journal: win

Known knowns, known unknowns, and security

By Nick, April 1, 2007

Rumsfeld's quote aptly describes the world of computer security.

Donald Rumsfeld took a lot a flak in his term as Secretary of Defense. Perhaps one of his best quotes was also his most amusing:

“As we know, there are known knowns are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say,we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Rumsfeld’s quote aptly describes the world of computer security.

Known knowns

As it stands today, Windows has been, by far, the biggest malware target, partially due to its large market share and partially due to legitimate security problems, especially before Windows XP Service Pack 2. Apple’s Mac OS X has yet to see anything more than a couple sporadic minor malware threats (mostly proof-of-concepts). OS X’s lack of malware is believed to be due to Apple’s relatively small market share and OS X’s inherently better security. Security experts are apparently puzzled as to why Mac OS X hasn’t seen more hacks. Also, it’s debatable whether Mac OS X itself is really any more secure than Windows or if Mac OS X’s good malware record so far is due to its relative obscurity (i.e. nothing has been proven either way), so for the time being, we only really know one thing for certain: Microsoft Windows has been the victim of many more malware threats than Mac OS X.

Known unknowns

About a week and a half ago, Symantec released…
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iTunes: What I Want Changed For Vista

By Liam, February 24, 2007

Where to begin? Even Apple admits that iTunes needs some changes for Vista, but they only admitted to wanting to fix the issues with iTunes Store purchases. Despite saying it would be ready a few weeks after the announcement, there is no fix in sight. Now that I’m using Windows Vista final (haven’t you heard?), I want to compile a list of everything I think needs to be added or changed so iTunes is a better Vista application.

Fix the lack of responsiveness. Right now, iTunes on Vista is about as responsive as what Mac OS X used to be (and may still be, depending on the hardware). The responsiveness is truly pitiful, especially considering that every other application on this PC is instantly responsive unless the system is swamped with processing something.
Support the Desktop Window Manger in full. This means that all iTunes windows should animate when opened, closed, minimized, and restored, and that all iTunes windows should have a drop shadows just like any other window in the system. (That screenshot is just inactive iTunes over this Word document resized to be the same size.)
Integrate with built in applications. iTunes should be able to use Window Calendar and Windows Photo Gallery to choose what to sync to an iPod for those types of media. Currently, only Outlook is supported for the calendar sync, while it uses Photoshop Album or your Pictures folder for Photos.
Include a 256x256 icon. As much as Apple may not want to accept…
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Inside Vista: The Windows Vista Shell

By Nick, February 3, 2007

This is the first in a series of articles looking at some of the key new features of Windows Vista. This article is based on a prerelease build of Vista (Release Candidate 1). Bugs and minor tweaks aside, the feature set discussed in these articles should be pretty much identical to the shipping product, since Release Candidate 1 comes at the end of the product development cycle and should be pretty much feature-complete. Regardless, due to that fact, this article should not be taken as an actual scored review. This particular article will cover the changes made to Windows Explorer, the Start menu, Taskbar, and associated elements of Vista.

And I’m sorry in advance for mentioning Mac OS X a few times in this article. When you write an article like this, sometimes comparisons are inevitable.

Anyway, let’s jump in, shall we?

Windows in, uh, Windows

So what has changed, you ask? A lot. Windows Vista may represent the largest overhaul of the Windows user interface since Windows 95, and I’m not just talking about eye candy, either. Let’s first take a look at the typical Windows Explorer window:

A typical Windows Explorer window contains back and forward buttons, a search field, toolbar (similar to the task pane in Windows XP), and customizable “favorite links” pane. Similarities to OS X’s Finder aside (search field in the upper right, customizable favorites pane), the window layout is much cleaner, and in my opinion, more efficient, than that of Windows XP. Additionally, Windows Explorer…
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Zune debuts, reactions stream in

By Nick, November 14, 2006

Welcome to the social.

Zune makes its debut today and seems to be, oh, about the 1,245,172nd media player to be poised by some to be an “iPod killer.” Does it stack up? The early returns are in:

Engadget had a tough go of it:

Icing on the cake: restart after uninstall. No, sorry, the icing on the cake is the crash our computer took after we hit this, causing our RAID 5 array to crap out and spend a few hours rebuilding.!

Engadget reports that Zune worked fine on a second machine.

Gizmodo proclaims the Zune to be “competitive with the iPod.” They also had some interesting things to say about the color.

MacDailyNews? Well, they might as well rebrand themselves as ZuneDailyNews for all the Zune coverage they’ve been posting (most of it negative, of course):
Here’s one example, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another. Fun.

Deep Thought has no Zune to play with, unfortunately, so we won’t be able to give you a review of it anytime ~~zune~~ soon. Bummer.

UPDATE: Fixed the strike through.

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Windows Vista RTM’d

By Liam, November 8, 2006

From the “It’s about damn time” table:

It’s now official—Windows Vista is ready to be rolled out. After a six-year long road, the Windows Vista codebase had been frozen. The set dates of November 30 for businesses and January 30 for us mere mortals are almost guaranteed to be met. Of course that hasn’t stopped Paul Thurottfrom reviewing the thing before it even rolls out to MSDN subscribers next week.

Deep Thought’s (okay, my) take: I, for one, welcome our new clarity-bringing overlords. It’ll be the first Windows release I’ll pay attention to (I wasn’t paying attention to the internet back in good old 2k1.)