Slashdot Mirror

A recent book (reviewed here) denounces the entire concept of manned spaceflight as the useless "madness" of boys who never outgrew childish games. Milder critics of the space program ask why we should send humans into space when automated probes are supposedly more useful for their price. Not too long ago, Discover Magazine had a cover article asking whether, maybe, space is so innately dangerous (with all that radiation) that we should avoid going back until we have robots or gengineered humans (!) able to cope with it. Others such as Vox Day, hater of humanity, begin using their word processors to declare that "science has outlived its usefulness to Mankind." And here, we have NASA saying hold everything; we're afraid of the dust.

(An excerpt from the book:
"If there is a lesson to be learned, it is in the futility of seeking fulfillment in outer space. We need to judge ourselves by who we are, not by where we go... Hubris took America to the Moon, a barren, soulless place where humans do not belong... If the voyage has had any positive benefit at all, it has reminded us that everything that is good reside on Earth.")

"We're not worthy, it's not safe, nothing we've ever done is worthwhile." I see this line of thinking as suicidal for the human race. If transhumanism is a supposedly unrealistic fantasy of doing more things than have ever been done before, then shall we call this sentiment "subhumanism," the desire for people to set their sights below what's been accomplished already?

Moondust problem? But, what about this one after long time Lunar mission:
Space email: I will rip off your space suit
" First urge will be to rip your clothes off, throw you on the ground and love the hell out of you.
But honestly, love, I want you to totally and thoroughly enjoy your hero's homecoming. "
http://badhardware.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive .html#5598394580701060652/
By the way, why this email wasn't lost? It will be used in the court, right?

"First urge will be to rip your clothes off, throw you on the ground and love the hell out of you."
http://badhardware.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive .html#5598394580701060652/

By the way, why this email wasn't lost? It will be used in the court, right?

After participating in the neural network hype in the 1980s (I spent 1 year on a DARPA committee for NN tools, and was the original author of the SAIC ANsim NN software product) I found Hawkin's book to be light technically, but I really enjoyed reading it.

His work might have been inspired by Kohonen's classic Springer-Verlag book "Self-Organization and Associative Memory".

I downloaded their software last night but have had little time doing anything but building and running two examples. When I get 20 hours to really kick the tires, I will blog about it on my AI blog http://artificial-intelligence-theory.blogspot.com /

I am hoping that NTA will really simulate temporal memory and spacial invariance that the neocortex apparently has.

A little off topic, but I love the way they package the NTA software: most of the low level code is C++, that builds into sharable libraries loaded and used in a Python wrapper. Neat stuff. The free license is only for non-commercial use, BTW.

I believe there's program that lets you build with virtual Lego, but it's not a 'game' it's more of a modeling environment.

As mentioned above, for interactive building fun in a FPS environment, there's Blockland, or if you prefer, Blockland Mods. The former is the base game, with basic bricks; the latter contains lots of user-created additions.

For offline, more systematic virtual Lego, you can't go wrong with BlockCAD, which is just what it sounds like, and is perhaps what you're thinking of.

Now we know why protecting Earth was dropped from NASA's mission statement http://www.physorg.com/news72971590.html.

It costs to much. Not too suprising considering how we're spending money like we can just print more of it. As NASA becomed the can't do agency, who will fill the void?
--
Energy delivered from space with no shipping charge: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

From My observations of my daughter's continued use of both BlockLand Mods and Legos I would say no. http://blmods.blogspot.com/

Why don't you give it a try for yourself.

Whoever has the gold makes the rules!
More on lost emails here:
http://badhardware.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive .html#4458218604715556001//

[...]but Dr. Baird (whom you and I saw many years after at his native place, St. Andrew's in Scotland) gave a contrary opinion: "For the industry of that Franklin," says he, "is superior to any thing I ever saw of the kind; I see him still at work when I go home from club, and he is at work again before his neighbors are out of bed."

Whoever has the gold makes the rules!
More on lost emails here:
http://badhardware.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive .html#4458218604715556001/

I'm so glad Micro$oft in on top of this. Oh, wait....
--
Real daylight savings: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

This also provides a solution to bandwidth problems. A signal will be observed to propogate at c in all frames so to conserve energy its frequency must shift. If moving towards a source the frequency is increased an so is the bandwidth. So, if your ISP is slow, just move towards it very very quickly and you should be able to get satisfactory performance. Obtaining equipment to implement this kluge is up to you.
--
Harvest solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

http://instapundit.com/archives/030693.php

June 01, 2006

RFK, JR. GETS A BAD REVIEW FROM DAN RIEHL: "NPR debunked it a week ago before it was even published."

Meanwhile, Don Surber comments: "Real journalism would have at least also looked at Wisconsin, where multiple-state voting likely cost Bush a state."

UPDATE: Armed Liberal notes that even Mother Jones is ahead of RFK, jr. When you're peddling conspiracy theories that have already been busted by NPR and Mother Jones, well . . . .

I gave a lecture course in Astronomy one summer. I order to get a complete survey of the students, I passed it out before the final. Needless to say, no matter how bad I was at lecturing, there was definite downward pressure on the results owing to my timing. The Department Chair spoke to me about it saying he'd never gotten such a high completion rate and that it was a good thing I was a grad student because if I was faculty I'd be in trouble. Actually, it was two older students who had a large number of complaints (like having to come to class).

When students judge performance you get some good feedback, but much of my later and better lecturing was improved by just having a better grasp of the subject. I find that the best teachers are the ones who enjoy how other people learn. Putting money into opening up this mode of enjoyment would probably be well spent.
--
Now Icarus....http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slas hdot-users-selling-solar.html

In this case, and no doubt due to the fact that they stood to "lose their shirt" if they kept going with it ... because it IS protected in the US, the pork board backed off.

The lawyer who sent the original C&D was an asshat, but the pork board sounds like they knew bad mojo when they found it.

http://thelactivist.blogspot.com/2007/02/well-done -pork.htmlThe Lactivist

'm at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com/

What's a comcas tissue? Is that a pr0n thing?

Nope, this kind of stomping on parody by big business never happens in the US:

http://thelactivist.blogspot.com/2007/02/overzealo us-big-pork-stomps-on.html

I don't know these people, just saw it on a rights blog.

Note that they have still never used the slogan beyond the original 2 T-Shirt sales...

I've thought about this lately. I've been concerned if I posted anything like Comcast's logo or anything on my blog that remotely looked like them that I would be shutdown.

I'm at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com/ and have had a few people email me asking if I was concerned Comcast might come after me for something. Not really as it's clearly stated at the top that it's my opinion and experience with the company. Besides, I'm very good at keeping records. I have records backing up everything I said.

I've even recently posted my phone records, a screen shot of our customer history (got it from a Comcast CSR last week) along with other things I've been saving. So if I'm shutdown for Copyright then there is a serious problem with those laws. The blog is clean.

One of his big problems was getting flash to work with a 64 bit browser. He solved this by going to a 32 bit browser. It is also possible to wrap the 32 bit flash binary using nspluginwrapper http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwr apper/ which works OK most of the time using 64 bit Seamonkey and FC6.
--
Flash on solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Actually they do, only very slowly. There is a famous problem called the Faint Young Sun Paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_parad ox that requires extra greenhouse gasses early on for its resolution. Why does the Sun slowly brighten? Basically the central mean molecular weight (bad term) increases as hydrogen is converted to helium. This means more energetic collisions and faster fusion.
--
Get fusion power faster: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I like all three. That Hideous Strength goes more into the banality of evil on an organized scale. Weston's tricks in Perlandra are writ large in the third book. Lewis also develops the idea of the inner circle as a entry into evil in the third book of the trilogy.
--
The power of Arbol: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

At least for potestants who take St. Paul seriously, it is Grace that supports or allows belief. That would be a two ways street. But, many theologians do identify something in the soul that also seeks God. C. S. Lewis was interested in this and looked at levels of inclination such as loyalty to country, animal's attraction to their keepers as well as darker attractions. His book That Hideous Strength is a good read. Finding some hardwiring for this would not be too suprising I think. I'd imagine that is would be related to things like filial piety http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_piety which actually comes in as a commandment.
--
Solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

License OS X to all comers. If Microsoft can get $399 for it's bloatware, Apple can get it too, and I'd pay it, as would a lot of you, even sans support. I can imagine by 2010 more than half the geek desktops on Earth running it as primary. At that point all the doors open.

I am not buying Apple's (or anyone else's) proprietary stack. Reread that last sentence until it registers. It applies even if the platform is only proprietary in the legal sense, as is mostly the case with Apple's hardware. The full stack chip to terminal business model declined sometime in the mid 80s and it is not coming back. It persists in some boutique niches, where Apple lives today, and that is as far as it will ever get.

No one vendor can scale well enough to satisfy the entire world of computing. AMD exists to make x86 scale to the market. Nvidia and ATI carry on because the market wants options. There has always been a plethora of storage vendors and that isn't going to change, because that is what the market insists on. The market has no trouble finding room for multiple competitive, successful game console vendors. The epiphany required to regress all of this back to the days of the One True Vendor is fantasy.

There has never been a better time for a rebel to chuck a sledgehammer through the screen. Vista sucks and few of us really want it. Less than a quarter of Apple's revenue comes from desktop/laptop hardware (linky). Why not risk some of that hardware revenue and take 50% of Microsoft's OS market?

In case you're interested, that quote contributed by dan of the north is from my March 2, 2007, letter in Elektra v. Schwartz .

You shouldn't be feeling sorry for him, you should feel sorry for his thousands of victims.

He had a choice of whether to accept an assignment he was not qualified to do, or to perform the assignment in a shoddy and unworkmanlike manner, printing out sloppy imprecise opinions by rote inculpating innocent people. He also could have chosen to spend more than 45 minutes on the assignment, and to have done some verifying and testing and probing, in which event perhaps he would not have found himself opining that there was copyright infringement in each and every case in which he was called upon to testify.

His victims were given no choice.

If you read the deposition along with the written opinions he has given (exhibits 15 and 16 listed here), you will see that he has repeatedly stated things in his written opinion that he has no support for. And make no mistake.... the RIAA has repeatedly used those "expert" opinions to convince the judge that they had evidence of a copyright infringement by the defendant when in fact they did not.

And by the way, experts who know what they're talking about have no problem explaining themselves to lawyers, judges, jurors, or anyone else.

It's experts who are phonies, who haven't done their homework, and who don't have proper backup for their opinions, who have a problem with that.

And now a year later, she claims we need specialized hardware interfaces to scan memory for rootkits, even though this problem is laughably easy in the world of virtual machines.

And on to the actual work ... the research basically observes that MTTR registers (some of the MSRs in the CPU) can cause memory mappings to look different between the CPU and the northbridge, and then comes up with a pretty easy way to cause the northbridge to either lock up or read data that is different (really easy once you see the specs for the appropriate registers). And she totally ignores the possibility of a system defending itself against this attack by verifying the registers she's modifying. Lousy research, girl.

Oddly enough, this "hack" is ALREADY IN USE ON YOUR SYSTEM and is actually necessary. See, when the processor is running in SMM (System Management Mode), it switches to exactly this configuration: the PCI bus sees VGA hardware mapped at the well-known address, but the processor maps the RAM at that address, which gives SMM mode a few kilobytes of memory that the normal system can't touch. SMM mode is used for things like "legacy USB devices" (e.g. having your USB keyboard act like PS/2 so DOS can use it) and other implement-in-software hacks that your OS doesn't know about, but your BIOS vendor gives you as "value-added features".

I hope someone else has already pointed out that this is hardly a "slash". It is small change out of a massive amount of money. The real story is that now that the defender of the budget, Lord Sainsbury, has gone the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) feels that it can raid the science budget to pay for its own incompetent financial management. It is sad that the UK press has handled this story so badly. They even failed to say where the money has gone. I loved the bit where they take money from the Research Council that supports research in electronics to pay for thew DTI's failure to get its act together on Europe's electronic waste initiatives. More here: http://michaelkenward.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-am-su rprised-that-none-of-reports.html

I think we actually agree. I reread my post and it clear to me that I said that the lab work shows causation. I would go further and say that our understanding that the sturcture of planetary atmospheres is essentially a priori when the spectra of their costituents is taken as given. An argon atmosphere would be very similar to no atmosphere at all owing to argon's high ionization potential and few transitions. It is the forest of mid-infrared rotational-vibrational transitions from molecules with many degrees of freedom that provides the warming of the surface above what it would be otherwise.

It is important to distinguish between deduction and inference so that we know the limits of our knowledge. The geologic record is largely consistent with our deductive understanding so we may interpret it as supportive but there is insufficient information there to draw the strongest conclusions. For that, we rely on the lab.
--
Catch the Sun: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Most all the political solutions (kyoto) have included their policies that were once rejected. And yes, most of hollywoods considers itself liberal. They do control a good part of the distribution proces.

Instant Kyoto compliance to help offset Al Gores inconvenient electric bill.

But when every thing is out there and all the objections and discrediting revolves around blasphemy because the religion says otherwise, I will celibrate that this study was corect. And yes, I did just liken the global wamring science to a religion. It has become one for some people. I'm not saying you, but some people.

You mean like this or this?

Most all the political solutions (kyoto) have included their policies that were once rejected. And yes, most of hollywoods considers itself liberal. They do control a good part of the distribution proces.

Instant Kyoto compliance to help offset Al Gores inconvenient electric bill.

But when every thing is out there and all the objections and discrediting revolves around blasphemy because the religion says otherwise, I will celibrate that this study was corect. And yes, I did just liken the global wamring science to a religion. It has become one for some people. I'm not saying you, but some people.

You mean like this or this?

A proposal to encode the Greek Lunate Sigma in UCS. (It's since been incorporated into Unicode 4.0.) Or this blog post.

Stars move up and to the left in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H-R_diagram.png during their main sequence lifetime which means they get cooler but more luminous. It it the luminosity that is most important for the temperatures of planets. Watch the evolution here http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys230/lectures/star _age/evol_hr.swf and you'll see that a factor of 2 in a billion years is about what the evolution looks like. That is less that a part in 100 million per year. So, main sequence evolution is not the sort of thing we can measure right now. There are changes in solar brightness at a larger level and on shorter timescales though recent changes do not account for the measured warming. See a rough calculation here http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html.
--
Solar: It's steady. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Stars move up and to the left in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H-R_diagram.png during their main sequence lifetime which means they get cooler but more luminous. It it the luminosity that is most important for the temperatures of planets. Watch the evolution here http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys230/lectures/star _age/evol_hr.swf and you'll see that a factor of 2 in a billion years is about what the evolution looks like. That is less that a part in 100 million per year. So, main sequence evolution is not the sort of thing we can measure right now. There are changes in solar brightness at a larger level and on shorter timescales though recent changes do not account for the measured warming. See a rough calculation here http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html.
--
Solar: It's steady. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Thanks, Nom. Yep you picked out some of the many goodies. It was a very fertile outing. I've only had it for a day, and have already cited it in another case. Lawyers defending RIAA victims are going to have some fun with it.

Listed here.

One thought for a Moon base is to place it at one of the poles. Then solar power can be available all the time so that there is less need for backup power. So, one can figure a limit on a polar base capablility from the duration of alunar eclipse. At a minimum, it has to have backup power to maintain safety to last the duration of an eclipse. If food is grown, it has to be thermally protected or else harvested on the eclipse schedule. Inflated structures have to have sufficient (linked) heat capacity or backup pressure to avoid collapse. It is only 4 or five hours of power loss but it needs to be anticipated.
--
Engage Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

This guy has actually used a watt meter: http://lancej.blogspot.com/2006/03/pc-electricity- consumption.html

According to this blog entry (see http://zetarace.blogspot.com/2007/03/dont-use-teln et.html), his honeypot network caught one of the worm attempt.

[**] [1:10136:3] TELNET Solaris login environment variable authentication bypass attempt [**]
[Classification: Attempted Administrator Privilege Gain] [Priority: 1]
03/01-13:44:29.556771 192.18.17.206:1134 -> 192.168.0.34:23
TCP TTL:46 TOS:0x0 ID:52835 IpLen:20 DgmLen:86 DF
***AP*** Seq: 0xED89493C Ack: 0x9D57147C Win: 0xC4E0 TcpLen: 20
[Xref => http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/22512%5D

However, looking at the source ip attacking his honeypot machine.. seems it's coming directly
from Sun network range:

whois 192.18.17.206

OrgName: Sun Microsystems, Inc
OrgID: SUN
Address: 4150 Network Circle
City: Santa Clara
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 95054
Country: US

NetRange: 192.18.0.0 - 192.18.194.255
CIDR: 192.18.0.0/17, 192.18.128.0/18, 192.18.192.0/23, 192.18.194.0/24
NetName: SUN1
NetHandle: NET-192-18-0-0-1
Parent: NET-192-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.SUN.COM
NameServer: NS2.SUN.COM
NameServer: NS7.SUN.COM
NameServer: NS8.SUN.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 1985-09-09
Updated: 2003-10-10

RTechHandle: IS189-ARIN
RTechName: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
RTechPhone: +1-303-272-7000
RTechEmail: Netmaster@sun.com

OrgTechHandle: IS189-ARIN
OrgTechName: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
OrgTechPhone: +1-303-272-7000
OrgTechEmail: Netmaster@sun.com

It seems to me that Sun is spreading the Worm.^H^Hd.

Vista isn't beta, that's the point. It's ready to go.

The hardware manufactures however have not done their job, so the "instabilities" are related to crappy code not created by Microsoft.

Not every install is a nightmare. Mine went well. It takes a while though.

http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/

You really have to piece together a lot of this puzzle to understand some of the underlying issues.

Timing is everything with wireless. An overflow which causes a crash one time may allow for remote code execution the next. It's all very tricky to get right, and there are non-driver issues that can cause problems (things like interference, which you can't control). Maynor or Cache alluded to this at one point, and it was speculated that this might have been the real reason that they did a video demo instead of a live one--a live exploit demo which fails (but crashes the system) 6 times before it succeeds isn't all that impressive.

So there were very similar (nearly identical) bugs in other vendor's drivers. FreeBSD had patched their version of the bug in January 2006. It was a similar exploit in a similar driver for similar hardware. It's far from a stretch to assume that he noticed his Macbook crash when he got it (he claims he was fuzzing other devices at the time here: http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/03/apple-infoan d-thats-all-folks.html ), he started investigating the chipset, found that it was Atheros, started researching the bug, and discovered the near identical one that had been patched 6 months ago. For someone with the knowledge, it should be trivial to adapt to the new platform, given the similarities between the FreeBSD and Apple drivers.

Now it all gets pretty fuzzy around the time that they claim to be using 3rd party hardware. Why do that? Why does the video clearly show the Apple interface with an Apple MAC if they were using a 3rd party card?

If we assume that he's lying, the video shows all of this because it was rigged. If we assume that he's telling the truth, then that is just more evidence to the "Apple coverup".

The point of all of this, though, is that I think there's a certain amount of plausibility to all of this. I don't think that the situation I outlined above is a stretch. I do think that if it even remotely resembles the reality of the situation, then Maynor and Cache were exaggerating their own skills in determining the exploit. There was a pretty big inference by everyone at Blackhat that Maynor and Cache had discovered and engineered the exploit alone, not that it was based upon a pre-existing exploit for another OS. If they didn't intentionally imply that...well, then it sucks to be them, but their credibility takes a bit of a hit for it.

Oh, and the timing issue I mentioned above? Could well be why he only demoed a crash instead of a full exploit this time. He's got Apple's word that remote code execution is possible, and he's shown that he can cause the crash. Who knows how many takes their video took to get right? With a live demo, you really only get one shot.

This is too bad. I had hoped that the Winows Vista copy protection was solid. In fact I hope that all MS software copy protection is unbreakable and a pain in the butt. This way people will be forced to look at alternatives. At the moment Windows and other big software packages has the unfair advantage of being an expensive product that you can get for free (by pirating). If that was not possible people would have to consider other options like Linux or cheap shareware. I wrote more about it here: http://eriksrantsandraves.blogspot.com/2007/02/whe n-rolls-royce-cost-less-than-skoda.html Why I think pirating is imoral and bad for the economy.

First posted here http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/02/trivial-remo te-solaris-0day-disable.html on February 11, 2007

Fun trivia - the PlayStation logo is designed to light up - the button material below it is translucent and pokes down throught he button chassis to two pads on the main circuitboard - an LED is supposed to go there, but isn't populated. Wonder why that changed... it really would look nicer if it was lit up.

http://ps3mods.blogspot.com/2007/01/sixaxis-5th-le d-mod.html

Not taking any sides here, but here is what he has said about this (and other issues) from his blog

I thought you said it was a hijack yet you only showed a DoS.
Yup, I showed a crash. I didn't feel the need to do the do the entire hijack for two reasons: Apple already confirmed that this vulnerability leads to remote code execution (they said so in the advisory here). Everybody that was running a sniffer during my talk now has a copy of the DoS code. The demo had two parts. I showed the crash happening on a 10.4.6 machine since it didn't have any of the airport patches. I then rebooted into 10.4.8 and the crash no longer happened. I did this to prove that the Airport patches issued on Sept 21st, 2006 fixed the problem I was demoing. The only real change to airport code was the security fixes that were issued.

You just reversed the patches and found what you then showed on stage.
I find this to be a funny argument. If I have the skills to reverse the patches and do a binary difference analysis of them, why couldn't I use those same skills to find the bugs in the first place (they weren't hard to find). This argument also doesn't take into account the fact that I showed that the first crash of the exploit occurred on Jul 15th, 2006, or emails to Apple helping them build a wifi auditing box (A linux machine with madwifi patched with LORCON) and pointed them to a vulnerability that was fixed in their patches (a problem with overly long SSIDs). The picture below is from the day I bought the Macbook, July 15th 2006. This crash occurred because I was fuzzing other devices and the Macbook crashed before I got to run the initial setup.

http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/03/apple-infoan d-thats-all-folks.html

Well almost, I recently built an AMD 4x4 system that is now running Vista64, you can check it out here: http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/

Here are a few thoughts:

Getting setup is a pain in the ass. Prompts abound and I feel my anger bubble up every time I see one of those stupid boxes. However, the boxes go away for the most part and day to day operation becomes easy.

Driver support from vendors sucks hard. NVidia should be ashamed of themselves. I'm pretty sure that we will see a class action of some kind fall out of their negligence. I think ATI has better driver support from what I have been reading, but I'm more involved in the nvidia world. What is unfortunate about this situation is that Microsoft is on the hook for ensuring compatibility. I don't really see it as their problem - the hardware vendors seem to have completely ignored Vista as a potential OS that consumers would adopt. As such hardware support is pretty bad at the moment. It's really inexcusable considering how long Vista has been in development.

The same goes for various applications - web sites, consumer apps. What's odd is that IE 7 and Vista have some serious issues with web sites. Also, "Trusted mode" isn't really trusted and you can still have major issues. My test cases are somewhat fringe: Outlook Web with Exchange 2003 doesn't work at all without a patch that's not part of the regular OS updates - get with it MSFT, Outlook users are your bread and butter. MSDN is a mess under IE 7 and Vista. Invalid/Expired security certificates make IE 7 throw a hissy fit.

I can see the IE 7 and Vista user experience driving users to adopt firefox.

File syncing is jacked up. It's totally confusing to see what is being synced, and I have yet to figure out how to bring offline drives online when the server they are on is alive. Most of the check boxes pertaining to this feature are grayed out, but there is no explanation as to why they are not available. In addition the sync center keeps hounding me about syncing temp files and my iTunes library doesn't seem to stay synced (I'm using network mapped home folders)

Note to Microsoft, I wanted to switch Windows Media player but you don't have a codec for decoding non encrypted AAC files.

iTunes uses a ridiculous amount of ram (Almost 100 mb with 8500 songs), and is just generally slow. It also can't burn dvds or cds on 64 bit systems. So I'm stuck with it for a bit longer.

On the flip side, I installed the "Sync Center" and plugged my T-Mobile Dash in and it showed a nice pretty icon of my phone, and of course it worked. I liked that. And the sync center isn't nearly as nag ware oriented as Active Sync.

Remember the "new" view in Windows XP for things like the control panel? I never switched, and I preferred "classic mode". Nesting 30 odd control panels in arbitrary categories wasn't really something I was a huge fan of. In Vista, Microsoft has made the "new" style in XP the only way to view many of the system functions. There is a bit of a learning curve associated with this.

Also, something that I'm not a huge fan of - Vista has a tendency to hide things if you can't use them. While this seems like a good idea it's not. For example, when setting up a Bluetooth PAN with your phone you must have Bluetooth on the Vista PC turned on in order for this option to show up under the list of connection options. It takes three clicks and a full scroll to find the option in the first place so when you go hunting for it, but don't really know that you need Bluetooth turned on to get the menu option a user ends up wondering if they are looking in the right place. For the sake of learning where things are, it's nice to see the option perhaps grayed out with an explanation as to why it is disabled rather than mysteriously hiding something, when the conditions around toggle logic isn't well known.

There are some things that are worth the switch. First and foremost: The start menu re-design. Being able to type

sorta like http://aufero.blogspot.com/2007/02/xp-vs-vista.htm l/, I guess?

I still find myself using yahoo mail exclusively over gmail. That thing ever gonna move from beta?

I do believe that's what happened last month.

Photo editing services on the web already exist for several years. Years ago I played with a photo filter tool on the Nikon website. You could apply all sorts of funny filters on your foto's, like cartoon filters and so on.

Now there are several (free) services available, like myImager, Phixr and Pixenate. Image processing is done at the webserver. A preview of the image processing result is shown on the web page and the final image can be downloaded at full resolution. So no rocket science at all. Just some clever web programming. I think there is space for a big player (Adobe, did I hear the G-word?) to create a more advanced web based image processing service. I think it could be very popular and a real concurrent for light weight photo editing tools.

A short review of some of these tools can be found at the "Ditigal Inspiration" weblog.