If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A Croatian college student has created a utility that installs a seriously stripped-down Windows Vista, saying the heft of Microsoft’s biggest desktop OS was just too big to believe. “Who can justify a 15GB operating system?” asked Dino Nuhagic, a fifth-year student from Split, a Croatian city on the Adriatic. Not Nuhagic, or the uncounted users who have turned to his creation, vLite.
vLite, a free program that lets users pick and choose which Vista components, hotfixes, drivers and even language packs are installed, then builds a disk image that can be burned to a DVD for unattended installation of the operating system.
“Why did I do it? Well, it’s performance and work environment,” said Nuhagic when asked why he came up with vLite. “Performance, that’s easy to explain. The less things running, the more responsive the OS. But the environment part is where it gets down to personal preference.”
Those preferences include options for leaving out virtually every component of Windows Vista, from the minor — such as the bundled screensavers — to the major, such as the firewall or Universal Plug and Play.

Link: vLite | vLite Forums
View: Full Article @ Computer World

Ahead of its launch of Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP, Microsoft is planning to ship in late February assessment tools for IT shops so they can get their networks in order and ease any planned migrations. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Solution Accelerator is designed to help IT shops inventory their network, assess the readiness of their infrastructure for a migration and generate reports and recommendations.
The tool is for users planning migrations to Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Microsoft Virtualization technologies (Virtual Server 2005 R2 and the forthcoming Hyper-V), and Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid). Baldwin Ng, of the Microsoft assessment and planning team wrote in a Jan. 26 posting on the MAP blog that the assessment tool would be released on the Web in approximately four weeks. A beta program is already under way.

View: Full Article @ ARN

365 days and 100 million licenses later, enthusiasm for a safe, reliable and engaging Windows Vista experience is high.
Since the worldwide release of Windows Vista one year ago today, people are doing more and getting more out of their Windows experience. From pictures and videos, to games and family safety settings, users are finding out that they can do more with Windows Vista.
We commissioned independent studies from IPSos and NPD to explore the attitudes of users about the operating system not only in the U.S., but also in China, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. According to NDP, 70 percent of these users say it’s an improvement over their previous operating system.
Windows Vista is the first operating system to build in parental controls. And they sure have changed things in the Charney household. For my ten-year-old, Ruby, they’ve helped make sure that her browsing habits are safe. Parental controls have also removed the argument about when she has to stop using the PC because after a certain hour, she simply can’t log on. She participated in that discussion and agreed to the rules, and now we don’t have to have that debate every night.
We’ve worked diligently with industry partners to increase the number of Windows Vista-compatible applications and devices, while also building support for them. While we were happy with what we launched with, we also built the system to update seamlessly with the new technology that has been and will be added every day.
Today, Windows Vista supports over 43,000 hardware products, almost doubling the 23,000 thousand at launch.
We pay a lot of attention to and continually work not only on the performance of Windows Vista but also on people’s experience of performance. We get data from people who file bugs - Microsoft tech support, our OEM partners - and we pay attention to press, bloggers and enthusiasts’ web sites.
Microsoft has invested heavily in security improvements for products for about six years now, and we’re seeing the results of that commitment in Windows Vista. I think it’s fair to say that Windows Vista is proving to be the most secure version of Windows to date.
There are many areas of progress, but I’d like to point to three: the ability to run as a standard user, a set of Internet Explorer capabilities that help protect us from outside threats - the Phishing Filter and improved authentication of secure transactions with Extended Validation SSL - and the efforts of Windows Defender to clean spyware and other potentially unwanted software.
Windows Vista is the first operating system we’ve built with gamers and gaming in mind. Hardcore gamers have responded with more than ten million of them around the world already running Windows Vista
For these gamers, we created a whole new graphics technology and engine in Windows Vista—DirectX 10. A new generation of games is being developed to take advantage of the capabilities of the DirectX 10 compatible graphics cards and Windows Vista, and it’s exciting to see what kind of great experiences this is creating for gamers.
We look forward to providing more exciting experiences for Windows Vista users in the coming year.

News source: Microsoft.com

According to an analysis of the top 100 U.S. Internet properties in 2007 by comScore, social networking giant Facebook.com reaped the benefits of opening registration to all users, jumping 81% versus December 2006 to 34.7 million visitors in December 2007. Facebook is of course still quite behind the social networking site MySpace, but it is quickly gaining. Other highlights of 2007’s major trends in U.S. Internet activity include:

• Wikipedia Sites gained 34% to reach nearly 52 million visitors
• Leading classified site Craigslist.org jumped 74% to 24.5 million visitors
• AT&T grew 27% to 30.2 million visitors (think exclusive iPhone carrier)
• Yellow Book Network jumped by 137% to 10.4 million visitors
• Searches at the five major core search engines increased 15% to 9.6 billion searches
• Google Search Sites increased over 30% and hit 5.6 billion searches
• Yahoo! Search Sites decreased by 4% hitting 2.2 billion searches
• Microsoft Search Sites increased 8% and hit 940 million

Mozilla has given a proof of concept Firefox vulnerability a “high severity” rating because an attacker can collect session information such as cookies and history, according to Mozilla security chief Window Snyder. Snyder said the vulnerability will be patched with Firefox 2.0.0.12, which will be pushed out “shortly.” On Jan. 22, Snyder confirmed a proof of concept vulnerability discovered by researcher Gerry Eisenhaur on Jan. 19. Simply put, Firefox leaks information that can allow an attacker to load any javascript file on a machine. This “chrome protocol directory transveral” is in play whenever there are “flat” files–common in add ons–are installed. Chances are good that most Firefox users will have at least a few of these add ons installed. That’s a lot of data leakage.

View: Full Story @ ZDNet

A breakdown in an international undersea cable network disrupted Internet links to Egypt, India and Gulf Arab countries on Wednesday, and Egypt said it could take several days for its services to return to normal. It was not immediately possible to gauge the impact of the disruption on financial institutions. Egypt’s telecoms ministry said 70 percent of the country’s Internet network was down and India initially said it had lost over half its bandwidth. “This cut has affected Internet services in Egypt with a partial disruption of 70 percent of the network nationwide,” the Egyptian ministry said in a statement. Residents of Gulf Arab countries also reported a slowdown in Internet connectivity.

The Bahrain Telecommunications Co said its services were affected after two undersea cables were cut near Alexandria, on Egypt’s north coast. The Egyptian telecoms ministry said it did not know how the cables were cut or if weather was a factor. Storms had forced Egypt to close the northern mouth of the Suez canal on Tuesday. India also reported serious disruptions to its services and Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India, told Reuters: “There has been a 50 to 60 percent cut in bandwidth.” Chharia told the Headlines Today news channel that a “degraded” service would be up and running by Wednesday night, but full restoration would take 10 to 15 days. “The big operators have transferred their small broadband connectivity through the Pacific route, and that’s the reason there’s no hue and cry in the country,” he said.

View: Full Story @ Reuters

I’ve been working for a while on an upcoming story coinciding with Windows Vista’s first year on the market, and I’ve talked with a variety of people who have been using and working with the Microsoft operating system in different ways.

One of the most interesting perspectives came from Jon Bach, president of Puget Systems, a company in Kent, Wash., that makes high-end custom computers. As a preview, I thought it would be worth sharing some excerpts from his comments …

On the current demand for Windows XP vs. Windows Vista: “Today, we are seeing still slightly stronger Vista demand than XP, but it’s pretty close, maybe 60 percent Vista, 40 percent XP. It was an interesting progression of events following the Vista release, because when Vista first came out, we naturally adopted it very quickly, everyone did, as the next prominent operating system. But we’re a custom builder, so we wanted to continue to provide all options, so we kept XP around so that customers who weren’t all that excited about upgrading had a choice. So we actually developed a little niche for ourselves there when all the big guys — Dell, HP — were going exclusively to Vista. We saw extra-strong XP sales during that time just because we were one of the few people still offering it as an option. But as soon as people realized that Vista had some maturity problems in the code, the big manufacturers promptly added it back. … We’re seeing, you could say 50-50, but it’s a little bit swaying toward Vista.”

On those ‘maturity’ problems in the Vista code: “We’re definitely still seeing them. The biggest problem we’re having is with stand-by — getting computers to go into stand-by and to come out of stand-by. That’s an especially large challenge for us just because we are a custom builder. We can’t just qualify one set of hardware and then use it. It’s different every single time. And so it’s been pretty frustrating. … We had a customer where it was a deal-breaker to not have stand-by, and it was a very high-end system, and he was very upset that stand-by wasn’t working, and so we had to have this conversation of what’s possible and what isn’t, and how his configuration just was not very happy about going into stand-by with Vista. We actually ended up moving him to XP, and it was kind of a frustrating process for everyone, because to him, XP symbolized taking a step back or settling for old software. But really for him, it was the more appropriate choice, because he was looking for stability and things just working — things you find in a mature product, not in a newer product.”

On whether these kinds of problems are normal in the first year after a Windows release: “When XP came out … I remember there was a certain level of problems. With XP it was the Windows 98 applications that would no longer work in XP, and so you had a lot of people frustrated with that, and eventually all the software manufacturers released updates and got everything working in XP, but that was different because that was something where Microsoft was changing the architecture and it was up to the software partners to stay on top of it and release updates. In this case (the stand-by issue) it’s entirely within Microsoft’s code — that is where the problem lies. It has been frustrating, and I think it has been more rocky than in the past, just from the standpoint of Microsoft and what they’re putting out. We have, at least, some hope on the horizon with Service Pack 1 coming out. One of the major things that Service Pack 1 is supposed to tackle is stand-by issues, and so we’re hopeful to see some updates there.”

The story about Windows Vista’s first year is slated to run in Wednesday’s newspaper. Among other things, I spent time in the home of a West Seattle man who has been trying, without success, to get Windows Vista to work with his printer. Microsoft has also offered its perspective for the story, citing progress on a number of fronts. After the story appears, I’ll link to it and post more excerpts from people I spoke with.

In the meantime, feel free to weigh in below.

Source: Seattlepi.com

The internet’s Domain Name System is 25 years old this week.

Paul Mockapetris, chairman and chief scientist at Nominum, is credited with inventing the DNS in 1983.

Mockapetris shared his thoughts on the technology during a ceremony at the Oxford Internet Institute, discussing how it came to be, its impact on the internet and where it is headed.

What started as a small project that few thought would be such an important aspect of communication, the DNS is now part of the internet’s underlying infrastructure and provided an alternative to typing numerical IP addresses for every domain name.

“The DNS is the database for internet communication technology and, with billions of people using it everyday and millions of companies and organisations with registered domain names, the technology is ubiquitous in the developed world,” he said.

“It continues to spread around the globe, and has given us the flexibility to change the way we communicate.

“As more people come online they need rapid, intuitive and safe DNS services that do not require technical expertise.”

Mockapetris added that one of the greatest achievements of the DNS is its ability to adjust to the world’s changing needs.

When the DNS was created, eight years before the introduction of the World Wide Web, a few hundred machines were connected to the internet.

Today more than 130 million are connected, and this number is expected to grow substantially as the majority of the world’s population gets online.

eBay Incorporated plans to lower fees for listing items, raise minimum selling standards, and offer its best sellers incentives and discounts. To improve the buying experience, the company announced it is making changes in three major areas that influence seller behaviour: fee structure, seller incentives and standards, and feedback. The fee changes, which vary by country, are intended to encourage sellers to list more items and use more pictures in listings. The online auction leader is also setting the bar higher for sellers who aspire to its PowerSeller program: qualified PowerSellers will receive valuable fee discounts and better payment protection from PayPal.

Starting February 20 in the U.S., eBay is reducing its fees to list items (called “Insertion” fees) by 25-50%. eBay is balancing that change by increasing the fees it charges when an item is sold (called “Final Value” fees). Sellers prefer this structure, as it lowers their risk if an item doesn’t sell. The company is also eliminating fees in the U.S. for its Gallery option, which should spur sellers to include more photos of the item for sale.

The company is also making its minimum standards more stringent for anyone who sells on the site and will begin requiring a safe payment option, such as PayPal or a major credit card, for sellers who have lower rates of customer satisfaction or who sell in categories that have a high number of buyer complaints.

eBay will begin decreasing search exposure for the listings of sellers who have high rates of customer dissatisfaction, while increasing search exposure for the listings of sellers with the best buyer satisfaction ratings. As well, the company plans to update its feedback system to reinforce healthy, vibrant trading and keep bringing buyers back to eBay.

“Consumers have more choices than ever, and they expect more when they shop online today. We’re serious about making eBay easier and safer to shop. It is our intention to reward great sellers. Sellers that describe items accurately, ship on time, and ship at a fair price will enjoy preferential pricing and discounts on eBay. We think this will significantly improve the buyer experience overall,” said John Donahoe, the President and CEO-elect of eBay.

The Mozilla Mobile team has posted two prototype mobile user-interfaces for you to play with, one for button-driven devices, and one for touch screen devices. Now is a great time to get involved with the mobile project, as the team would like feedback on these UIs. More information is available on Doug Turner’s weblog, and Ars Technica has published a short article about the prototypes.