Category: Microsoft
March 7th, 2008
Asus' 8.9" Eee draws crowds at CeBIT
Here in CeBIT 2008, crowds descended on Hannover Germany to see the latest technologies. Germany is certainly a lovely country but there’s nothing lovable about the 5.60 Euro per gallon gas prices.
CeBIT is certainly one of the more unique conventions I’ve been to since everything is spread out over a square kilometer and it’s like going to 10 mini conventions. While you get some outdoor air between the halls, don’t expect any fresh air with all the smokers there. The temperature delta certainly makes proper attire a challenge because it’s too warm inside and freezing outside.
Asus had a massive presence in building 26 which is one of the more popular spots at CeBIT and they managed to draw crowds wanting to get a closer look at the new and improved 8.9″ Asus Eee PC. The new 8.9″ Asus Eee comes with more SSD flash storage, a bigger LCD screen with 1024×600 resolution, a better quality webcam. The same Pentium M 900 MHz CPU is the same as the original Eee. [See gallery for a close-up view.]
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The Windows XP model comes with 8 GBs of SSD flash memory when the Linux model comes with 12 GB of SSD flash memory. So far we only know that the price will be 399 Euros (which typically means it will be fewer in dollars for the US market), but we don’t know if there will be a price difference between the Linux and Windows XP model. It is possible that the price of the flash memory offsets the licensing costs of Windows XP.While holding the lightweight Eee with one hand, I tested the quality of the Mic and the Webcam and confirmed that the quality if fairly good. The Webcam is definitely much better quality than the old Eee. The Eee also comes with a wired 10/100 Ethernet port as well as 802.11g. The one down side to the Eee is that it doesn’t have a DVI output and instead has a DB-15 VGA port.
Here’s a comparison of the older 7″ Asus Eee versus the 8.9″ Eee. As you can see, the screen is much bigger and the color and contrast appears to be much better. The speakers had to be moved to the bottom of the laptop because the bigger screen pushed them off the lid. You can also see that the track pad is also larger.
I wouldn’t doubt if people buy the 12 GB Linux version and use NLite to install a trimmed down version of XP though having Linux on this device is extremely useful if you’re going to use it as a security auditing tool. The 8 GBs of SSD is more than enough to hold the OS and key applications and a $60 16 GB SDHC card is more than sufficient to hold plenty of movies and data. With the larger screen and nicer webcam and adequate microphone, it becomes a great Skype video conferencing solution. The bottom line is that the Asus Eee is very pleasing in the hands and it runs Windows XP very quickly if you keep bloatware/crapware off of it.
February 28th, 2008
Microsoft's free enterprise search is a must try
At the Heroes Happens {here} event in LA yesterday which saw the launch* of Windows Server 2008, one of the relatively hidden gems of the event in my opinion was Microsoft’s free** Search Server 2008 Express. It’s is a streamline install of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with almost all the enterprise search features that most users would want and is a must download for any Windows Server shop.
Even if you didn’t own Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, or 2008, it would seem like a great way to build a very cheap enterprise search engine appliance with a minimal Windows Server 2003 or above license and a simple 1U server for less than $2000 which is a LOT less than a $30K starting price Google Search Engine appliance with a 500K document cap. Update 7:28PM - Wiredguy in the talkback pointed out that Google’s Mini search appliance starts at $3K, but that only indexes 50K documents and it doesn’t tie in to Active Directory as seamlessly and lacks Exchange support. If you’re a Windows shop with an IIS server sitting around with low CPU utilization which is quote common, adding Microsoft’s Search Server 2008 Express costs nothing.
So why would you want an enterprise search engine for your company or organization? Windows Vista (and XP users who add Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop Search) know how useful it is to have relatively instant indexed search results for any document or email in their computer. But those benefits stop at the local computer because you don’t want every user crawling the network data resources redundantly since it would bring the whole network and server infrastructure to a halt.
An enterprise search engine gives you a centralized intranet website where users could go to a URL like search.mycompany.com and find any document in their entire corporate LAN (and to a lesser extent the WAN and some Internet sites due to bandwidth considerations). Google’s online search engine is great but it’s stopped dead in its tracks at the corporate firewall and there’s no way it can search your Exchange or Lotus Notes mail server or your file server documents. The enterprise search engine bridges an essential gap between desktop search and google.com. Documents or emails that would have been glossed over and forgotten about instantly pop up on the enterprise search server.
The search results are security-trimmed and active directory integrated so that the user will only see the documents that they have permissions to access. With an Intranet IIS web server set for seamless Active Directory authentication, the user merely goes to the search portal and they’re logged in automatically. The server can also be tuned to crawl the network at off-peak hours with full or incremental searches.
Microsoft’s Search Server Express comes preloaded with the following search connectors.
- File servers
- Web sites
- SharePoint websites
- Exchange Server public folders
- Lotus Notes
To make Search Server 2008 Express work, you’ll either need a free SQL Server 2005 Express database backend or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and above. Using the free SQL Express will limit the server to 1 GB and 4 GB database size. Under most document sizes, a 4 GB index should allow you to index more files than the 500K document cap imposed by the $30K edition of the Google Search Engine appliance. Buying a SQL server license will still end up being far cheaper than buying the Google appliance. No matter what your opinion of Microsoft, I think this is one of those things that’s definitely worth a try. Enterprise search is finally affordable and it should become a fixture in any company’s server room or datacenter.
* This was also a 3-month post launch party for Visual Studio 2008 and 6-month pre-launch party for SQL Server 2008.
** People who already own a copy of Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, or 2008.
February 7th, 2008
First experiences with Vista SP1 RTM
[UPDATE 1/12/2008 2:55PM - Looks like my fellow blogger Ed Bott may have pulled through and found the answer in the quotation below. The lesson in this is to always update the motherboard BIOS when upgrading to a new OS. This shouldn't be too much of a surprise since this same rule applies to upgrading memory and CPUs as well.
Ed Bott: 2.07 (BIOS for IBM Thinkpad T60) is ancient, and according to the changelog Vista support was added in 2.09, so your BIOS is not Vista-compatible. The most up-to-date BIOS is 2.20:]
[UPDATE 1/12/2008 2:55PM - It looks like the IBM ThinkPad T60 lockups may have something to do with Vista SP1 after all. It locks up within 30 seconds when I boot the Vista SP1 fresh install DVD or when I boot Windows Vista that was upgraded to SP1 from a different DVD. My IT person loaded Windows XP on the laptop and it runs smoothly. He will load Windows Vista without SP1 and see if it is stable as well. More updates to come. Update 3:15PM - Looks like Vista without SP1 crashes too. This reminds me of the lone desktop machine I had last year that ran fine for a year on XP but was never able to load a fresh install of Vista without it crashing. This could be one of those hardware problems that only manifest itself when being taxed more by something like Windows Vista. Either way, we're trying to get to the bottom of this and this laptop is going back to where we bought it from.]
[Update 3:55PM - Seems like a hardware issue with this specific IBM ThinkPad T60 since Microsoft tells me they have plenty of T60s that are running fine with SP1. I was trying to recover some log files for Microsoft by booting the Windows Vista SP1 fresh-install DVD and it hung there and locked up the mouse too. That would seem to at least rule out DivX and it was a mere coincidence on the exact timing of the lockup. Heck the battery on it is dead too and the screen came with some scratches so it's time this dog of a laptop goes back to the IT department.]
I completed the first two installations of Vista SP1 RTM upgrade last night on to my primary desktop computer and my first Vista laptop meant to be my new work computer. The result is a near death experience with my desktop computer, and then a real death experience with the laptop (caused by hardware and not Vista SP1). I guess I should count myself lucky that it wasn’t my main computer that died since I haven’t migrated to the laptop for work yet. I will try to get some help from Microsoft to see if we can resolve this issue.
Near death with desktop computer:
The desktop computer almost didn’t make the upgrade but finally managed to pull itself out of the gates of hell. The SP1 upgrade on both computers took more than an hour to install along with multiple reboots. When the desktop system finally allowed me to log in, it went in to non-aero mode and it refused to let me flip in to aero. The sound was temporarily messed up but I managed to get it working after I enabled the sound. 5 minutes after I logged in the Windows SP1 upgrade finally told me it was finished which seems strange since you would think the user should be locked out until everything was done. Since I couldn’t get aero running I figured I’d try rebooting but the next reboot just seemed to hang on a black screen with a working mouse pointer for 5 minutes so I tried rebooting again. On that last reboot everything finally came up and I breathed a sigh of relief. [UPDATE 3:55PM - Microsoft says they are working with the driver developers on this to smooth out the install process]
Death of a laptop:
The laptop computer on the other hand went a little smoother on the SP1 upgrade and worked fine for about two hours until I installed the latest DivX codec and the whole machine just locked up after Vista popped up the Windows experience feedback prompt. Now this laptop locks up the entire computer within 15 seconds of logging in and there’s no way I even have time to run system restore to see if I can get it to the state right after I installed SP1. All I see is a locked up Vista screen and the laptop is as useful as a bookend. It is possible that this could be a hardware issue but the laptop was working fine up until this point. [UPDATE 3:55PM - It appears to be most likely a hardware issue with this specific IBM ThinkPad T60 laptop]
I don’t know if Vista SP1 just doesn’t like DivX or if it was just a coincidence and something else is causing this problem. I have the same DivX codec installed on my desktop computer this week but it was installed before last night when I installed Vista SP1. It’s quite possible that installing this version of DivX after SP1 will kill the computer but if this is the true, Microsoft needs to issue a warning and block this codec from installing after SP1 has already installed. If you’re planning on installing SP1 on your computer, DO NOT install DivX codec after you’ve installed SP1 until after I verify what’s going on and update this blog. If you have DivX codec installed already, then it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Minute long login times for domain connected computers
The other problem I was told that Windows Vista SP1 would fix was the minute long login times for a Vista computer joined to an Active Directory. This turned out to be false at least in my case since it still takes 55 seconds of looking at the “Welcome” message after I type in my password. This doesn’t seem to be a problem coming out of suspend mode if you’re already logged in so it would only affect you if you reboot or log off the computer, but it’s annoying as hell and it really makes me think twice before using Vista in a business environment until these issues are solved.
[UPDATE 4:05PM - Microsoft explained to me that until a laptop at least logs in once on the corporate LAN and cache the domain controllers correctly, it will exhibit a 20 second delay per each domain controller the laptop knows of. That's a neat solution and all, but I know quite a few mobile workers who never go in to the corporate LAN and they need a solution where they can simply VPN in and get all this nonsense sorted out automatically and painlessly without flying in to an office with a permanent LAN or WAN connection to the Domain Controller]
Some improvements after SP1
My desktop computer seems to be a lot healthier now after I installed Vista SP1. The Vista install seemed to have gotten corrupted to the point that IE7 was locking up left and right while I kept getting these error messages from Windows Media Center Store Upgrade Manager shown in the figure below. [UPDATE 4:15AM - Looks like I may have spoken a bit too soon and the talkback tool here still locks up IE7 pretty hard on this computer. I'm not sure if it's related to the talkback or something else on that page that's causing it. All I know is that IE7 has been locking up hard on my Windows XP laptop and Vista machine for the last month or more.]
So far that error message hasn’t popped up yet [UPDATE 3:55PM - The message popped up again and it appears I need to rebuild the database score in Windows Media Center] and IE7 seems to have stabilized now and it’s no longer locking up the CPU to 100% utilization on a single CPU core[UPDATE 3:55PM - I'm working with Microsoft to figure this issue out and will update since it's still locking up in the talkback section]
The Windows networking indicator icon shown in the screenshot below seems to be a lot more responsive in discovering your network location. It completes in a few seconds after you log in rather than sometimes wait up to a minute pre-SP1. The laptop (before it died) also exhibited the same responsive network indicator icon. [UPDATE 3:55PM - Microsoft says quite a bit of work went in to the TCP/IP stack. This seems to be a good thing.]
Windows Movie Maker for Vista still a stinker:
If you’re wondering why I even bother with the DivX codec and Dr. DivX video encoder, it’s because Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder 9.0 is old and doesn’t support high definition HDV formats yet and Windows Movie Maker for Vista is still garbage. If you attempt to use Windows Movie Maker to encode HDV videos, it will only encode one corner of the video at standard resolution and leave out most of the rest of the video frame. [UPDATE 3:55PM - Microsoft says they can encode HDV footage without problems so the problem may be caused by some codec conflicts. They also say that Microsoft Expression Encoder ($300) will work much better, though that's quite a bit more money than I want to spend since Dr. Divx is free.] The latest version of Dr. DivX (which requires the DivX codec) will handle High Definition .dvr-ms files and let you encode in to the desired video format for DVD set-top box playback or for YouTube optimized format. I’d love to be able to encode in to the 1080p Windows Media Advanced Profile format that Windows Media Encoder 9 promises but the software simply doesn’t work.
Making things worse, I was hoping Windows Movie Maker which only comes with the Premium or Ultimate Edition would actually be a complete application by now but I would be disappointed again. The old Windows Movie Maker in Windows XP was a free download and it allowed you to select the part of the tape you want to record off your DV camcorder but HDV format wasn’t supported at all. The new Windows Movie Maker for Vista does support HDV format but it teases you by asking you if you want to “Import entire videotape or just parts?”. Then it only gives you the option to “Import the entire videotape to my computer” as shown in the screenshot below. If anyone knows of a cheap or free non-bloated HDV capture program for Windows, please tell me in the talkback.
Fortunately DivX codec and Dr. DivX works on my desktop computer since they were installed before SP1 so I will need to get verification of the problems on my new work laptop.
Now at this point it’s still to early to draw any conclusions about Vista SP1 and the problems I faced may be unique to my particular setup or hardware. It certainly doesn’t make a good first impression for me and you need to be careful anytime you install a major upgrade like this. Please check back here for updates and status reports on these problems.
February 6th, 2008
A dozen free & essential apps for Windows
Every time I build a new Windows computer, there are a dozen free and essential applications that I always install for other people. These applications all seem to fill essential functions and they all seem to be well-behaved installers and uninstallers, in other words it won’t crash your computer or drag it down with gunk. Since they’ve served me so well, I thought I’d compile the list here and share them with you. Without spending a dime of your hard earned money on software, you can now make the most of your computer.
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uTorrent - This is the BitTorrent client that is a must have for anyone who wants an effective file sharing application that allows you to download large files. It was developed by a lone old-school programmer Ludvig Strigeus who wrote a BitTorrent client in a few hundred kilobytes (yes, that’s not a typo) which is a real pleasant surprise in this age of bloated Java applications with 100 MB memory footprints. It was bought out by BitTorrent Corporation which raised some concerns among the user base but the client has retained all of its functionality and the new owners have done a good job of maintaining it.
Skype - This is another killer-app for the modern personal computer. If you haven’t already heard of it and installed it, go get it. It’s the first and one of the few VoIP applications on the market that “just works”. Couple it with a good analog microphone or something like the Polycom Communicator and you will be able to send superb wideband audio which is amazing compared to the normal narrow band audio you get on a telephone. If you add Whiteboard Meeting which has a free limited version, you now have a mission critical business collaboration application.
Add a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000, Quickcam Pro for Notebooks, or Quickcam Orbit AF for as little at $80 for the first two models and you have yourself a very high-quality 640×480 video conferencing solution. Skype’s HQ (High Quality) video conferencing is something you just have to see to believe. The only downside to the HQ mode is that Skype does not support IEEE 1394 camcorders so you have to buy those Logitech webcams if you want the HQ mode. The camcorder supporter would have allowed much longer zoom for use in the living room but unfortunately they don’t have that feature yet. Also note that you need a minimal of 384 kbps uploads to maintain HQ mode.
February 4th, 2008
Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1 RTM today
Microsoft has reached a major milestone today for its Windows Server and Client products. Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service pack 1 have been released to manufacturing today which means they will soon be available to IT customers and consumers. Windows Server 2008 replaces the venerable Windows Server 2003 while Vista SP1 upgrades the somewhat controversial Windows Vista. If this looks like a coincidence that Vista SP1 and Server 2008 launched at the same time, it’s not. These two products share the same kernel and they were finished together and launched together by design.
Windows Server 2008 will have key enhancements in Virtualization both on the OS kernel side and the hosting side, but the hosting side of the equation won’t appear for another six months in the form of Windows Hypervisor. The OS kernel side optimizations come in the form of “enlightened” (AKA paravirtualized) IO optimizations for video, storage, networking, and memory. The Hypervisor will take advantage of these kernel enhancements to reduce the overhead associated with virtualization. Other virtualization vendors will most likely license or negotiate rights to these kernel enhancements in virtualization if they wish to host Windows Server 2008 efficiently. Older server operating systems like Windows 2000 and 2003 server will later be retrofitted with just the I/O optimizations but not the full kernel modifications that optimize Memory and CPU operations.
Windows Server 2008 will also have a stripped down headless operation mode called “Core installation” that increases reliability and security because it reduces the code foot print. This in turn also reduces the need for reboots because components that would normally need to be updated simply won’t be installed in the first place. Server 2008 will also have a fast kernel mode IIS web server as well as enhancements to Routing and Remote Access such as SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol). SSTP puts a NAT- and proxy-friendly wrapper around the PPTP and L2TP protocol for trouble free VPN access.
Windows Vista will get some sorely needed enhancements on stability. The size and scope of enhancements and changes to Windows Vista over previous generation Windows XP has resulted in some major growing pains both in OS and driver stability. While many of these issues have already been hammered out, annoying problems like a minute long wait to login a Vista machine in to an Active Directory domain and slow network file copies are now fixed in Vista SP1. Other controversial features like a Windows Vista kill switch have been removed. On the usability front, the aforementioned SSTP feature in Windows Server 2008 can now be leveraged using the new SSTP client in Windows Vista SP1. In the coming weeks, I will be eager to test both of these products.
January 28th, 2008
Steve Ballmer then and now?
That was then …
This is now? Ok, maybe it was 6 years ago?
Alright, I’ll try to stop laughing now while I finish this post. I saw the first video a few months ago and the second video I got from Fake Steve Ballmer. I think the first video was true and it was obviously from the late 80s. The second video could be a gag Microsoft posted for laughs or someone did a really good edit job. I don’t know who the man pushing him out of the way is. I don’t know who the CEO talking about fewer helpdesk calls is but he sure sounded like Mike Cox (our favorite talkback CIO).
January 18th, 2008
Don't believe the low bit-rate 'HD' lie
Update 6:00PM - Here’s what fake HD video looks like.
Last week at CES, Comcast announced their “HD” video on demand download service over its future DOCSIS 3.0 that allows 4 minute downloads of entire HD movies. Attendees at MacWorld this week were told that disk-based HD formats like HD DVD and Blu-ray are essentially obsolete because you can simply download “HD” movies from your Apple TV 2.0 box on demand. Microsoft started offering HD downloads for the XBOX360 starting in late 2006. You can even watch “HD” videos from ABC right from the web. There are even YouTube competitors that offer user uploaded “HD” content. There’s just one minor little problem, it’s not HD.
As I’ve tried to educate my readers last year with my blog “Why HD movie downloads are a big lie“, these so-called HD movies use very low bit-rates compared to even standard definition DVDs let alone something like HD DVD or Blu-ray DVD. Raw uncompressed 1080p video at 60 frames per second is about 3000 mbps so even HD DVD’s 28 mbps needs to be compressed about 107 to 1 with the H.264 or VC-1 codec. By all reasonable standards this needs to be the minimum bit-rate for acceptable loss in quality on 1080p video.
Updated 4:30PM - Standard definition 480i DVD movies are typically 5 to 8 mbps (megabits per second) MPEG-2 whereas these so-called HD wannabes weigh in at a pathetic 1.5 to 4 mbps of 720p H.264. Apple’s new HD service is capable of 4 mbps which simply isn’t enough to be considered HD. XBOX360 downloads are 6.8 mbps 720p VC-1 so they’re semi-decent borderline HD. Marketing will push the nicer sounding “720p” aspect of the video but they don’t tell you it’s way too compressed to offer good video fidelity. Blu-ray has a maximum bit-rate of 40 mbps while HD DVD offers a maximum of 28 mbps. Over the air broadcasts can be up to 24 19.38 mbps.
Modern video compression codecs like H.264 or VC-1 can hide these compression artifact problems much better than MPEG-2 video compression but there’s only so much it can do. At best you might get away 50% more compression over older compression technology but 1.5 to 4 mbps H.264 will not be better than 8 mbps MPEG-2 under most video complexity requirements. The only time 4 mbps 720p will look better than 8 mbps 480i is when the video on the screen is almost entirely stationary or it’s a low-complexity video such as animation movies. Under most normal circumstances, the low bit-rate 720p so-called “HD” video will be inferior though many companies are betting that consumers won’t know any better.
So the bottom line is that so-called “HD” video from Microsoft’s XBOX360 HD download service and Apple’s new Apple TV service or any other web download service is simply not HD by any respectable definition. These companies cannot and should not use the “HD” name with video that is lower fidelity than standard DVD. As for Comcast, there’s not much detail on it but I highly doubt it’s more than 4 to 8 mbps even on DOCSIS 3.0 because its 160 mbps total capacity is divided between 50 to 400 customers. Only FiOS technology with its massive 620 mbps per 32-user capacity and possibly U-Verse (but slower than real time) has sufficient last-mile capacity to deliver true HD movie downloads at the quality of HD DVD and Blu-ray technology.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy these services from Apple, or other services that offer low bit-rate 720p video downloads, but consumers must be aware of the fact that they’re slightly worse than a 1080p up-converted DVD. Microsoft’s XBOX service is border-line HD that is slightly better than DVD but nowhere near 1080i over-the-air HD broadcast quality.
December 24th, 2007
Vista deactivates me for upgrading motherboard firmware
Updated 8:40AM - After going to “Windows Help and Support” in the start menu, I searched for Activate and the second choice was “Activate this computer”. Using the phone option I called an 800 number and spent 3 minutes waiting and 3 minutes talking to a person. I didn’t have to give him any keys and simply explained what happened. He gave me a 48-letter activation code and I was on my way. That wasn’t too bad but the whole process is rather silly and a waste of my time.
Twas the day before Christmas and all I got from Microsoft and MSI was Vista’s kill switch, a buggy motherboard BIOS, and horrible tech support from MSI. The following is the screenshot of what I saw after I upgraded my problematic motherboard’s (MSI P965 Platinum) BIOS firmware.
After switching to two larger 1 GB memory DIMMs so I can use the four 512 MB DIMMs for other systems, the system became very unstable. The memory tested fine under memtest and worked fine with other systems so I immediately suspected the motherboard and tried to update the BIOS firmware. Vista’s crash analysis later told me that there was a problem with the BIOS and the memory and also recommended an update, but it didn’t warn me that upgrading the BIOS would trigger Vista’s kill switch.
I tried to upgrade the BIOS to version 1.7 but the BIOS update was faulty and both the online Live Update or booting from a CD to DOS bombed with an error message of “Error: Problem erasing flash050000 (31%)”. MSI tech support was absolutely NO help to me and they simply told me to redo the update from DOS (which I already told them I tried) or they told me to go back to the vendor I bought it from. Eventually MSI support told me to download it again and I noticed that version 1.8 was available and I managed to use version 1.8 to upgrade my MSI P965 Platinum board.
Anytime you upgrade a motherboard BIOS you pretty much have to hold your breath because a botched installation will result in a bricked motherboard. But Microsoft seems to be well on its way to bricking my Operating System after I successfully upgraded my BIOS. Now I’m going to have to call Microsoft tech support and see how I’m going to resolve this headache. I’ll update this post with how they respond.
Oh and I hope your Christmas gifts are a lot better than mine. Merry Christmas and happy holidays!
December 4th, 2007
Firefox vs. Internet Explorer: No real security winner
The rhetoric coming from Microsoft and Mozilla has heated up in recent days on who is doing a better job on web browser security. I’d prefer to frame the debate in terms of who is doing worse than the other because both companies have had lots of security issues with their respective browsers. Both companies have vastly improved since the days of Firefox 1.5 versus Internet Explorer 6.0, If each one of these vulnerabilities were a zit on their faces, would they be bragging publicly that they have fewer zits or who pops them quicker?
but each browser leaves much to be desired when you look at the vulnerabilities that have continued to come out.
Microsoft came out and gave a report that showed IE has fewer software flaws than Mozilla Firefox and they want us to believe this is the most important metric. Mozilla hit back saying that time-to-patch is a more important metric. Both of these metrics are important and should be debated publicly so that the user can make informed decisions. However, “time-to-patch” (the time a vulnerability is publicly known until it’s patched) should not be confused with time-vulnerable since that is determined by the length of time a product has been publicly available to the time it becomes patched.
It is true that once a vulnerability is publicly known that this is a more dangerous time since more people know about the vulnerability but we should not assume that the software was “safe” before the vulnerability was known. This is why number of vulnerabilities plays an equally important role in determining the security level of software because it indicates the quality of the auditing done before the software is released to the public. Patching known critical vulnerabilities in a timely manner is important but that should never excuse shoddy code auditing and the converse of that statement is also true. Microsoft patches slower but has better code auditing while Mozilla patches critical vulnerabilities faster but permits more vulnerabilities to get past their auditing process. Clearly each company can learn from the other and each company is failing in overall security.
One other issue that has come up in this spat is Mozilla’s Mike Shaver who says flaw count is misleading since Microsoft hides patches in service packs. That’s a really silly argument since there hasn’t been a Microsoft Windows desktop OS service pack since 2004 with the release of Windows XP SP2 and all the comparisons that have been made are post SP2. All the other talk of silent fixes are light on actual details and it’s awfully hard to make changes to a browser without the public knowing about it and Microsoft would get skinned alive if they made a change to a product without informing their customers about it. No one to my knowledge has given a specific example of how Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has had any silent or bundled fixes yet so we can’t really factor this in until someone shows an example. Furthermore, the difference in flaw count isn’t some small margin that can easily be explained away by bundled or silent fixes, the gap is almost a 2 to 1 ratio between Firefox 2.0 and IE7.
<Next page - Internet Explorer 7 versus Firefox 2.0 vulnerability comparison>
October 31st, 2007
Microsoft Unified Communications shuns G.722 wideband interoperability
Microsoft launched its UC (Unified Communications) products this month with the intention of replacing the traditional PBX. But before it can get to a dominant market share position if it ever gets there at all, it’s going to have to interoperate with existing telephony systems on the existing standards that are in place. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the current UC products will not be able to interoperate with the most commonly implemented patent-free wideband codec G.722 in existing high-end SIP phones. This means Microsoft’s UC phones will be restricted to narrowband calling when it tries to dial wideband enabled IP phones from Cisco, Polycom, Avaya, Snom, Linksys, Mitel, Grandstream all of which use standardized G.722. Microsoft UC phones will instead go its own route and use its own proprietary wideband codec called RTAudio and a proprietary Polycom codec G.722.1 called “Siren”.
I had asked Microsoft about G.722 compatibility during WinHEC in May and I got an answer when I got back home after the show and I was shocked to hear that it didn’t support it. I spoke with members of the UC product team to let them know of my disappointment and argued from a practical perspective why Microsoft should simply add the royalty free standardized codec to their UC platform. What I got in response was how none of Microsoft’s customers were asking for G.722 interoperability and how old and inferior the codec was. I told them that from my perspective as a former IT person, I would not be happy with this incompatibility and that it’s unlikely that their customers would even know to ask about such a thing.
I contacted Polycom after the initial Microsoft meeting to see if their “HD Voice” branded wideband IP phones would support G.722.1 so that it could interoperate with the UC phones. It turned out Polycom wideband “HD Voice” IP phones only supported G.722 and G.722.1 “Siren” is only used in Polycom’s high definition video conferencing products. I then had a conference call in June with Polycom CTO (and cofounder) Jeff Rodman to discuss how the world of Video conferencing and telephony don’t interoperate at wideband. Jeff Rodman explained that the phones not only have limited processing capability but limited memory. While certain compression algorithms may be computationally feasible, they won’t necessarily fit in the memory space of standalone IP Phones. This may be the reason that G.722 - while not as effective in compressing wideband audio at lower bitrates - is the only codec that is universally supported.
Fancier codecs like RTAudio and G.722.1 which produce smaller streams at the same quality level are more suited to high-end video conferencing end points and general purpose computers that have more than enough CPU and memory to handle the workload. So while G.722.1 and RTAudio may have better compression ratios with wideband audio streams of 32kbps, it may be too complex for dedicated hard IP Phones. While G.722 produces a less compressed 48 to 64 kbps wideband stream, the difference isn’t as big when you factor in the 18.8 kbps of IP/UDP/RDP header overhead on a TCP/IP network. By the time header overhead is counted, we’re really comparing 66.8 to 50.8 or at worst 82.8 versus 50.8.
So now that Microsoft has launched their Unified Communications product, I went back to Microsoft to ask for a status update. Unfortunately it was pretty much the same arguments I heard back in may and here is the official reply Microsoft sent me last week.
“From a customer perspective, we have not had any requests for adding this codec to our stack. Further, while the Polycom HD SIP phones support G.722, we haven’t seen large installations use this codec. From a technical perspective, 722 was first developed for ISDN video conferencing – it’s quite old. As a result, it doesn’t support the same level of resiliency to packet loss or use of bandwidth on the wire that more modern codecs like RTAudio provide. It’s critical that we provide our customers the best possible quality of experience with Office Communications Server 2007 and at this time we don’t see G.722 support as advancing that goal forward.”
As I told Microsoft in person, I don’t have a problem with advanced codecs like RTAudio and G.722.1 but I do have a problem with lack of interoperability. At this point in time I think it would be fair to say that G.722 enabled devices absolutely dwarf Microsoft UC devices. Interoperability shouldn’t be something that you only do when a large enough customer threatens to avoid Microsoft’s UC products unless they make their products interoperable. Furthermore, I doubt Microsoft actually took a poll of its customers or advertises the fact that they can’t do G.722 which is the only wideband codec support on all the other IP phones on the market.
Microsoft has made a lot of progress in recent years in the area of openness and I fear this is a regression to the old closed Microsoft. I actually have some high hopes for Microsoft’s UC platform and I especially like the fact that you can set up your own web conferencing portal. I’ve deployed Microsoft’s conferencing products all the way from Exchange Conferencing Server to Microsoft Live Communication Server 2003. I still intend to fully evaluate the new Office Communication Server 2007 but the lack of G.722 interoperability and the UC team’s attitude towards this matter has soured things for me especially when they admit it’s trivial for them to add G.722 compatibility. I think there is plenty of room for a product that can free us from the tyranny of proprietary PBXs but only if the liberator adopts open standards.
October 27th, 2007
Microsoft blocks FairUse4WM v2 after 3 months of DRM free music
Just over a year ago when hacker “Viodentia” wrote FairUse4WM and broke Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM scheme wide open, Microsoft responded with record urgency in a mere 3 days. But when Viodentia came back as “Divine Tao” and wrote a second major revision of FairUse4WM this July and broke Microsoft’s Windows DRM scheme wide open again, Microsoft didn’t seem to be as concerned and spent their usual 3 months to patch the issue. As of the last patch Tuesday, the current version of FairUse4WM no longer works so the ball is in the hacker’s court again to break Microsoft’s latest DRM revision.
Services like Napster, and the recently shut Urge service all rely on Microsoft’s Windows Media protection scheme for their music subscription services. The instant you stop paying the monthly subscription fee, all the music that you’ve downloaded stop working. If you can just rip out the DRM protection in a matter of seconds for a hundred songs, then one could conceivably download the entire music library in a month’s time, rip out the DRM, and have all the music indefinitely.
This is precisely what FairUse4WM can do though it was written for paying customers who wanted to have more flexibility with there music. There are many portable music playback devices that support the Windows Media format but not Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM scheme. So even if you are a paying customer, your music won’t work on many of those devices and it can be a frustrating experience for consumers. For those customers who wish exercise their fair use rights, they’ll have to go back to the old analog method of converting their music until the next version of FairUse4WM comes out.
October 24th, 2007
Sun launches Intel Workstation on X38 platform
Following last month’s launch of dual-socket and quad-socket Intel-based servers, Sun Microsystems launched its first Intel based workstations in two decades. The Sun Ultra 24 Workstation is based on the latest Intel X38 chipset (which replaced Intel’s 975 chipset).
Equipped with Intel quad-core processors, up to 8 GBs of ECC (Error Correcting Code) DDR2-667 memory, and NVIDIA’s Quadro FX graphics cards, the Ultra 24 is targeted at the CAD (Computer Aided Design) market. When I asked Sun what this meant for Sun’s SPARC based workstations, Sun replied that they will continue to sell SPARC as long as there are customers buying them and they still have customers buying SPARC today.
Sun sent me the following standard configurations:
- B21-TAZ1-AA-512DT $995.00
*Sun Ultra 24 Workstation ROHS-6; 1 * Intel Core2 Duo E4400 2.0Ghz, 512MB Memory, 1 *250GB SATA HDD, NVIDIA NVS290, 1 * DVD-ROM, 1 * 10/100/1000 BaseT Ethernet port, 2 * 1394 Firewire, Audio, 6 * USB2.0 ports, 2 * full-length PCI slots, 4 * PCI-Express slots, Solaris license. Solaris 10 and Sun Development tools pre-installed. - B21-TNZ1-AA-1GDU $1,445.00
Sun Ultra 24 Workstation ROHS-6; 1 * Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz, 1GB Memory, 1 *250GB SATA HDD, NVS290 Graphics, 1 * DVD-ROM, 1 * 10/100/1000 BaseT Ethernet port, 2 * 1394 Firewire, Audio, 6 * USB2.0 ports, 2 * full-length PCI slots, 4 * PCI-Express slots, Solaris license. Solaris 10 and Sun Development tools pre-installed. - B21-TGZ1-AC-1GDU $1,835.00
Sun Ultra 24 Workstation ROHS-6; 1 * Intel Core2 Duo E6850 3.0Ghz, 1GB Memory, 1 *250GB SATA HDD, NVIDIA FX 1700, 1 * DVD-Dual, 1 * 10/100/1000 BaseT Ethernet port, 2 * 1394 Firewire, Audio, 6 * USB2.0 ports, 2 * full-length PCI slots, 4 * PCI-Express slots, Solaris license. Solaris 10 and Sun Development tools pre-installed. - B21-TSZ1-AA-2GDU $2,335.00
Sun Ultra 24 Workstation ROHS-6; 1 * Intel Core2 Quad Extreme QX6850 3.0Ghz, 2GB Memory, 1 *250GB SATA HDD, NVS290 Graphics, 1 * DVD-Dual, 1
* 10/100/1000 BaseT Ethernet port, 2 * 1394 Firewire, Audio, 6 * USB2.0 ports, 2 * full-length PCI slots, 4 * PCI-Express slots, Solaris license. Solaris 10 and Sun Development tools pre-installed.
Despite the fact that each system is shipped with a Solaris license, Sun also supports a wide range of operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Red Hat Linux.
The Ultra 24 comes with a hot-swap SATA or SAS 4-drive cage that is accessible when the side panel is removed. Since this is based on the Intel X38 chipset, it is fair to assume that it is using Intel’s ICH9R RAID storage controller which is the same one used in the other 3-series motherboards like the G33 and P35. If you want to use SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) which is typically used in servers, you will need to use an add-on PCI-Express storage controller.
At this point in time, only Intel’s 65nm dual- and quad-core desktop processors are available but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Penryn-based desktop processors being added to the Ultra 24 product line as early as November when Intel launches their 45nm Penryn-based products. With the Intel 45nm launch coming in a month, I would highly recommend holding off until you can order 45nm CPUs with 50% more cache and SSE4.1 instruction set. I’m sure Sun and Intel would prefer that you buy now but I’m sure even they understand that there will inevitably be some Osborn effect in effect here with the 45nm launch so close.
While I haven’t reviewed this workstation first hand yet, I have to admit the prices look decent for a brand-name workstation and the hardware specifications look good. With Sun’s recent moves in to the Intel Server/Workstation business and selling Microsoft Operating Systems, Sun seems to have shed some of its SPARC and Solaris only religion and I think this can only bring good things to the company. IBM certainly has no love for Microsoft or Intel but it doesn’t stop IBM from being huge partners of Microsoft and Intel while making a bundle of money at it.
October 22nd, 2007
Build the $340 NAS for half the price but double the speed
The thing that has always bothered me with the NAS (Network Attached Storage) market for consumers is that it’s very high margin yet the products deliver very poorly on performance. While that might be great for the product manufacturers bottom line, it isn’t so great when you’re the consumer. Typical NAS devices that allow you to insert 4 to 6 drives cost anywhere between $500 to $1000 yet they only deliver between 15 to 30 megabyte/sec of performance when they imply gigabit (125 megabyte/sec) performance to the consumer in their advertising.
While I think most consumers don’t mind paying a small premium for something that is pre-assembled and easy to use out of the box, I don’t think they’re happy about paying a 100% premium while getting less than half the performance. I’ve come up with an alternative solution for half the price and more than double the network performance and you can have this solution so long as you’re willing to do a little PC building and you follow my parts list. If you’re not sure how to build a PC but you’re willing to learn, you can follow this step-by-step picture guide.
For $340 you will be able to build a NAS server running a free Linux server operating system from any of the major distributions like Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat, etc.
| Part | Price |
| G33 motherboard with ICH9R RAID controller | 141 |
| Intel 2140 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo | 75 |
| 1 GB DDR2-667 RAM | 30 |
| 300W 80% efficiency silent PSU | 43 |
| Cooler Master Elite 330 ATX ($45 pickup at Fry’s minus $20 rebate) | 51 |
| Total (shipping included but not taxes) | 340 |
With a slight upgrade to $442 you can get it with a 5-drive hot-swap SATA backplane cage which I reviewed here. Note that the SATA hot-swap cage requires some small modifications to the chassis since there is a small metal lip between each 5.25″ drive module.
| AMS 5-drive SATA hot-swap backplane (model DS-3151SSBK) | 102 |
| Total w/hot-swap cage (w/shipping) | 442 |
I do like the feature set and relative ease of use of Windows Home Server (for people not familiar with Linux), but I have been disappointed with the steep system builder price of $185 when the hardware is barely double the cost of the software. I’m sure the OEMs like HP are getting a much better price for Windows Home Server but that doesn’t really help the home system builders who buy one at a time.
| Windows Home Server | 185 |
| Total w/WHS and hot-swap cage (w/shipping) | 660 |
You could run Vista Premium which is around $110 OEM price and that will give you basic network file hosting capability along with the media center capability so this is a great option for people who want Windows. Linux plus MythTV will also let you do the network file sharing and TV recordings and that’s free if you can deal with Linux.
| Windows Vista Premium | 117 |
| Total w/Vista Premium and hot-swap cage (w/shipping) | 559 |
Double duty as a Media Center PC
Note that you’ll need to borrow a CD or DVD ROM drive to install the OS or you can just throw in a cheap DVD burner for $30. Having the optical drive might be useful since you can also stick in a TV tuner card and have this system perform double-duty as a NAS and Media Center PC which doubles your utility without spending a lot more money or using a lot more power. It makes little sense to buy a totally different system for the Media Center PC and waste the extra 60 watts of power to run a separate box. The nice thing about this arrangement is that you already have all the storage at your disposal for your video recordings and there isn’t a better place to put all your videos. The other great thing about having a system like this is that you can host additional virtual servers using free hypervisor software from Microsoft and VMware.
System power and performance specifications
This system without the hard drives will consume roughly 42 watts during idle and each hard drive you add will add roughly 9 watts to the idle power consumption. Peak power consumption in the system will be around 75 watts without the hard drives and each hard drive peaks at around 13 watts during busy read/write cycles. The peak power consumption fully loaded with 6 typical 7200 RPM hard drives is 153 watts during peak CPU and storage operation. During system power-up, each drive consumes up to 30 watts so it’s possible to see 200 watts of power consumption for a few seconds when the hard drives go from 0 to 7200 RPM so the 300 watt power supply (smallest ATX model you can buy) is overkill.
Note that Western Digital now sells hard drives with half the idle/peak power consumption and the 750 and 1000 GB drives are between $220 and $300. Compared to 500 GB drives you can buy for $110, the larger capacities are a bit expensive per GB.
Performance-wise you can expect to see about 70 megabytes/sec over a gigabit LAN which is twice as fast as the $1000 commercial NAS devices you can buy over the shelf. With the new ICH9R RAID controller you can actually expect to see close to 300 megabytes/sec of disk sub-system performance but you’ll be limited by the speed of the gigabit network when you factor in overhead to around 70 MB/sec. If you don’t have a gigabit switch, they’re as cheap as $36 with jumbo frame capability. For more on how to effectively configure and use all this capacity, you can read Best storage strategies for the multimedia PC.
October 10th, 2007
The all-in-one dual-core VESA Stand PC mod
Can you spot the PC in this picture? It’s behind the 22″ LCD display and it’s actually holding up the LCD. [See my image gallery for more and larger photos.] There’s plenty of room under the display for all your important stuff. Now you can actually put your CENTER speakers in the center rather than off to the side because the LCD monitor stand is taking up center. The Polycom Communicator also found a home underneath the LCD taking center stage. There’s also a convenient power strip right under the display so you don’t need to crawl under the desk. There’s even flat space above the LCD for things like speakers and video cameras.
Last week I had The poor man’s all-in-one PC for $380 and The 22″ dual-core all-in-one game PC for $765. Last weekend I bit the bullet and labored 2 full days to build the all-in-one dual-core VESA Stand PC. This piece of oak board in the photo was sacrificed in the making of this PC because your’s truly is an absolute noob when it comes to wood working and thought he could do this project with a jig saw. I ended up buying a table saw and spent 6 hours assembling it (3 hours wasted because I got a defective unit). I had to exchange the table saw because the lifting/lowering mechanism was jammed. Once the saw was up and running, it didn’t take long to cut the wood.
After 6 hours of hard labor (most of the time figuring out what to do), I cranked out this box. I learned the hard way that this type of real birch wood is hard to work with and I used the wrong saw blade for it.
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I should have gotten a nail gun but those things aren’t cheap. I also didn’t counter sink the screws which made them stick out a little. I didn’t have enough clamps and I didn’t use them properly. Oh well, I did the best I could since I’ve never really done any wood work and next time I know better.
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This was a $20 VESA LCD mount that supports tilting and quick release. I had to get something that didn’t make the LCD stick out too much and tip the entire box over.
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Just finished mounting the motherboard and power supply. I screwed up the screw location for the PSU so I need to fix that. I haven’t decided where to permanently mount the hard drive yet so that’s just held there by tape and a single screw.
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The back plate was made of thin wood since it’s not load bearing. The fact that “1/4 inch” wood isn’t actually 1/4″ thick also threw me for a loop when this board was 1/16th inch shy of 1/4″.
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I used two one-foot long power cords to power both the VESA Stand PC and the LCD display. It certainly helps reduce cable clutter.
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Looking at the entire PC from the side, it really doesn’t take all that much room. While it’s certainly no work of art like the Apple iMac, I can load this thing up with inexpensive standard components with higher performance and I have more usable desk space.
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I’ve got a small Wi-Fi antenna hiding behind that LCD stub on the bottom (visible in first photo) that I’d like to get rid of but can’t thanks to Acer’s poor design.
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I probably could have made it cleaner if I used a Blue Tooth keyboard and mouse since that only requires a small USB dongle like this Microsoft Wireless Entertainment 7000. Those are a bit more expensive and they use 2.4 GHz which may degrade Wi-Fi because of signal leakage.
Well there you have it ladies and gentlemen, the all-in-one PC using industry standard components. The PC mod spirit is alive and well.
October 9th, 2007
OLPC is the PC you can't ever criticize
As Nicholas Negroponte said a year and a half ago in a presentation on the OLPC: “people really don’t want to criticize this because it is a humanitarian effort, it is a non-profit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid actually”. When I dared question the need for OLPC mesh networking (criticism on client-side mesh topology and not fixed wireless mesh or wired mesh) since it is a solution to a problem that can be solved a lot cheaper and better though other means, I got flooded with harsh words and intimidation. I’ve had people accuse me of being a first world rich snob even though I was actually born in the third world and went to a mud-made school with holes for windows and doors. I even had one person in the past get so personal in a forum that he accused me of hating children, including my own.
When the Indian minister of education Sudeep Banerjee did when he said that the OLPC was “pedagogically suspect” last year, he was quickly dismissed. Now we have New York Times pundit David Pogue has accused the education minister of fearing a change in the status quo and losing his job though he didn’t have the courage to call him out by name but it’s fairly clear what he meant. Now I’m not going to sit here and say you can’t criticize the India minister of education, but it’s pretty silly when you consider how well India educates its children when PC penetration in that country is a mere 5%. Pogue also went on to say that the obstacle to the XO’s (that’s the name of the green OLPC machine) isn’t technology but “big name computer makers” fearing the loss of a two-billion-person market. I guess Pogue was afraid to call out Microsoft and Intel by name since those are the usual scapegoats for the conspiracy to kill the OLPC. Never mind the fact that Microsoft has been working with OLPC project and Intel is actually on the board of the OLPC project, we can’t ever blame the OLPC or the project for being too expensive and not delivering on promised features. It’s always someone else’s fault that foreign governments are only happy to sign on for the OLPC so long as someone else signs the check.
Pogue raved about the “famed $100 laptop” (what’s +$100 among friends) in a video embedded in the same article on page one quoting the battery specs and the mesh feature though I have yet to see an objective analysis of the actual battery life and I have yet to see a successful implementation of client-side mesh topology. But when it came to actual criticism such as the boot times and application load times, Pogue thought that was just fine since “it isn’t for snarky bloggers it’s for poor kids in other countries”. But that kind of self-righteous arrogance made me very uncomfortable and what is it about poor kids in other countries that makes it ok for them to have long boot times (2 minutes when I tried it last spring) and application load times (20 seconds when I tried it last spring)?
Maybe if it wasn’t possible to build a responsive $200 laptop, then the OLPC XO’s sluggishness might be an excusable shortcoming but the $230 (basic model with Wi-Fi) Asus Eee has already shown 15 second Linux boot times and Intel Classmate works just fine too. Instant boot was actually one of Negroponte’s key selling points in the same presentation he gave where he said you couldn’t criticize the OLPC. Negroponte criticized modern bloated PCs (only if you have too much Crapware which can be removed) and promised that the OLPC will make computing wonderful again with instant boot. Yet the reality is that OLPC turned out way more sluggish. But since no one is allowed to criticize the OLPC, I guess everyone is overlooking that minor detail. The OLPC is the one PC you can’t ever criticize or give an honest assessment of because you’ll be bashed like there’s no tomorrow.
October 4th, 2007
Are thin clients the solution to all your security woes?
Our UNIX/Linux blogger Paul Murphy posted an interesting link to an article entitled: Information Security: 7 Data Leaks you can’t Ignore written by Matt Roedell. Unfortunately, I think Paul missed the point of it by attributing the issue to “Wintel infrastructure” and claiming the solution is to go thin client with Sun Rays. Security unfortunately isn’t so simple that it can be fix it with any single product and most of the risk vectors have nothing to do with whether you use Windows or Intel products. The cure-all solution in the security industry is one of the most ubiquitous forms of snake oil and there simply is no such thing. Let’s take a look at these vectors for data leakage.
Data leakage via removable media:
Under #1 and #2, Roedell listed USB mass storage devices and Optical drives. I’m going to lump these two things together and add floppy drives to the list. Roedell put a $0 price tag on Optical Drives because those can be disabled via Microsoft’s Active Directory Group Policy but he put a $50K price tag on 300 licenses. I’m going to set that to $0 because USB mass storage devices can also be disabled via group policy by importing this ADM file. Floppy drives can also be disabled via Group Policy not to mention the fact that we don’t have to put floppy drives and optical drives in to the computers in the first place.
Stolen laptops:
Laptop security is a huge pain point, but it’s something you’re going to have to deal with when you have mobile workers. It would certainly be a lot easier on IT if there were no laptops, but companies are not going back to the dumb terminal and mainframe days. Until there is fast, inexpensive, reliable, and universal wireless connectivity, data will have to be stored on the laptop for offline access. As long as data sits on the laptop, I don’t care what operating system you use you’re going to have to use reliable encryption software with reliable key management technology. Government regulators will not care if you tell them you lost a MacBook or Linux-based laptop with sensitive data on it.
EFS folder-level encryption comes free with Windows XP but that only works if you don’t give the user admin rights (a good idea if you can get management to sign off on it) and encrypt all the user folders with an automated policy. Vista Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition comes with Bitlocker and EFS. There are companies that sell add-on products both with software only or software/hardware solutions. There are even hard drives from companies like Seagate that have encryption technology built in to the firmware. Whether that’s $200 per station or less, that is the cost of running laptops and it isn’t IT’s job to tell the business what they need and what they don’t need. The business tells IT what they need to do their job and it’s IT’s job to solve the problem.
Stolen data from backup media:
I don’t care what OS you use or computing model you use, you will have data one way or another and it will have to be backed up and stored off site for safe keeping. Thin clients or Sun Ray clients won’t change any of this. Encrypting the tape media doesn’t cost “$800 per server” if you’re doing the encryption transparently on the backup server.
Leakage via Internet Web Access:
I don’t care what OS or computing model you use if you allow web access. Unless you block all Internet access, you’re going to have to deal with information leakage over the web. There are no full proof solutions for this and the most you can do is due diligence by implementing the proper check points and user policies. Scan everything only covers unencrypted traffic or traffic you can decrypt and policies are only good if people follow them. We can take it a step further with rights management software such as Active Directory Rights Management Services which blocks users from performing actions that might compromise data. User policies and software can help keep users from making honest mistakes but a determined leaker will find a way to leak data even if they have to use the analog hole and take photographs of the monitor. The human aspect of security is the hardest challenge of all.
Layer 2 access switch port security:
This is one of those aspects of security that most companies and organizations fail to implement even though many already have all the hardware and software in place. They should look at my comprehensive guide on locking down Layer 2 security.
Security vulnerabilities:
Again as with everything else, it doesn’t matter what OS or computing model you use, you’re going to have to deal with security vulnerabilities. This affects every hardware and software vendor on the planet. Most people only hear about Microsoft vulnerabilities but they’re currently one of the better companies in the computer industry when it comes to auditing their own code. Their vulnerabilities affect the most number of people because they’re used by the most number of people but the statistical occurrence of software flaws is relatively low.
Are thin clients the solution?
There certainly is some merit in the security implications of thin clients; but there’s also a lot of merit in handing people electric type writers or VT100 terminal emulators from a security and maintenance point of view. Now I am saying that a modern Sun Ray or thin client device to a type writer or text based computer terminal, just that people do associate thin clients in general with fewer features and a “demotion”. I’ve met a lot of people who think that thin clients are just wonderful until you want to take away their computer and give them a thin client. Thin clients are generally associated with data entry tasks and not office productivity. It’s not that you can’t do those tasks with modern thin clients, it’s just that it doesn’t work the way people have grown accustom to and the flexibility afforded to them by the modern personal computer. Until businesses clamor for the days of the main frame and thin clients, it won’t happen any time soon.
October 1st, 2007
The poor man's all-in-one PC for $380
UPDATE 10/3/2007 - The 22″ dual-core all-in-one game PC for $765
Apple has their iMac and Gateway has their One, but both of them are in the $1300 to $2300 range depending on the various options. What about the person on a budget? Can you get something for less than $400? You can but you’re going to have to build it yourself and I really do mean BUILD.
It’s time to pull out the handy jigsaw and drill and do some wood working. See gallery here with full screen downloadable schematics I created.
Now this might look ugly at first glance… ok it is ugly and it’s no iMac by any stretch of the imagination but this is a very crude mock-up cranked out on a Sunday afternoon. But that’s not a problem since the actual schematic has the sides and top covered so you won’t see the internal guts and it will muffle the sound of the hard drives. When I get around to it, I’ll do the full build and repost the finished pictures.
It’s currently one of those things that only a mother or builder could love but what’s important is that it successfully booted Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. I managed to move the device from room to room without having to connect the monitor and PC individually. I surfed the web and watch DVDs pulled off the network since this unit doesn’t have a DVD drive though we can certainly add a slim model to it.
Pictured below is the full schematic but you can click on it for a full screen download.
The poor man’s all-in-one PC costs $380 including a 20″ wide-screen LCD. Image shows an older 19″ LCD with a crude mock-up attached to the back. The entire computer including the LCD takes 58W in idle and 64W at peak CPU operation. The PC itself consumes 30W idle and 36W CPU peak so I’m sure the folks at Climate Savers will approve. The CPU is a 1.33 GHz Celeron 215 processor based on the “Yonah” Core Microarchitecture with the equivalent performance if a Pentium 4 2.2 GHz.
The motherboard and CPU is a D201GLY which costs $70 at Fry’s Electronics. The one annoying thing about this particular motherboard is that it doesn’t support S3 sleep so it can’t really save any power when you suspend the PC although it doesn’t use much to begin with and it would be good for something you intend to keep on 24×7 such as a file server or firewall device. I also got a $3 on/off switch at Fry’s that connects to a 2-pin prong on the motherboard. The power supply is an “80 Plus” 1U PSU from Sparkle Power Inc that costs $50. You could try this 20″ Acer or 20″ Sceptre LCD display with VGA and DVI ports for $180 each and you really won’t save that much money if you tried looking for 17″ or 19″ LCDs. What’s important is that the VESA mount is completely exposed so that we can hang our PC off the back. Two screws 100mm apart are used to bolt the computer to the VESA mount on the back of the LCD. You can buy a pair of 512MB DDR2-667 DIMMs for $36 and get 512 MB for two computers so the cost per unit is only $20 including shipping. Here you can get a 250GB 3.5″ hard drive for $50.
The entire thing measures 87.7 mm thick (3.45″) so it will not stick out too far from the back of the LCD when completed. That’s actually the perfect thickness for mounting a silent 80mm fan if we load it up with two Hard Drives and cover up all the sides. All the cables are self contained though I had to twist the two power cords together and they both connect near the same location for the PC and the LCD. The VGA or DVI cord can be tidied up for a very short run from the PC to the back of the LCD and the same for the USB. The sides are half-inch thick MDF wood. The top and bottom are quarter-inch thick hardboard. The cost for the wood material is almost negligible since it was around $7 for a 2×4 foot panel and I picked it up at Home Depot though most hardware stores will have it.
Hardboard is relatively light and strong and you can drill some smaller holes and screw the four motherboard mounts directly in to it. Just be careful you don’t screw it in so tight that you strip the wood and fiber and it’s probably a good idea to use wood glue to hold it in permanently. The same goes for the two power supply holes used to hold down the PSU. The two holes for the VESA mount were larger and loose because the screws go in to the back of the LCD and the same goes for the four hard drive holes.
This design leaves enough room for two hard drives mounted on the top and bottom but you’re going to have to wait for the D201GLY2 which has two SATA ports in addition to a PATA IDE port before you can actually use two hard drives. There is also enough room for a half-height PCI card so we can plug in a TV tuner card or Gigabit network adapter if we want to use this thing as a high-speed NAS (Network Attached Storage). The rest is up to your imagination.
September 28th, 2007
More facts and less hysteria on Vista, please!
In the latest round of hysteria to be written about Windows Vista, Don Reisinger regurgitates the usual hysteria about Windows Vista mixed in with a pinch of facts here and there. Don spouts off the usual nonsense about sales, UAC, and even DRM. Despite the fact that bashing Vista is quite the popular sport these days, I’m going to see if I can set him straight with an honest and factual assessment of Windows Vista.
Are Vista sales really poor?
Everyone knows that Windows Vista retail box sales are poor, but does that matter when Microsoft relies overwhelmingly on sales to OEM PC makers? If you focus only on the retail box sales, you’re missing the real picture because Vista has sold more than 60 million licenses and ~78% of those sales are Vista Premium edition. Don complains about Windows Vista Ultimate edition and I actually agree with him that it’s overpriced and under delivers but Microsoft doesn’t need to “save itself” if Vista Ultimate fails, more like an “oh well”.
Does it matter if a few people revert to XP?
Even if a whopping 20% of computer buyers downgrade and revert to Windows XP for whatever reason, that still leaves 80% who stay with Windows Vista. That means hardware makers and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) have to deal with Windows Vista now or later whether they like it or not if they want to stay in business. The fact that 60 million copies were sold in the first 6 months since launch pretty much confirms Vista will become the dominant OS by default.
How about Vista drivers?
There are no questions about it, a fair number of Vista drivers during the first 2 months stunk badly. Vista implements a brand new driver model which offers a little more separation between the driver and the kernel so that a bad driver is less likely to crash the entire system. The price for this is that there is a brand new learning curve and it took a few months for the hardware companies to get it right. For the most part, everything is working well but there are still some older devices that don’t have drivers and will never get drivers for Windows Vista and much of that is because the hardware vendors want you to buy new hardware.
Is it fair to expect a hardware company to write drivers for a 3+ year old device? Probably not. Is it fair to expect users to buy new hardware because they can’t get Vista drivers for a one year old device? Definitely no! Reputable hardware companies that want to keep customer loyalty will go back as far as they can to create drivers for older hardware. Was it Microsoft’s fault that the drivers didn’t work well at first? Technically no but that isn’t going to matter to consumers and they’ll take their anger out on Microsoft and the hardware maker. Fortunately, the driver situation has stabilized but it’s always good to check for drivers before you upgrade a computer to Vista and before you buy a piece of hardware.
How about application compatibility in Windows Vista?
There’s no question about it, applications will break in Vista and it’s probably the #1 reason some people are reverting back to Windows XP. This is primarily due to the fact that many applications never followed Windows development guidelines set since 2000. One of the worst offenders is Intuit which refused to properly write QuickBooks right up to the 2006 version. Intuit never followed Windows development guidelines that have existed since Windows 2000 and XP for Windows logo certification and they - like many other software makers - used Vista as an opportunity to sell a new version of QuickBooks 2007. If you bought QuickBooks 2006 or earlier, you were out of luck and it wouldn’t run on your new computer and you had to buy QuickBooks 2007.
Microsoft asked developers for 7 years to clean up their act but drew the line in the sand with Windows Vista which comes with UAC (User Access Control) on by default. That finally forced vendors like Intuit to properly code their application and not violate security best practices. If UAC does nothing else and even if people turn it off, it has had the desired effect of cleaning up the Windows development community.
Vista and Internet Explorer 7 also breaks a lot of applications in the name of drawing a line in the sand for security. Microsoft will get criticized for not getting rid of things like Active X but they’ll also get criticized for breaking dangerous coding techniques and the vast majority of Active X controls have been disabled in Windows Vista by default. There are still plenty of web applications that don’t work inside Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 and vendors like Kodak will try to drag their feet but they will have to deal with it sooner or later unless they want to alienate the 60 million (since summer) and growing Vista user base. My colleague David Berlind questions why Microsoft needs to break so many legacy applications and the answer is security. It’s a known fact that until something is hard broken, no one will change anything. Is this going to be painful? Certainly. But it has to be done if we want a more secure computing environment.
September 26th, 2007
Europe's new 'monopoly' tariff on Microsoft bypasses WTO
The European Commission has just levied a new $689,900,000 “fine” (read: tariff) on American software company Microsoft under the pretense of anti-trust which conveniently bypasses WTO agreements. The Brussels based think tank Globalization Institute has published a paper (PDF) where it recommends a ban on OS (Operating System) bundling for all PCs sold in Europe. At the end of the paper it writes:
Policy recommendation
This paper’s recommendation is that the European Commission should require all desktop and laptop computers sold within the EU to be sold without operating systems.
Scott M. Fulton, III wrote an excellent news piece here where he covers the key issues and points of views and our own bloggers John Carroll and David Berlind weighed in on the issue. Alex Williams of the Adam Smith Institute says “This neo-protectionist economic agenda is forming a policy cloak for the anti-Americanism of many European Commissioners, and it is European citizens who stand to suffer from it.” and I agree with him.
The Globalization Institute says their recommendation will produce more “choice” but I can’t possibly see how this would produce more choice when 90% of the population wants an Operating System (not necessarily Windows) bundled with their computer and they have no desire to install their own OS or pay someone to do it. I can even agree on a matter of principle that computer makers should be forced to sell no-OS computers as an easy option for consumers or businesses though the savings won’t be as big as some people think since hardware makers don’t pay full OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) pricing or anything close to it. But to tell European Consumers and they can’t buy a computer with a heavily discounted pre-configured Operating Systems is asinine in my opinion and it is the absolute antithesis of choice.
When a PC maker bundles Windows Vista Home and sells the entire computer to the consumer at $350, does anyone think they pay $100 single-quantity OEM cost let alone the $199 retail price? There’s absolutely no way and I would venture to guess that the true cost of Windows Vista Home is in the vicinity of $60 because Microsoft sells at a significant quantity discount. The computer comes with the OS and hardware qualified drivers integrated in to the system and everything works out of the box which is what 90% of the population wants. Dell (and other PC makers) have started offering users the option of getting Linux bundled with the PCs because of MARKET demand but now some Bureaucrats in Brussels wants to tell Dell and others that this is now going to be against the law?
The last time the EC (European Commission) in their infinite wisdom decided to ban the bundling of software forced Microsoft to ship a version of Windows without Windows Media Player installed. To the EC’s consternation, no one bought that crippled version of Windows and they kept buying Windows. Now some of these same people want to consider crippling PC companies and force them to sell worthless hunks of metal to people with no operating system installed and people will have to figure out how to install their own OS and device drivers or pay someone else to install it for them not to mention the additional cost of buying single-unit OEM OS.
The European Commission is frustrated that despite all their meddling these last few years, Microsoft has doubled their market share in the “Workgroup Server” market from 40% to 80% thought this is another one of those arbitrary definitions like the Apple iTunes monopoly definition. When you factor in all those unregistered or roll-your-own copies of Linux running in the market place, you can hardly declare Microsoft a monopoly in the server space. Within that narrowly defined market segment, perhaps the EC should consider the fact that people prefer paying $600 perpetual licenses for Windows Server plus a very occasional $250/incident support fee (typically 4 times a year for all Microsoft issues for my old company) over a $1300/year/server support contract for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Those tens of thousands of copies of Linux being run by Google and millions more by other companies don’t count in the eyes of the EC when they need to define Microsoft a monopoly.
The EU Competition Competitor Neelie Kroes said that the EU now expects a “significant drop” in Microsoft’s overwhelming market share. In fact Kroes even hinted that perhaps somewhere around 50% but not exactly is the correct market share. Kroes’ spokesman Jonathan Todd clarified that:
“Once illegal abuse has been removed and competitors are free to compete on the merits, the logical consequence of that would be to expect Microsoft’s market share to fall,”
So I can translate this (via the contrapositive rule of logic) that if the market share doesn’t fall, then that “logically” must means that free competition doesn’t yet exist and illegal abuse must still be rampant. That leaves absolutely no other possible explanation for Microsoft’s dominant market share so what’s next if crippling PC makers doesn’t work? Will the EC then order ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to port all of their applications to Linux with equivalent performance, functionality, stability, and validation if they wish to continue doing business in Europe? Where does the madness end?
I have no doubt some people are jubilant about the fact that someone is sticking it to Microsoft, but do they honestly believe that an EC that tastes the fruit of their fines (tariffs) will stop with just Microsoft? They’ve already declared Apple’s iTunes a monopoly so what is to keep them from imposing a new WTO-bypassing tariff on Apple? What happens when the EC declares Cisco a monopoly in routers because their market share is too big and not because they’ve actually broken any anti-trust laws? Will the EC come up with all sorts of creative remedies to force Cisco to drop their market share to ~50%? What happens when the EC declares Oracle a monopoly in their respective market? Should Intel’s market share be knocked down to ~50% too?
The American people and their politicians need to wake up to the fact that the EC is imposing tariffs under the guise of anti-trust merely on the basis of market share. Europeans need to realize that their politicians are doing no favors for them with these draconian rules and that they will end up paying higher prices and greater hassles. Trade is a two-way street and there will have to be repercussions and the side that has the trade surplus bleeds the most.
Loading ...September 1st, 2007
Gutmann Vista DRM paper uses shoddy Web Forums as source
Computer scientist Peter Gutmann made a name for himself when he published his paper “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection” and got worldwide attention for outlining some serious concerns about Windows Vista DRM mechanisms. But Peter Gutmann admittedly doesn’t use Windows Vista and he’s publicly asked for others to confirm his theories and based many of his key assertions on web forum postings as his source.
Note: As of April 2007 on Gutmann’s website, Gutmann stated: “Can others confirm this? I don’t run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft’s claims that the content protection doesn’t interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present”. Peter Gutmann has recently removed this embarrassing admission from his paper hosted on his website after Ed Bott pointed out that Gutmann admitted to never having run Vista and thus couldn’t have done any experiments. An older version of the PDF can be found here which still contains that admission.
Gutmann makes the following key assertions based on forum postings:
- Vista’s Media Foundation Protected Pipeline (mfpmp.exe) takes excessive CPU resources, anywhere from 10% to 50% CPU utilization.
- AudioDG (Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation) and mfpmp.exe takes massive amounts of memory.
- Vista’s content protection applies to and limits non-premium (non-DRM) content.
The fact is that Peter Gutmann didn’t do the research himself and relied on web forums alone says a lot about the quality of his research. But it gets much worse, those forum postings don’t seem to represent anything close to reality and my tests below verify this.
Based on the research and experimentation that I have done, Karel Donk’s forum posting (cited by Gutmann) that mfpmp.exe (Media Foundation Protected Pipeline) consumes “10-50%” is off by a factor of 20. Chris Martin’s screenshot (also cited by Gutmann) which shows AudioDG using up 347.23 MBs is off by a factor of 30 times if we are talking about playing audio on a modern PC. Furthermore, the resources consumed by mfpmp.exe shown in task manager actually accounts for the combined CPU utilization of mfpmp.exe and Windows Media Player and should not be solely attributed to the Media Foundation Protected Pipeline.
Test results for Windows Vista mfpmp.exe and AudioDG:
Typical CPU utilization of mfpmp.exe shown in the Process Explorer graph below hovers between 0.77% to 2.31% on an Intel E6400 CPU while playing back a DRM protected WMA file. As you can see below, the memory foot print and CPU utilization of mfpmp.exe is trivial and not even close to Gutmann’s anecdotal evidence of 10% to 50% and 154.4 MB memory consumption. Even the playback of an NTSC resolution WMV (Windows Media Video) file only resulted in ~11 MBs of memory consumption for the mfpmp.exe process.
As you can see below, AudioDG.exe consumes approximately 10.61 MB on my task manager compared with Chris Martin’s screenshot of 347.23 MB (KB to MB conversion with division by 1024). How Martin got the AudioDG process to use that much memory is beyond me and that single process would exceed the 256 MB minimum memory requirement in Windows Vista. Maybe it’s an aberration but it can’t possibly be common behavior or the millions of Vista users would be screaming.
[Update 9/3/07 - Microsoft's Larry Osterman explained in an email to me that AudioDG allows third party IHVs (Independent Hardware Makers) to add audio processing effects. Some earlier versions of third party effects did cause excessive memory and CPU usage but to his knowledge all these problems were fixed. The way user would check this if they suspect issues is to disable the sound effects in the sounds control panel and see if that fixes the problem. If the problem goes away then it indicates a problem with the audio effects.]
How mfpmp.exe got wrongly blamed for excessive CPU consumption:
While trying to get to the bottom of this, I noticed something strange. A colleague of mine noticed that playing WMV (Windows Media Video) files in WMP11 (Windows Media Player 11) will trigger the mfpmp.exe process while my WMV files will not. This sparked my curiosity and after testing on a larger range of WMV files, I made the following discovery.
- All the movies that I recorded directly to WMV format from an earlier version of Windows Movie Maker DO NOT invoke mfpmp.exe when played in WMP11.
- All the movies that I encoded using Windows Media Encoder DO invoke mfpmp.exe when played in WMP11 but NOT when played in WMP Classic (Windows Media Player Classic). So it would appear that some kind of format difference or “flag” is set when you use Windows Media Encoder.
- HOWEVER, the total CPU load from WMP11 + mfpmp.exe is roughly 9% for me and 0% of that was attributed to WMP11 while 9% was attributed to mfpmp.exe so it looks like all the CPU utilization is counted against mfpmp.exe. If I play a file that doesn’t invoke mfpmp.exe, WMP11 will indicate 9% utilization by itself. If I use WMP Classic which doesn’t invoke mfpmp.exe under any circumstance, it also uses 9%. The point is that with or without mfpmp.exe, decoding my WMV video file will always consume 9% on my Intel E6400 dual core processor.
If I use Process Explorer, it correctly shows the mfpmp.exe process chaining off of the WMP11 parent process and it gives you the same consolidated CPU utilization of 9%. Vista’s task manager is deceptive when it makes the two processes look independent and it’s easy to understand how someone can wrongly attribute excessive loads to mfpmp.exe when it was really accounting for the video compression decoding.
[Update 9/3/07 - Microsoft's Larry Osterman confirmed for me that there are two rendering pipelines in Vista. One is the Media Foundation and the other is DirectShow. Media Foundation sometimes sends the processing to mfpmp.exe which explains why WMP11 shows zero CPU utilization and mfpmp.exe shows all the CPU consumption. Media Foundation supports the newer implementation of DRM in Vista or non-DRM content.]
It really goes to show why the researcher must understand what he or she measuring and not just what the measurements are. The fact that Gutmann did no measuring at all and relied on comments from web forums as his “research” to make his bold assertions about Vista DRM mechanisms is comical. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry that so many news organizations and big name researchers like Bruce Schneier cited Gutmann’s paper as a credible source. One sits in amazement watching Gutmann, Schneier, Korel Donk (dubious mfpmp.exe data above), and Charlie Demerjian all cite each other in a game of blind leading the blind and circular referencing.
Does Vista really block non-commercial premium content?
Gutmann cites Karel Donk’s webpage on comment-1255 that mfpmp.exe also runs for DIVX or XVID files and says that this is “implying that it’s always active even if no premium content is present”. The bookmarked link to comment number 1255 doesn’t work but searching for “DIVX” takes you down to Karel Donk’s comment reproduced below.
Karel Donk Says:
January 17th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Akira, for me the “Media Foundation Protected Pipeline EXE” starts for almost all avi files, which use DivX or Xvid. I don’t know about downloads going slower, so far I haven’t had issues with that. I don’t use steam however.
So this explains why Peter Gutmann told Usenix Boston 2007 that Vista Content Protection blocks non-commercial premium content (reported by Jon Brodkin PCWorld). But Karel Donk’s claim is that mfpmp.exe is started with “almost all avi files, which use DivX or Xvid” can’t be replicated. My tests show that WMP11 (Windows Media Player 11) only spawns the mfpmp.exe child process when it plays MP3 or WMA (Windows Media Audio) files. My results completely contradict Donk’s forum posting and WMP11 will not spawn mfpmp.exe while playing XVID, DIVX, or even DVD VOB files. Furthermore, Windows Media Player Classic or any non-WMP11 player will not launch the mfpmp.exe process at all.
If Peter Gutmann has such a big problem with mfpmp.exe and he doesn’t want it consuming any CPU, the simplest solution is to NOT use Windows Media Player 11 in Windows Vista. All anyone needs to do is install the Swiss Army Knife of media playback pack called K-Lite Mega Pack (download) which includes Windows Media Player Classic. I consider K-Lite one of the essential add-ons for any Windows user so it’s something you’ll want anyways. If you hate DRM, you have a choice of not using it in Windows Vista because no one is forcing you to use WMP11 to play your content. The only reason you need WMP11 is if you choose to purchase DRM content and Windows Vista simply gives you the choice of using DRM or not. No extra resources have to be consumed and no content is blocked.
So based on dubious web forum “research”, Gutmann concluded that Vista Content Protection is like a virus that consumes unnecessarily high CPU and memory resources. Believing that Vista supposedly consumes an extra 10 to 50 percent CPU utilization, Gutmann flew halfway around the world to Usenix Boston 2007 and told the audience that Vista content protection draws so much power that it causes global warming.
Last month I debunked Gutmann’s claims that encryption for HDCP causes a significant rise in power consumption and now I’ve debunked Gutmann’s assertions that the Media Foundation Protected Pipeline consumes excessive CPU and blocks users from premium content. At this point in time Peter Gutmann needs to explain himself and backup his wild assertions with actual research data or withdraw his paper.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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