a good amount of main memory). Since each user evaluated the computer's performance by how responsive it was for him, the manufacturer put logic into the operating system to ensure that user response time was minimized. That meant that I/O bound batch jobs would run, but not at the expense of giving good response to live, breathing human beings who want answers immediately, not 10 minutes from now. Comes the revolution. Now, everybody has his own computer and very few choices for operating systems. The Microsoft operating system (I think they call it Windows) can be maddeningly unresponsive when an I/O bound process (like a file backup) is running. Even dropping the CPU priority of the I/O bound job is not sufficient to make the user interface responsive. Why is that? Well, I would imagine there is a great deal of disk contention between the user interface-related work and the file backup-related work. Everytime an I/O completes for the batch job, the next-queued I/O for that job gets started from the I/O request queue. Work that gets queued from the not-I/O-bound job has no priority. So, while my file backup job (long running) is active, I can double-click an icon on the desktop and wait ... and wait for the operating system to do all the magic necessary to get the program into memory (from disk) and started executing. This problem was solved very satisfactorily in the 1970s. And unsolved when the Unix-heads started designing operating systems for the 21st century.

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Another Windows Error Message [Another Windows Error Message ]

earnshaw — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:04:16 GMT

I created a compressed folder on a network drive and wrote about 120 gigabytes to it. Then Vista sent me a message: "A file system limit has been reached." That's nice. What limit would that be?

in reply to Another Windows Error Message

$RECYCLE.BIN [$RECYCLE.BIN]

earnshaw — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:44:22 GMT

I notice I have a system/hidden folder $RECYCLE.BIN on my C: drive. It consumes many bytes on my hard drive. Yet, the Recycle Bin is empty. Windows keeps a lot of hidden data around, especially cached web visits. I wonder how an ordinary user can easily reclaim the space. I know about the DISK CLEANUP button and I don't trust it.

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On Vista [On Vista]

earnshaw — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:49:20 GMT

Ballmer opined that users are unhappy with changes to the user interface and that is why Vista is a shock to their peopleware systems and they reject change. Others have noted that hardware manufacturers have been slow to provide drivers for their equipment for Vista. Still others have noted that application programs that formerly worked perfectly, no longer do under Vista. I note that when Microsoft rolls out changed environments, they do so with little regard for preparing the receiving public. It is sink or swim all over again. Perhaps change for the sake of change isn't what the public wants, even if a majority of developers in Redmond are enthusiastic about change. Developers in Redmond get an opportunity to learn about changes over a substantial period of time. The public is confronted with all of the changes all at once. Windows is still better than Unix and its derivatives in most respects. But it is one convoluted ball of yarn.

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What Do You Want Me To Do About It? [What Do You Want Me To Do About It?]

earnshaw — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:49:43 GMT

Speaking of messages from the OS -- how about this? I decide to delete a folder. It contains stuff that I know about generally. However, my task it simply to get rid of it. I open Windows Explorer. I navigate to the folder that contains the folder that I want to delete. I right click the folder I want to delete and click Delete. All is well until the Windows Vista Delete Engine comes across a file whose name is "too long for the Recycle Bin." For some inexplicable reason, this is an event that must be brought to my attention. Frankly, I don't care. And, if I did care, what could I possibly do about it at this point in time? I went in to drain the swamp. I don't need this alligator to come up and tell me about the impact on his habitat.

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Simple Differences Between XP and Vista [Simple Differences Between XP and Vista]

earnshaw — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 02:07:04 GMT

Long ago, Longhorn was touted as the operating system that would make search easier. Then the plug was pulled on that part of the Longhorn project or else Vista would be scheduled for delivery beyond 2019. What was left in the way of search is so awfully different from the mechanisms, that we XP Luddites are used to, that we find them more or less unusable. It is easier to make a share out of a folder, that we want to search, and use XP on a computer on the network to search than to type a search key into some unlabled box and watch as searching apparently happens and eventually displays incorrect results. Another beauty of "improvement" is the default columns for every folder displayed by Windows Explorer, which is tailor-made for 20-something music lovers. Me? I'm interested in each file's name, date/time of most recent update, file type, and file size. Artist is not and rating is not one of my favorite categories. Of course, there must be some way to instruct Vista to use some other default, but that option is buried somewhere in the newly and unnecessarily relabeled Control Panel. Vista is an operating system, not a music box. I just installed SP1 (beta?) of Vista as a volunteer Guinea Pig and found that Vista had evaluated my computer to have a Figure of Merit of 1.0. Someone suggested that I run the Official Microsoft Vista Computer Figure of Merit Calculator. Once I figured out how to do that, Vista reported my computer was 5.0. It also, thoughtfully, turned on Aero, without notice. I can spend entire work days exploring the unknown Universe of Vista. Unhappily, that is not what I get paid to do.

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Set Associations Control Panel [Set Associations Control Panel]

earnshaw — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:41:11 GMT

"This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel." From the Windows Vista operating system. There exists no Set Associations control panel. The file being double clicked has the filename extension .DOC. That should not be a mystery to Windows. In this case, it is. Default Programs in Control Panel looks promising, but it doesn't list Microsoft Office Word as one of the possible programs an association can be created for. Design-wise, this is a non-starter. Help is no help because it has no idea what a Set Associations Control Panel is.

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Clueless Communication to MSDN Subscribers [Clueless Communication to MSDN Subscribers]

earnshaw — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:40:42 GMT

I received today an e-mail from Microsoft about an upcoming shipment that is part of my MSDN subscription. It reads, in pertinent part,

Ship Date	Part Number	Item Name	Quantity	Carrier	Tracking No.
2007-12-18	F1Q-00007	VStudio Pro w/MSDN Pro English NA Subscr MVL DVD VLP	1	MI2	MLV628337

So, what does this tell us? It is Visual Studio Professional that is part of a subscription to the Professional Level of the Microsoft Developer Network. The version is targeted to English speaking customers in North America. The medium is DVD. MVL? Your guess is as good as mine. VLP is Volume Licensing Program.

We know the part number. What we don't know is what it is that is being shipped. I can assume that it is the latest and greatest Visual Studio. But, where in this mess does it say that?

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A Simple Matter of Point and Click [A Simple Matter of Point and Click]

earnshaw — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:20:27 GMT

The advent of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) brought with it the notion that the human/computer interface is therewith so simplified that erstwhile practices, such as rich documentation and focus on usability, were abandoned. Since running every GUI program reduces to a "simple sequence" of points and clicks, one can dispense with documentation. One doesn't, in practice, dispense with documentation. One simply creates "help text" that generally isn't sufficiently helpful, but does stand in for rich documentation, as that requirement sits perpetually on low heat over a back burner. Program complexity hasn't reduced with the GUI. Rather, it has increased as screens full of icons, toolbars, scantily self-explanatory controls, buttons, and scroll bars, have become de rigeur. The user knows, more or less, what task (s)he wants to perform. Yet, the help text and the GUI fail to address tasks and how to perform them. In the bad old days, the user interface was 80-column punch cards. That meant the user had to learn some sort of language with which to communicate with the computer. The language could be simple or complex. But, documenting a language is a much more straightforward process than documenting a series of points and clicks in a GUI. Your grey-haired granny can probably poke and hope her way around the e-mail GUI. Yet some programs defy mastery given the mind boggling complexity of the GUI and the mind blowing obtuseness of the help text. Apparently, explaining how to use a program is of no concern to vendors or purchasers. End users will figure it out or seek employment elsewhere. Finally, the GUI has given us the extreme disadvantage of being unable to automate many mundane processes that heretofore were easily automated. How do you tell a GUI to repeat a process? Microsoft's solution is to have the end user learn an extremely difficult scripting language called VBA, which is completely different from the GUI and an alternative user interface that does not involve pointing and clicking. In the end, this has to do with the nature of program quality. Lots of time and money is expended trying to decode the intent of program implementers. It is not so easy.

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Obtuse Error Message -- One in a Continuing Series [Obtuse Error Message -- One in a Continuing Series]

earnshaw — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 04:51:53 GMT

POST /XX_WEBSERVICES_41/authenticationclient.asmx HTTP/1.1
Connection: close
Host: localhost
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 0
SOAPAction: "http://xxxxxx.com/yyy/Logon"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<soap:Body>
    <Logon xmlns=http://xxxxxx.com/yyy>
      <userName>test</userName>
      <password>test</password>
      <language>1033</language>
    </Logon>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Und the answer is...

9/12/2007 19:16:51 HTML page on localhost:
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:16:53 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 0

Ja. Ist Bad Request. Could you be more specific? Danke.

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The Parameter Is Incorrect [The Parameter Is Incorrect]

earnshaw — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:02:29 GMT

http://www.mdrsesco.biz/TheParameterIsIncorrect.bmp

Grandma doesn't know from parameters. Besides, all I was trying to do was copy a DVD to a blank DVD.

I am at a loss. What am I to do?

This is Windows Vista RTM.

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Unanticipated ASR Behavior [Unanticipated ASR Behavior]

earnshaw — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:03:08 GMT

The following concerns NTBACKUP, the now fully deprecated tool, that has shipped with Windows since the days of Windows NT. Scenario: slow HDD of 120GB capacity is fully backed up using ASR Wizard. And successfully restored to a pair of new, fast 300GB HDDs.

So, once ASR is finished restoring, one finds that ASR has formatted DRIVE 0 with one 120GB partition with everything in it and one enormous unallocated partition with nothing in it. There is an unwritten rule in Windows XP that says you may not extend the partition that contains boot files and/or system files, which, of course, the 120GB partition contains. Also, you may not extend a partition that is not DYNAMIC. Also, you may not extend a partition that was ever a boot partition and was ever BASIC even though it is now DYNAMIC.

I wanted to partition DRIVE 0 as one 300GB partition, but NTBACKUP says no. Windows XP says no. Waahhhhh! I wanted to mirror DRIVE 0 and DRIVE 1, but the parental units (Windows XP, NTBACKUP) say no, no, no.

Apparently, the only way to do what I want to do with the software I have is to format DRIVE 0 and install Windows XP fresh. Then install other software from installation media I may or may no longer own. Then manually restore e-mail and address books. And on and on. The File Settings and Transfer Wizard having been relegated to the category of something that MAY work or MAY NOT.

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MANIFEST PARSE ERROR [MANIFEST PARSE ERROR]

earnshaw — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:14:59 GMT

Those of us who are members of the Microsoft Developer's Network have access to a secret download page where we may, at our leisure, download images of various versions of Windows. Windows XP is a popular example of Windows, which is available by this method. Currently, the wares on display are CD or DVD image files, which one can use to burn one's own installation media. The Windows XP has a known bug in it called the MANIFEST PARSE ERROR bug, Knowledge Base Article ID 331881. There is a certain file embedded in the CD image that contains several syntax errors. That means the CD, that one might create, cannot be used to install Windows XP on a freshly formatted HDD. I conversed with the MSDN Concierge and was placated with a suggestion that I fill out a survey form. Seems to me it would take one Microsoft employee under an hour to remake the image, incorporating a change to one file for distribution to MSDN members. Of course, that must be repeated once per human language times the number of different release versions of XP, like Amateur, Pro, Entertainment Center... Damn. There must be a disk image that was sent to the CD fab plant for each of these variations. One is not going to distribute buggy software for retail sale, eh? Why not put them on the site for download distribution to MSDN members?

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ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION? What ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION? [ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION? What ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION?]

earnshaw — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:13:27 GMT

If you will kindly navigate to http://www.mdrsesco.biz/fcf.bmp and inspect the screen shot there, you will see the program PRIME95.EXE (from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) faulted on what Visual Studio Whidby claims is an illegal instruction. Whidby's debugger is running the program under Windows 2008 Server (Beta), which is running under Virtual PC 2007, which is running under Windows Vista RTM. This happens with or without the debugger and always at the same instruction. PRIME95.EXE does not exhibit this behavior under Windows Vista RTM (without virtualization). What is going on here?

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Unsigned System Files from Microsoft? [Unsigned System Files from Microsoft?]

earnshaw — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:11:19 GMT

I recently installed Windows 2003 Server on a newly formatted HDD. These files appeared unsigned. Is this intended? See screen shot below.

SCREEN SHOT

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Registry Cleaners [Registry Cleaners]

earnshaw — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:47:05 GMT

I downloaded one of the top five Register Cleaners, a computer program that claims to solve problems by correcting inconsistencies and outright errors in the Windows Registry. I recently installed Windows 2003 Server without any additional software except Office. The Registry Cleaner "found" hundreds of problems, and, if I dropped several nickles into their bank account, they promised to fix them. What is going on here? If the Registry becomes corrupt or inconsistent, should not Microsoft Windows notice and correct the problem itself?

The problem that I was trying to correct was at launch of Microsoft Office 2003, specifically, opening a .DOC file. At launch a dialog box opened, telling me that software was being installed. Immediately, another dialog box opened to tell me that Word for Windows could not continue because there was an open dialog box. I ran the REPAIR function of Microsoft Office 2003. It claimed everything was hunky dory. It was not.

The problem went away when I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007.

in reply to Registry Cleaners

Codename Longhorn Server Stall? [Codename Longhorn Server Stall?]

earnshaw — Fri, 04 May 2007 23:22:13 GMT

http://www.mdrsesco.biz/PRIME95_STALL.JPG

shows Windows Longhorn Server running the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), which the OS has determined has failed in some indefinable way and must be closed. The same binary has been running without complaint under XP, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows Vista RTM. Could be a problem that Windows Longhorn Server is running under latest virtual PC software? Hmmm. This has happened 3 times.

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Xanadu [Xanadu]

earnshaw — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 21:18:32 GMT

Microsoft is a garden of Earthly Delights. Slight problem: the curators neglected to put proper labels on the plants and there is no taxonomy. The museum gift shop has books on plants, but out in the garden there is no reference to the books. And, in the gift shop, there are just shelves with books on them in no particular order. Most of plants are named Microsoft Blah Blah Blah, where Blah Blah Blah is everything visitors get to inform them about what the thing is. I'm sure the term SharePoint, to pick a random example, means a great deal to a great many people. To me, it may as well be in Klingon. And I don't sprechen zee Klingon. I know Avalon and Monad, but not the corporate names they became. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I'd never stoop to complain. These are all happy problems.

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Cost of SSL Certificate [Cost of SSL Certificate]

earnshaw — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:09:48 GMT

What is to be gained by paying hundreds of dollars for an SSL Certificate when one can be had for FREE? (This has to do with a web site authenticating itself to users in some obscure way. I suppose the more expensive model has cachet in that a company that is a household name, so to speak, is in charge of vouching.)

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