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Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser; and browser privacy, a feature that didn't make Firefox 3. I'm primarily a Firefox user, and I've been using IE8 at work (MS) for the past few weeks. It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for. Give it a spin, submit feedback, and help keep all browser makers on their toes by facing each other's competition."

Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser; and browser privacy, a feature that didn't make Firefox 3. I'm primarily a Firefox user, and I've been using IE8 at work (MS) for the past few weeks. It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for. Give it a spin, submit feedback, and help keep all browser makers on their toes by facing each other's competition."

Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser; and browser privacy, a feature that didn't make Firefox 3. I'm primarily a Firefox user, and I've been using IE8 at work (MS) for the past few weeks. It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for. Give it a spin, submit feedback, and help keep all browser makers on their toes by facing each other's competition."

Gamepolitics notes that starting next Monday, Xbox Live users will be able to register to vote using their game console. They'll also be able to participate in polls and "voice their opinions to the presidential candidates." Quoting the press release: "This is the first time that Rock the Vote has joined forces with an entertainment partner such as Xbox to reach voters under 30. Xbox LIVE is the largest online social network connected to the television, with membership totaling 12 million -- if Xbox LIVE were a state, it would rank as the country's seventh largest, giving it approximately 20 electoral votes. Xbox also will have a presence at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, promoting the Rock the Vote partnership and educating delegates about creating a safer entertainment environment on Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE using the built-in parental controls known as Family Settings."

seussman71 writes with a link to some very interesting research out of the University of Washington that employs "a method of using high quality photographs to enhance a video taken of the same subject. The project page gives a good overview of what they are doing and the video on the page gives some really nice examples of how their technology works. Hopefully someone can take the technology and run with it, but one thing's for sure: this could make amateur video-making look even better than it does now." And if adding mustaches would improve your opinion of the people in amateur videos, check out the unwrap-mosaics technique from Microsoft Research.

theodp writes "Bill Gates makes his case for Creative Capitalism in TIME, citing projects like a Text-Free UI for illiterate computing, the use of Multimouse technology to allow fifty kids to share one computer display, cell phone billing by the second, and Bono's RED campaign as examples of the type of corporate creativity that can make the world a better place for the billion or so people scraping by on less than a dollar a day. Michael Kinsley, a former Microsoft employee whose wife still advises the Gates Foundation, says it's hard to object to Gates' goals, but notes that creative capitalism does have its share of skeptics, and points out that there was not a whole lot of energy devoted to lifting up the world's poor during Bill's three decades at Microsoft."

theodp writes "Bill Gates makes his case for Creative Capitalism in TIME, citing projects like a Text-Free UI for illiterate computing, the use of Multimouse technology to allow fifty kids to share one computer display, cell phone billing by the second, and Bono's RED campaign as examples of the type of corporate creativity that can make the world a better place for the billion or so people scraping by on less than a dollar a day. Michael Kinsley, a former Microsoft employee whose wife still advises the Gates Foundation, says it's hard to object to Gates' goals, but notes that creative capitalism does have its share of skeptics, and points out that there was not a whole lot of energy devoted to lifting up the world's poor during Bill's three decades at Microsoft."

parvenu74 writes "A story from Infoworld is suggesting that the days of Windows are numbered and that Microsoft is preparing a web-based operating system code-named Midori as a successor. Midori is reported to be an offshoot of Microsoft Research's Singularity OS, an all-managed code microkernel OS which leverages a technology called software isolated processes (SIPs) to overcome the traditional inter-thread communications issues of microkernel OSes."

Penguinisto writes "According to a somewhat jaw-dropping story in The Register, it appears that Microsoft has performed a trifecta of geek-scaring feats: They have joined the Apache Software Foundation as a Platinum member(at $100K USD a year), submitted LGPL-licensed patches for ADOdb, and have pledged to expand their Open Specifications Promise by adding to the list more than 100 protocols for interoperability between its Windows Server and the Windows client. While I sincerely doubt they'll release Vista under a GPL license anytime soon, this is certainly an unexpected series of moves on their part, and could possibly lead to more OSS (as opposed to 'Shared Source') interactivity between what is arguably Linux' greatest adversary and the Open Source community." (We mentioned the announced support for the Apache Foundation earlier today, as well.)

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released the specifications for the binary file formats used by pre-2007 Microsoft Office applications. They're accurate this time! Honest! While the documents are enormous (Word alone requires 533 pages; Excel runs over 1000 plus another 850 pages for the Office 2007 binary format), they hopefully will be useful to developers trying to create or extract information from Microsoft Office files (which despite their flaws, have been the de facto standard in many fields for some time now)."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released the specifications for the binary file formats used by pre-2007 Microsoft Office applications. They're accurate this time! Honest! While the documents are enormous (Word alone requires 533 pages; Excel runs over 1000 plus another 850 pages for the Office 2007 binary format), they hopefully will be useful to developers trying to create or extract information from Microsoft Office files (which despite their flaws, have been the de facto standard in many fields for some time now)."

Kurtz'sKompund tips us to news that Microsoft has released a finished version of the Open XML software development kit. Microsoft has made additional resources available with the download. Quoting Techworld: "The SDK includes an application programming interface (API) simplifying the creation of code for searching documents, creating documents, validating document parts, modifying data and other tasks, Microsoft said. The API can be used in any language supported by the Microsoft .Net Framework, the company said. The current SDK supports the version of Open XML supported by Office 2007, which is not the same as that ratified as a standard by the ISO, due to changes effected during the ratification process."

Diomidis Spinellis writes "Earlier today I presented at the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering a research paper comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows (its research kernel distribution), OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. For the comparison I parsed multiple configurations of these systems (more than ten million lines) and stored the results in four databases, where I could run SQL queries on them. This amounted to 8GB of data, 160 million records. (I've made the databases and the SQL queries available online.) The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization. To my surprise there was no clear winner or loser, but there were interesting differences in specific areas. As the summary concludes: '..the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.'"

mksmac writes "According to the KOMO TV Website, Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for Yahoo after presenting them with an increased offer that was subsequently declined by Yahoo. Frankly, this seems like a smarter decision on Microsoft's part, but I'd like to hear how other people feel about the deal. Should Microsoft have walked away, pressured Yahoo via a hostile takeover or sweetened the pot until Yahoo gave in?" For those who prefer it, the NYT also has coverage, and the story is also at news.com, among many others. I like the Beeb's version as well. And for the Microsoft-centric explanation of why the courtship is over, see Steve Balmer's letter to Jerry Yang.

Tumbleweed writes "The Cross Platform and Interop team at Microsoft today announced some new beta products for managing Unix/Linux systems from MS Operations Manager 2007, as well as connectors for HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console. Both betas are available at Microsoft Connect (search for systemcenter), according the blog."

mike_diack was one of many readers to send word that Windows XP SP3 been released to manufacturing. It will be available to OEMs and enterprise customers on April 29. Here is a summary of features and changes. The company will wait till "early summer" to enable SP3 downloads through Automatic Updates.

mike_diack was one of many readers to send word that Windows XP SP3 been released to manufacturing. It will be available to OEMs and enterprise customers on April 29. Here is a summary of features and changes. The company will wait till "early summer" to enable SP3 downloads through Automatic Updates.

whencanistop writes "Having seen Google set up their Google Analytics product for free (in an attempt to get everyone to spend more money on adwords) and then seen Microsoft release their version of a free web analytics tool into beta, Yahoo have decided to do the same thing, by buying someone else and releasing it into the wild for free. Great news for bloggers who don't want to sign up for Google's 'evil' plans."

You asked questions about Skewz.com on April 2nd and April 3rd. Here are your answers. This media bias stuff is tricky to deal with. Both Skewz and Microsoft's Blewz are trying, anyway. Skewz people say they want to jump into the conversation attached to this post, so if you have any follow-up questions please feel free to ask them. 1) Why is everything about "bias"? (Score:5, Insightful)
by MillionthMonkey

Shouldn't just "being full of [bleep]" count for anything? Why not just rate stories on their frequencies of lies, distortions, unsupported assertions, and factual inaccuracies?

That's what gives the impression of "bias" to a reader in the first place.

Vipul Vyas:

First of all, we've enjoyed all the great feedback from the Slashdot community. You can't get a more intellectual and insightful set of observations from any other group. With regard to rating bias on more granular terms, I'll answer the question with two points:

First, it's the combination of various factors that leads people to perceive bias as you have said. All we've really done is distill those many factors down to an overall political bias - either liberal or conservative. People perceive an article to be biased one direction or the other because of a variety of factors which include: biased word selection, assumptions not supported by data, poor sourcing, open demonization, inaccuracy, omission of facts, and guilt by association as a few examples. All of these factors in some combination create the perception of either liberal or conservative bias because folks on one side perceive their side is not being fairly represented by virtue of these factors being present. So the overall bias is a distillation of all these factors.

Second, all of the above being said; we are planning functionality to support this more granular reasoning for identifying bias. This will likely be used by power users that really want to dig into the reasons for bias. We believe this will be interesting because it will enable us to be able to track news sources in terms of both bias and the reasons for bias such as inaccuracies. This should add a new dimension of insight.

2) Incentivising Registration? (Score:4, Interesting)
by eldavojohn (898314)

What do you offer to entice users to register and rank stories for you? It seems that the benefits just come from the people that do all the work, is your only incentive that the person feels good for helping you out? Do you rank your users? Is there a reward system even if it's only number of stories ranked?

The article said you are hoping to raise your current set of 600 users to something more like 10,000--what are you doing to accomplish that?

Vipul Vyas:

Great question. I believe people really enjoy the Skewz forum in which they can blow the whistle on pieces purporting to be objective but are not and also push forward pieces that they advocate despite their bias. When we first started the site we were simply transferring our own daily behavior of sending around emails with articles and our reactions to them. Just being able to find a community to exchange ideas and interact with is a huge draw for people...sort of like Slashdot but for politics. Many people can get angry with what they read in the paper, but their only recourse is to send a letter to the editor and hope that it gets read or the remote possibility that it gets printed. With Skewz they can call out such issues instantly and get an immediate reaction from a community of people from both sides of the political landscape. The feedback loop is immediate.

To answer your question more direction, right now Skewz does have a user ranking system. Users are ranked in terms of their experience on the site (number of articles submitted or skewed, comments made, etc.). Users are ranked from rookie Congressmen all the way up to incumbent Senators to keep with the political theme. We also provide individual statistics with regard to user activity under the user's Skewz Me! profile. These all provide incentive from a pure personal accomplishment perspective.

A curious thing we've observed is that people both 1. reveal bias in the 'main stream or corporate media,' and 2. submit articles that they know are biased from say the blogosphere that support their position. So one of the biggest emerging reasons that people are active is to promote their perspective in an environment where they feel they might just reach the other side. I believe people honestly feel that they can reach the "other side" on our site simply by virtue of the format.

With regard to getting to 10,000 users, we're relying on the basics:
1) Great reviews from the Slashdot community (that's you guys),
2) Strong content from a politically involved community and an intuitive mechanism to attract both opinion readers and trend setters,
3) Strong ties with the blogosphere to create a mutually rewarding Skew mechanism through our widget program which is customized for political blogs in ways that more generic widgets for sites such as Digg are not, and
4) Good motivation or our current users to invite their friends - which we're seeing a lot of.

We are pleased with the results so far as we have a healthy number of people enjoying Skewz.

3) Missing sliders (Score:4, Insightful)
by Tsar (536185)

From your site's What is Skewz? [skewz.com] section:

"Skewz was started by a group of 4 guys with diverse political views who engaged in frequent political sparring. We tired of the coarseness of the public political dialog and the tendency for both sides to talk past each other. The goal was not to make peace between liberals and conservatives. Instead, we wanted to encourage liberal-conservative dialogue by improving on the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the discussions. We hoped that doing so would take focus from the cosmetic appeal of parties and personalities that generate allegiances and place it instead on wit and wisdom of intelligent debate."

It seems that your site's focus is currently on cultural/political bias rather than the "wit and wisdom of intelligent debate." If your project is to be true to its goals, shouldn't there be evaluation sliders for an article's wit, insight, wisdom and informativeness? We use a simplified system for that on Slashdot and it works surprisingly well most of the time.

Vipul Vyas:

Fair point. I think if you look at the discussion we have on the site today, it's quite a bit less bombastic than what you see on partisan sites. We're seeing people come to Skewz for more sophisticated debate with people from the other side of the political spectrum. People use the backdrop of a specific story with asserted facts and that backdrop helps keep things from getting personal and also keeps the focus on the article and topic being discussed. I believe that has really helped keep the community culture very positive.

But to your point, as indicated in my response to the first question here Skewz is adding functionality to allow people to more discretely comment on the positive and negative elements of the submitted articles.

4) Skewz me? (Score:4, Informative)
by Jeffrey Baker (6191)

Skews makes no sense. Take this article as an example:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080401184532.kxjxy7xo&show_article=1

It's an AFP wire story with completely straight, factual reporting about high school graduation rates in the USA. There is no commentary from the author whatsoever. However Skewz users rate the story as "Liberal", giving it 2.5 out of 5 points on the Liberal scale. I'm having a hard time seeing the logic there. How can a purely factual report on this topic possibly be considered leftist?

Vipul Vyas:

I think your observation makes the point. What many perceive as "straight up" objective can still be perceived as biased. With the article in question and the rating, I just learned something about how some segments of our polity interpret events...and it's very different from the way I interpret them. I think that's the point of Skewz.

Ultimately we'd have to ask the members of the Skewz community as to why the article was skewed left. I believe this is the insight you get from a site like Skewz. If you look at some of the comments associated with the article you see some interesting and even surprising perspectives which I never would have thoughts of.

Folks on the left felt the article was objective to slightly leftward leaning by pointing out the serious problems faced by inner city youth. So, liberals felt that the story being covered was good coverage of objective reality with maybe some modest left bias in terms of advocacy for a traditional set of liberal positions like uplifting those in inner cities and focusing more on education.

Conservatives had a more visceral response. If you look at the comments, the perception was that the failings were implicitly pointing to George Bush's No Child Left Behind policies. Some said the article didn't associate blame with the students or parents. Others pointed to the photo associated with the article showing jubilant African American students. They felt that the picture was out of line with the point that graduation rates among minorities were extremely low.

These sharply different take-aways from a fairly straight forward articles create the most insights. Skewz lets you augment those insights by seeing who skewed the article in what way. Each person's profile provides their political orientation so you can see how liberals reacted to an article and how conservatives reacted. That makes for some interesting insights. In addition, you can leverage the split view function on Skewz to see a story about the same news event that is rated with the opposite political orientation to the one that you are currently reading. That really lets you flesh out the whole picture in terms of the world of opinion.

5) Complaints? (Score:2, Interesting)
by Notquitecajun (1073646)

Have you ever gotten complaints from actual journalists about how their stories are rated? I think one thing that we rarely - if ever - hear is how actual journalists rate the news. I'm not talking pundits, either, I'm talking about those who are supposed to report on the who-what-when-where-how of the news.

Vipul Vyas:

We haven't so far but we hope to become more influential and at that point we'll matter to journalists. Unfortunately, some journalists are not too worried about what their readership thinks. That's where the Slashdot community can help by posting and skewing articles to keep the media honest. Our blog widget program will enable political bloggers to let their readers rate their articles and post them on Skewz. Now, bloggers by their nature are biased advocates of certain positions. That being said, there is value in understanding the information these blogs present relative to the traditional media. The closer the traditional media gets to certain segments of the blogosphere, the less likely they are representing an objective perspective. The blogs, on the other hand, carry their liberal and conservative affiliations as a badge of honor.

6) Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated (Score:3, Insightful)
by melted (227442)

Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated: http://research.microsoft.com/~chrisko/papers/ICWSM_paper.pdf, albeit totally orthogonal to what skewz.com does.

Are you guys using machine learning at all? If not, how do you protect yourselves against user bias (e.g. the situation where liberals like your site and conservatives don't, so you get mostly liberal stories). Personally, it seems to me that Skewz is just a glorified Digg with sliders.

Vipul Vyas:

There's always the risk that one side dominates the site. That being said, there is such a perception of media bias on both sides that I believe Skewz provides a legitimate venue for that discussion to take place which will continue to draw people from both ends of the political spectrum. If we provide an even playing field, we'll be a place where either side can come to try to evangelize the other in terms of their perceptions. Skewz is an political open space.

Also, based on a recent Harris Interactive Poll Blog readership is almost evenly distributed with 22 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats regularly reading blogs. Independents are the ones slightly more likely to read these, as just over one-quarter (26%) say they regularly read political blogs.

Interestingly, most all of the founders of Skewz come have speech recognition and statistical language modeling background. We leverage language modeling in our split view function which matches stories on the right with their corresponding foils on the left to provide a fuller perspective. So from that perspective we do use some linguistic modeling at a basic level.

I applaud what Microsoft is doing with Blews. However, I think Skewz is a pretty different site in that it's user driven, and we're interested in understanding what people think. If you're really into the political blog world you realize that different blogs have different degrees of alignment with the left or right and this actually evolves. In fact, some folks completely swap sides over time. In the end politics is about people and their perceptions. We think its valuable to get it directly from the source to best understand how these trends evolve. For example, Andrew Sullivan has evolved from being a fairly right wing stalwart to being an Obama supporter. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs moved in the other direction after 9/11. These movements are best described by asking the polity itself.

7) Cultural polarization as a web service (Score:2)
by Tsar (536185)

What filters will be available in the future? Will users be able to limit the stories they see to those rated, say, (+4,Reactionary) or above? That would allow your portal to emulate the Drudge Report, the Daily Kos or the John Birch Society homepage at the user's whim, removing the risk of accidental exposure to differing viewpoints.

Vipul Vyas:

I'm glad you asked this question. Skewz actually has this functionality today. If you are a registered user you'll see a spectrum under both the liberal and conservative sides. You can slide the hands there to bracket the stories to see more or less extremes of each side. In this way, you can create your own view or synthetic version of the Drudge Report or Daily Kos. But keep in mind, by virtue of the format you are always at risk at being exposed to the other side...which is a risk that has many rewards.

8) Where is your value add, without a better spectrum... (Score:2)
by PotatoHead (12771)

Of political alignment?

IMHO, most media today leans corporate left and corporate right. This is missed because the one dimensional model is not up to the task of actually helping us quantify and deal with bias.

So, why bother with a service like yours, if it is lacking in this way?

Vipul Vyas:

Good question. When Skewz first started, I used to just visit a couple of sites that were more or less aligned with my existing political beliefs. However, Skewz has exposed me to a variety of different perspectives...some of which I didn't even know existed. Even if I don't agree with some of the new perspectives I've been exposed to, I now have a better sense of how other people think and what their logic is. In some respects, I didn't realize what I myself was reading was biased because I was completely unaware of other facts or theories on the same subject that were out there. Skewz has enabled me to still get a lot of the information I was getting before while at the same time exposing me to an entirely different world of thinking in a format that's relatively easy to use.

With regard to your question on the spectrum, it works because you're not just rating the corporate media left or right which I take it you mean the traditional media. Blogs are also well represented on the site. Users can submit and add weight to what the blogs are saying. If there are subjects or angles that the traditional media are not covering then these stories can be submitted and rated. Again, people tend to reveal bias in two ways: 1. I know this is biased, but I like what it is saying or 2. this purports to be objective and it's not so I am blowing the whistle. Some people also use the site to employ a third tactic. They submit articles as being objective that deal with subject or facts that they feel the media has not covered through "bias by exclusion."

9) Truth, and the real bias we need to worry about (Score:2)
by Gat0r30y (957941)

It seems that the news media has become increasingly segmented, and indeed this provides a way for people to get only the news they want to see. But my issue stems not from Left or Right, but from a more general perspective. An increasing bulk of the news out there is increasingly aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator. I can see that there is a place for tabloids, and their stories, just like there is a place for soap operas. However, it seems that the tabloid mentality has infiltrated all facets of corporate news media. Instead of raising debate about policy, the dialog in most mainstream news outlets has become more along the lines of "OMG, Hillary is 2 points down! And she doesn't have as many myspace friends as Obama! And McCain is super hot!". I propose that what we need is not a "Left vs. Right" filter, but a "Pointless drivel I wouldn't read if it was printed on Lindsay Lohan's ass and I was doin her from behind vs. Actual News Content which I might find of Value".

I gave your site a quick look, there were 3 stories on the front page which might have entailed some sort of policy issue, or problem facing the electorate.

A) UK considering "Health Vouchers" for NHS patients.(marked conservative)
B)Study: only 1/2 of students graduate high school in US Cities (marked liberal)
C)'Silent' Famine sweeps globe (marked liberal)

Everything else was the "high school lunchroom" type of discussion, who's up, who's down, why they might be up if they are up, why they shouldn't give up and "rah rah sis boom bah for My Favorite Candidate". My question is this, how can we elevate actual issues to the discussion? How can we start a dialog based on the problems we face, and the policy which the candidates propose to fix these problems? Food shortages, Education, and Health care are real issues. The day to day of campaigning is interesting for sure, but how can we keep it from dominating the news landscape as it does now?

Vipul Vyas:

This is a great question. I believe it's human nature to do both. The "name calling level of debate" is indeed easy and appealing. But that being said, if you look at the actual debate on Skewz; the level of debate is more solution oriented than you'll see on many other more partisan sites. In fact, the three substantial articles you mention may not show up anywhere on many other news outlets. You are right in that news outlets tend to cater to the segments they are going after. With Skewz, the community decides what is most interesting so the feedback loop is more immediate. By and large, the self-selecting community has been more about deep debate on real issues versus mudslinging- even in this election season. On Skewz you can find finely parsed debate on Obama's health care plan or global warming for example.

Often the submitted article is the launching point for more detailed discussion where folks often learn a great deal about the other side. For example, liberal and conservatives (generally) seem to agree on US presence in Afghanistan...much to the surprise of many conservatives. Conversely, gun control is not as passionately pursued by liberals (at least those on our site currently) as many conservatives had assumed.

News media give their customer base what they want. With Skewz, the community decides what it wants, and so far we seem to be selecting a more sophisticated news consumer.

10) What about consensus? (Score:3, Funny)
by prxp (1023979)

What about when both parties reach a consensus and the story ranks 100% liberal and 100% conservative? Does the system explode? Is this a new sort of Quantum Computer? Enlighten me, please! (but hey, be fair and balanced, will you?)

Vipul Vyas:

We accommodate for this through the center skew which points to an objective view that everyone agrees represents reality objectively. Sadly, that doesn't happen often enough. (and by the way the quantum version of Skewz where articles can be liberal and conservative at the same time is coming up and will be part of the theory of everything...:-)

You asked questions about Skewz.com on April 2nd and April 3rd. Here are your answers. This media bias stuff is tricky to deal with. Both Skewz and Microsoft's Blewz are trying, anyway. Skewz people say they want to jump into the conversation attached to this post, so if you have any follow-up questions please feel free to ask them. 1) Why is everything about "bias"? (Score:5, Insightful)
by MillionthMonkey

Shouldn't just "being full of [bleep]" count for anything? Why not just rate stories on their frequencies of lies, distortions, unsupported assertions, and factual inaccuracies?

That's what gives the impression of "bias" to a reader in the first place.

Vipul Vyas:

First of all, we've enjoyed all the great feedback from the Slashdot community. You can't get a more intellectual and insightful set of observations from any other group. With regard to rating bias on more granular terms, I'll answer the question with two points:

First, it's the combination of various factors that leads people to perceive bias as you have said. All we've really done is distill those many factors down to an overall political bias - either liberal or conservative. People perceive an article to be biased one direction or the other because of a variety of factors which include: biased word selection, assumptions not supported by data, poor sourcing, open demonization, inaccuracy, omission of facts, and guilt by association as a few examples. All of these factors in some combination create the perception of either liberal or conservative bias because folks on one side perceive their side is not being fairly represented by virtue of these factors being present. So the overall bias is a distillation of all these factors.

Second, all of the above being said; we are planning functionality to support this more granular reasoning for identifying bias. This will likely be used by power users that really want to dig into the reasons for bias. We believe this will be interesting because it will enable us to be able to track news sources in terms of both bias and the reasons for bias such as inaccuracies. This should add a new dimension of insight.

2) Incentivising Registration? (Score:4, Interesting)
by eldavojohn (898314)

What do you offer to entice users to register and rank stories for you? It seems that the benefits just come from the people that do all the work, is your only incentive that the person feels good for helping you out? Do you rank your users? Is there a reward system even if it's only number of stories ranked?

The article said you are hoping to raise your current set of 600 users to something more like 10,000--what are you doing to accomplish that?

Vipul Vyas:

Great question. I believe people really enjoy the Skewz forum in which they can blow the whistle on pieces purporting to be objective but are not and also push forward pieces that they advocate despite their bias. When we first started the site we were simply transferring our own daily behavior of sending around emails with articles and our reactions to them. Just being able to find a community to exchange ideas and interact with is a huge draw for people...sort of like Slashdot but for politics. Many people can get angry with what they read in the paper, but their only recourse is to send a letter to the editor and hope that it gets read or the remote possibility that it gets printed. With Skewz they can call out such issues instantly and get an immediate reaction from a community of people from both sides of the political landscape. The feedback loop is immediate.

To answer your question more direction, right now Skewz does have a user ranking system. Users are ranked in terms of their experience on the site (number of articles submitted or skewed, comments made, etc.). Users are ranked from rookie Congressmen all the way up to incumbent Senators to keep with the political theme. We also provide individual statistics with regard to user activity under the user's Skewz Me! profile. These all provide incentive from a pure personal accomplishment perspective.

A curious thing we've observed is that people both 1. reveal bias in the 'main stream or corporate media,' and 2. submit articles that they know are biased from say the blogosphere that support their position. So one of the biggest emerging reasons that people are active is to promote their perspective in an environment where they feel they might just reach the other side. I believe people honestly feel that they can reach the "other side" on our site simply by virtue of the format.

With regard to getting to 10,000 users, we're relying on the basics:
1) Great reviews from the Slashdot community (that's you guys),
2) Strong content from a politically involved community and an intuitive mechanism to attract both opinion readers and trend setters,
3) Strong ties with the blogosphere to create a mutually rewarding Skew mechanism through our widget program which is customized for political blogs in ways that more generic widgets for sites such as Digg are not, and
4) Good motivation or our current users to invite their friends - which we're seeing a lot of.

We are pleased with the results so far as we have a healthy number of people enjoying Skewz.

3) Missing sliders (Score:4, Insightful)
by Tsar (536185)

From your site's What is Skewz? [skewz.com] section:

"Skewz was started by a group of 4 guys with diverse political views who engaged in frequent political sparring. We tired of the coarseness of the public political dialog and the tendency for both sides to talk past each other. The goal was not to make peace between liberals and conservatives. Instead, we wanted to encourage liberal-conservative dialogue by improving on the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the discussions. We hoped that doing so would take focus from the cosmetic appeal of parties and personalities that generate allegiances and place it instead on wit and wisdom of intelligent debate."

It seems that your site's focus is currently on cultural/political bias rather than the "wit and wisdom of intelligent debate." If your project is to be true to its goals, shouldn't there be evaluation sliders for an article's wit, insight, wisdom and informativeness? We use a simplified system for that on Slashdot and it works surprisingly well most of the time.

Vipul Vyas:

Fair point. I think if you look at the discussion we have on the site today, it's quite a bit less bombastic than what you see on partisan sites. We're seeing people come to Skewz for more sophisticated debate with people from the other side of the political spectrum. People use the backdrop of a specific story with asserted facts and that backdrop helps keep things from getting personal and also keeps the focus on the article and topic being discussed. I believe that has really helped keep the community culture very positive.

But to your point, as indicated in my response to the first question here Skewz is adding functionality to allow people to more discretely comment on the positive and negative elements of the submitted articles.

4) Skewz me? (Score:4, Informative)
by Jeffrey Baker (6191)

Skews makes no sense. Take this article as an example:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080401184532.kxjxy7xo&show_article=1

It's an AFP wire story with completely straight, factual reporting about high school graduation rates in the USA. There is no commentary from the author whatsoever. However Skewz users rate the story as "Liberal", giving it 2.5 out of 5 points on the Liberal scale. I'm having a hard time seeing the logic there. How can a purely factual report on this topic possibly be considered leftist?

Vipul Vyas:

I think your observation makes the point. What many perceive as "straight up" objective can still be perceived as biased. With the article in question and the rating, I just learned something about how some segments of our polity interpret events...and it's very different from the way I interpret them. I think that's the point of Skewz.

Ultimately we'd have to ask the members of the Skewz community as to why the article was skewed left. I believe this is the insight you get from a site like Skewz. If you look at some of the comments associated with the article you see some interesting and even surprising perspectives which I never would have thoughts of.

Folks on the left felt the article was objective to slightly leftward leaning by pointing out the serious problems faced by inner city youth. So, liberals felt that the story being covered was good coverage of objective reality with maybe some modest left bias in terms of advocacy for a traditional set of liberal positions like uplifting those in inner cities and focusing more on education.

Conservatives had a more visceral response. If you look at the comments, the perception was that the failings were implicitly pointing to George Bush's No Child Left Behind policies. Some said the article didn't associate blame with the students or parents. Others pointed to the photo associated with the article showing jubilant African American students. They felt that the picture was out of line with the point that graduation rates among minorities were extremely low.

These sharply different take-aways from a fairly straight forward articles create the most insights. Skewz lets you augment those insights by seeing who skewed the article in what way. Each person's profile provides their political orientation so you can see how liberals reacted to an article and how conservatives reacted. That makes for some interesting insights. In addition, you can leverage the split view function on Skewz to see a story about the same news event that is rated with the opposite political orientation to the one that you are currently reading. That really lets you flesh out the whole picture in terms of the world of opinion.

5) Complaints? (Score:2, Interesting)
by Notquitecajun (1073646)

Have you ever gotten complaints from actual journalists about how their stories are rated? I think one thing that we rarely - if ever - hear is how actual journalists rate the news. I'm not talking pundits, either, I'm talking about those who are supposed to report on the who-what-when-where-how of the news.

Vipul Vyas:

We haven't so far but we hope to become more influential and at that point we'll matter to journalists. Unfortunately, some journalists are not too worried about what their readership thinks. That's where the Slashdot community can help by posting and skewing articles to keep the media honest. Our blog widget program will enable political bloggers to let their readers rate their articles and post them on Skewz. Now, bloggers by their nature are biased advocates of certain positions. That being said, there is value in understanding the information these blogs present relative to the traditional media. The closer the traditional media gets to certain segments of the blogosphere, the less likely they are representing an objective perspective. The blogs, on the other hand, carry their liberal and conservative affiliations as a badge of honor.

6) Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated (Score:3, Insightful)
by melted (227442)

Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated: http://research.microsoft.com/~chrisko/papers/ICWSM_paper.pdf, albeit totally orthogonal to what skewz.com does.

Are you guys using machine learning at all? If not, how do you protect yourselves against user bias (e.g. the situation where liberals like your site and conservatives don't, so you get mostly liberal stories). Personally, it seems to me that Skewz is just a glorified Digg with sliders.

Vipul Vyas:

There's always the risk that one side dominates the site. That being said, there is such a perception of media bias on both sides that I believe Skewz provides a legitimate venue for that discussion to take place which will continue to draw people from both ends of the political spectrum. If we provide an even playing field, we'll be a place where either side can come to try to evangelize the other in terms of their perceptions. Skewz is an political open space.

Also, based on a recent Harris Interactive Poll Blog readership is almost evenly distributed with 22 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats regularly reading blogs. Independents are the ones slightly more likely to read these, as just over one-quarter (26%) say they regularly read political blogs.

Interestingly, most all of the founders of Skewz come have speech recognition and statistical language modeling background. We leverage language modeling in our split view function which matches stories on the right with their corresponding foils on the left to provide a fuller perspective. So from that perspective we do use some linguistic modeling at a basic level.

I applaud what Microsoft is doing with Blews. However, I think Skewz is a pretty different site in that it's user driven, and we're interested in understanding what people think. If you're really into the political blog world you realize that different blogs have different degrees of alignment with the left or right and this actually evolves. In fact, some folks completely swap sides over time. In the end politics is about people and their perceptions. We think its valuable to get it directly from the source to best understand how these trends evolve. For example, Andrew Sullivan has evolved from being a fairly right wing stalwart to being an Obama supporter. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs moved in the other direction after 9/11. These movements are best described by asking the polity itself.

7) Cultural polarization as a web service (Score:2)
by Tsar (536185)

What filters will be available in the future? Will users be able to limit the stories they see to those rated, say, (+4,Reactionary) or above? That would allow your portal to emulate the Drudge Report, the Daily Kos or the John Birch Society homepage at the user's whim, removing the risk of accidental exposure to differing viewpoints.

Vipul Vyas:

I'm glad you asked this question. Skewz actually has this functionality today. If you are a registered user you'll see a spectrum under both the liberal and conservative sides. You can slide the hands there to bracket the stories to see more or less extremes of each side. In this way, you can create your own view or synthetic version of the Drudge Report or Daily Kos. But keep in mind, by virtue of the format you are always at risk at being exposed to the other side...which is a risk that has many rewards.

8) Where is your value add, without a better spectrum... (Score:2)
by PotatoHead (12771)

Of political alignment?

IMHO, most media today leans corporate left and corporate right. This is missed because the one dimensional model is not up to the task of actually helping us quantify and deal with bias.

So, why bother with a service like yours, if it is lacking in this way?

Vipul Vyas:

Good question. When Skewz first started, I used to just visit a couple of sites that were more or less aligned with my existing political beliefs. However, Skewz has exposed me to a variety of different perspectives...some of which I didn't even know existed. Even if I don't agree with some of the new perspectives I've been exposed to, I now have a better sense of how other people think and what their logic is. In some respects, I didn't realize what I myself was reading was biased because I was completely unaware of other facts or theories on the same subject that were out there. Skewz has enabled me to still get a lot of the information I was getting before while at the same time exposing me to an entirely different world of thinking in a format that's relatively easy to use.

With regard to your question on the spectrum, it works because you're not just rating the corporate media left or right which I take it you mean the traditional media. Blogs are also well represented on the site. Users can submit and add weight to what the blogs are saying. If there are subjects or angles that the traditional media are not covering then these stories can be submitted and rated. Again, people tend to reveal bias in two ways: 1. I know this is biased, but I like what it is saying or 2. this purports to be objective and it's not so I am blowing the whistle. Some people also use the site to employ a third tactic. They submit articles as being objective that deal with subject or facts that they feel the media has not covered through "bias by exclusion."

9) Truth, and the real bias we need to worry about (Score:2)
by Gat0r30y (957941)

It seems that the news media has become increasingly segmented, and indeed this provides a way for people to get only the news they want to see. But my issue stems not from Left or Right, but from a more general perspective. An increasing bulk of the news out there is increasingly aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator. I can see that there is a place for tabloids, and their stories, just like there is a place for soap operas. However, it seems that the tabloid mentality has infiltrated all facets of corporate news media. Instead of raising debate about policy, the dialog in most mainstream news outlets has become more along the lines of "OMG, Hillary is 2 points down! And she doesn't have as many myspace friends as Obama! And McCain is super hot!". I propose that what we need is not a "Left vs. Right" filter, but a "Pointless drivel I wouldn't read if it was printed on Lindsay Lohan's ass and I was doin her from behind vs. Actual News Content which I might find of Value".

I gave your site a quick look, there were 3 stories on the front page which might have entailed some sort of policy issue, or problem facing the electorate.

A) UK considering "Health Vouchers" for NHS patients.(marked conservative)
B)Study: only 1/2 of students graduate high school in US Cities (marked liberal)
C)'Silent' Famine sweeps globe (marked liberal)

Everything else was the "high school lunchroom" type of discussion, who's up, who's down, why they might be up if they are up, why they shouldn't give up and "rah rah sis boom bah for My Favorite Candidate". My question is this, how can we elevate actual issues to the discussion? How can we start a dialog based on the problems we face, and the policy which the candidates propose to fix these problems? Food shortages, Education, and Health care are real issues. The day to day of campaigning is interesting for sure, but how can we keep it from dominating the news landscape as it does now?

Vipul Vyas:

This is a great question. I believe it's human nature to do both. The "name calling level of debate" is indeed easy and appealing. But that being said, if you look at the actual debate on Skewz; the level of debate is more solution oriented than you'll see on many other more partisan sites. In fact, the three substantial articles you mention may not show up anywhere on many other news outlets. You are right in that news outlets tend to cater to the segments they are going after. With Skewz, the community decides what is most interesting so the feedback loop is more immediate. By and large, the self-selecting community has been more about deep debate on real issues versus mudslinging- even in this election season. On Skewz you can find finely parsed debate on Obama's health care plan or global warming for example.

Often the submitted article is the launching point for more detailed discussion where folks often learn a great deal about the other side. For example, liberal and conservatives (generally) seem to agree on US presence in Afghanistan...much to the surprise of many conservatives. Conversely, gun control is not as passionately pursued by liberals (at least those on our site currently) as many conservatives had assumed.

News media give their customer base what they want. With Skewz, the community decides what it wants, and so far we seem to be selecting a more sophisticated news consumer.

10) What about consensus? (Score:3, Funny)
by prxp (1023979)

What about when both parties reach a consensus and the story ranks 100% liberal and 100% conservative? Does the system explode? Is this a new sort of Quantum Computer? Enlighten me, please! (but hey, be fair and balanced, will you?)

Vipul Vyas:

We accommodate for this through the center skew which points to an objective view that everyone agrees represents reality objectively. Sadly, that doesn't happen often enough. (and by the way the quantum version of Skewz where articles can be liberal and conservative at the same time is coming up and will be part of the theory of everything...:-)

mikkl666 writes "Even just since this morning, there's much to report in the ongoing fight between Microsoft and Yahoo!. After Yahoo! announced yesterday that they are testing Google AdSense, Microsoft reacted with a comment pointing out that 'any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google's hands.' Ironically, they complain that 'this would make the market far less competitive.' Both companies try to team up with strong partners, as well. Yahoo! and AOL are now closing in on a deal to combine their Internet operations. And of course, this morning's news was that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is apparently in talks for a joint bid for Yahoo!"

Dixie_dean writes "Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. 'The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage." This is a project we've been talking about for a long time.

Dixie_dean writes "Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. 'The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage." This is a project we've been talking about for a long time.

Researchers at Microsoft Labs are hoping to allow untrained singers to have their own automatic backup band in the near future. A new piece of software, "MySong", promises to take a sung melody and using a probability computation algorithm, generate an appropriate chord accompaniment. There is also a video of the process on the Microsoft Labs website. "'The idea is to let a creative but musically untrained individual get a taste of song writing and music creation,' Morris told New Scientist. 'There was nothing out there that could take a sung vocal melody as an input and then generate appropriate chords to accompany it. [...] Since people rarely sing at precise frequencies, MySong compares a sung melody to the 12 standard musical notes. It then feeds an approximate sequence of notes to the system's chord probability computation algorithm. This algorithm has been trained, through analysis of 300 rock, pop, country and jazz songs, to recognize fragments of melody and chords that work well together, as well as chords that complement each another.'"

An anonymous reader writes "In a letter sent today, Microsoft writes to Yahoo's board of directors to tell them that they would like to 'negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies.' Their message is a combination of friend and foe: 'If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders.'"

Skewz.com is not the Microsoft-funded Blews experiment that is supposed to help detect rightness and leftness in stories based on blogs that link to them. Instead of detecting blog links, Skewz relies on readers to submit and rate stories, and even tries to pair stories that have "liberal" and "conservative" biases so that you can get multiple takes on the same event or pronouncement. The Skewz About page explains how it works. The site has drawn a fair amount of "media insider" attention, including a writeup on the Poynter Institute website. But what does all this mean? Where is it going? Can Skewz.com help us sort our news better and make more informed decisions? We don't know. But if you post a question here for founder Vipul Vyas, maybe he'll have an answer for you. (Please try to follow the usual Slashdot interview rules.)

wiredog writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft is developing a program that classifies news stories according to whether liberal or conservative bloggers are linking to them and also measures the 'emotional intensity' based on the frequency of keywords in the blog posts." If you would like to jump right to the tool you can check out "Blews" on the Microsoft site.

Admodieus writes "It seems as though the veil has been lifted on the Internet Explorer 8 beta. Microsoft has revealed a list of the new features in IE8, including two interesting new additions called Activities and WebSlices. From the site: 'Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do ... WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.' Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery, a favorites toolbar, and improved phishing filter protection. Microsoft has also posted links to download the beta, but none of them are working right now."

Admodieus writes "It seems as though the veil has been lifted on the Internet Explorer 8 beta. Microsoft has revealed a list of the new features in IE8, including two interesting new additions called Activities and WebSlices. From the site: 'Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do ... WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.' Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery, a favorites toolbar, and improved phishing filter protection. Microsoft has also posted links to download the beta, but none of them are working right now."

Alex_Ionescu writes "Microsoft's Singularity operating system (covered previously by Slashdot) is now open to the public for download, under a typical Microsoft academic, non-commercial license. Inside is a fully compilable and bootable version of what could be the basis for the future of Windows, or maybe simply an experiment to demonstrate .NET's capabilities. Singularity, if you'll recall, has gained wide interest from researchers and users alike, by claiming to be a fully managed code kernel (with managed code drivers and applications as well), something that would finally revolutionize the operating system research arena. The project is available on CodePlex."

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has some opinions on child safety online and the use of fear mongering. Here are his thoughts. "The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been running online ads for several years saying that "Each year 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online", a statistic that has been endlessly repeated, including by vendors of blocking software and by politicians who often paraphrase it to say that 1 in 5 children "are approached by online predators". While others have quietly documented the problems with this statistic, lawmakers still bring it out every year in a push for more online regulation (preempted this year only by the topic du jour of cyberbullying), so it's time for anti-censorship organizations to start campaigning more aggressively against the misleading "1 in 5" number. That means two things: framing the debate with more accurate numbers, and holding the parties accountable for disseminating the wrong ones -- and that means naming names, including those of organizations like the NCMEC that are normally beyond reproach." Read below for the rest. I have no doubt that on balance, the world is a better place because of the NCMEC and what they've done, and God knows how I'd feel about them if they'd helped me find a lost child. But the good things they've done shouldn't be viewed as political capital that they can withdraw against in order to be above criticism for spreading the "1 in 5" meme. The longer they go on implying to parents that there is a 1-in-5 chance their kid will be asked by an adult to meet in person for sex, the more I think it tarnishes their whole legacy. (The NCMEC did not respond to contact requests for this article.)

First, what the 1-in-5 number actually means. It originated with a study done in 2000 by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, which surveyed 1,501 Internet-using youth age 10 through 17. The actual relevant findings of the study were as follows:

• The 1 in 5 figure was the number that had received at least one instance of unwanted sex talk (including from other teenagers), or sex talk from an adult (whether wanted or not), in the past year.

• The proportion of respondents who received a sexual flirtation from an adult, followed by a request to talk on the phone or meet in person, was about 1%.

• The number of survey respondents who actually befriended an adult online and then met the adult in person for sexual purposes, was zero.

Specifically: About 19% of respondents said had received a "sexual solicitation or approach" (my emphasis), and "sexual solicitations and approaches" were defined as: "requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult". That means any unwanted sex talk, including from other teens, even if limited to one occurrence in the entire previous year, would cause a respondent to be included in the 19% figure (which, when you define it that broadly, actually sounds pretty low). To say that those 1 in 5 minors were "sexually solicited" -- literally, asked for sex -- is simply false.

The actual proportion of respondents who reported that someone made sexual overtures and asked to talk on the phone or meet in person -- what the study called an "aggressive sexual solicitation" -- was 3%, and 34% of those requests were known to have been made by adults. And even this overestimates the proportion of minors who were truly "sexually solicited", because all it means is that an adult started out by talking to them sexually, and then made some request for offline contact, which could have merely been asking for a phone number. So the scenario that comes to mind when hearing that "1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online" -- of being approached sexually by an adult and asked for an in-person meeting -- had actually happened to no more than 1% of respondents, and probably much fewer than that.

And this is just considering the percentage of youth who received solicitations, not taking into account how they responded. Out of 1,501 youth surveyed, none of them reported actually meeting an adult in person for anything that they described as sexual contact. Two teens in the study had "close friendships" with adults that the authors wrote "may have had sexual aspects". One 17-year-old boy had a relationship with a woman in her late twenties that he described as "romantic" but not sexual, and they never met in person. Another 16-year-old girl became close to a man in his thirties, and they met in a public place, but she described the relationship as non-sexual, and she declined to spend the night with him. (While these could still be considered "close calls", it's worth noting that even if the 16- and 17-year-olds had actually had a sexual relationship with their adult friends, that would have in fact been legal in many U.S. states, and in any case it's not what most people think of when they hear about "children" being "sexually solicited online".)

Of course all of this depends on the accuracy of the answers that the youth gave to the surveyors. But the "1 in 5" figure was based on the youths' stated responses as well. People who cite the study can't have their cake and eat it too, taking the "1 in 5" number as accurate but discounting the fact that none of the teens surveyed reported a sexual relationship with an adult they met online.

These were the data that were available in 2000, when the "1 in 5" number started being spread. The authors of the original study followed up with a 2005 report, "Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later", in which the corresponding statistics were:

• 1 in 7 respondents received unwanted sex talk or sex talk from an adult, at some point in the past year.

• The proportion of respondents who received a sexual flirtation from an adult, followed by a request to communicate offline, was again about 1-2%. (4% of respondents reported a sexual flirtation plus a request to correspond offline. The new study reported that 39% of all sexual solicitations were made by adults, but did not say what proportion of "aggressive sexual solicitations" -- which included requests for offline contact -- were made by adults.)

• Out of 1,501 respondents surveyed in 2005, two did report an in-person meeting that led to a sexual crime -- one was a 15-year-old girl who met a 30-year-old man in person and had consensual sex with him, and another was a 16-year-old girl who went to a party with an older male she met online who later tried to rape her. But even these incidents (which were both reported to law enforcement) do not mean that the Internet is a more dangerous environment for youth with regard to interaction with adults. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's own Web site links to a study -- also by one of the authors of the "Online Victimization" report -- which found that when all types of abuse are counted, 20% of females experience some type of sexual victimization before adulthood, compared to 2 out of 750 female survey respondents in the "Online Victimization" study who reported sexual abuse by someone they met online.

The NCMEC has updated their Web site to say that "one in seven youths (10 to 17 years) experience a sexual solicitation or approach while online", although the banner ads still say 1 in 5. But I think the 1-in-7 versus 1-in-5 is hardly worth nit-picking, when the real problem is that the statement "1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online" is written in a way that virtually guarantees it will be mis-heard and passed along as a statement involving "online predators" or "pedophiles". "Authorities Say 1 in 5 Children Has Been Approached By Online Predators" reads the sub-heading of a story on ABC news. "20% of children who use computer chat rooms have been approached over the Internet by a pedophile" says an online safety site sponsored by the Albemarle County government in Virginia. "One in five kids in America are approached by online predators" says a Congressman's press release.

The NCMEC itself never says that 1 in 5 or 1 in 7 children is "approached by a pedophile", merely that they are "sexually solicited online". I still think this is false because that is not the proportion of minors who are literally solicited for sex, but suppose that you expanded "sexual solicitation" to include all sex talk, so that the statement was "technically true". That still misses the point, because the issue shouldn't be seen as a game where sides try to make their statements as alarmist as possible while still being "technically true", like the kid with his petition to ban "dihydrogen monoxide". If you say something that is virtually guaranteed to get passed along as a wrong and alarmist statement about "pedophiles", aren't you at least partly responsible?

Why, then, does the NCMEC do it? Their site does have a "Donate" link, but it's very low-key, and the site generally seems to steer first-time visitors towards actions that they can take with regard to their own children. So I'm not cynical enough to think the "1 in 5" statistic is a campaign to scare up donations; I think they really do believe they are doing good by getting people to believe that number and to take action based on it. The problem is that there is such a thing as too much worrying and too much overprotection. Sites like Facebook are often used to organize parties and events and send out venue changes, just because that's the most efficient way to do it, and if your parents ban you from getting on Facebook, you'll miss out on simple things like that. What good does that do for anybody? Critics of overprotection often say that overly sheltered kids may rebel later on and get themselves in worse trouble, and that's often true, but so what even if they don't? Your quality of life is still worse off if you're the only one in your peer group who can't get updates about your friends' parties. And your parents' quality of life will be worse if they're constantly wringing their hands thinking that there is a 1 in 5 chance their kid will be propositioned online by a pedophile.

So I would urge the NCMEC to reconsider what they're telling people. Regarding the "1 in 5" meme that's already out there, it's spread so far that it's probably too late for the NCMEC to put the genie back into the bottle. But any anti-censorship group participating in a debate about online safety should put the real statistics forward, and since many in the audience will have heard the "1 in 5" figure somewhere, take a minute to knock it down as well. You don't have to commit political suicide by calling out the NCMEC specifically for spreading the "1 in 5" number, but put the right numbers out there.

Unfortunately the subject of child safety is such that wrong information, from any source, is unlikely to be criticized if it's erring on the side of caution, but some memes die faster than others. Microsoft's resource page about "online predators" says that "if you find pornography on the family computer" -- not child porn, but regular pornography -- that could be a warning sign that "your child is the target of an online predator". I think that's a wildly irresponsible thing to be telling parents, but fortunately the meme does not seem to have spread beyond that one page, which probably not one parent in a thousand will ever actually read.

Nemilar writes "Preload is a Linux daemon that stores commonly-used libraries and binaries in memory to speed up access times, similar to the Windows Vista SuperFetch function. This article examines Preload and gives some insight into how much performance is gained for its total resource cost, and discusses basic installation and configuration to get you started."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Microsoft is now saying that Vista SP1 disables some 3rd party applications. The KB article on SP1 incompatibility states: 'For reliability reasons, Microsoft blocks these programs from starting after you install Windows Vista SP1.' It does link to several vendor support pages with updates or workarounds. Unfortunately, at least one of the suggestions consists of merely disabling part of the program, which could leave you with half an anti-virus solution."

theodp writes "A recent Amazon SEC filing sheds light on the puzzling departure of Microsoft Sr. VP Brian Valentine in Sept. 2006. Valentine is the Gen. George Patton-like figure charged with pushing Vista developers, who dumped the still not-ready-for-prime-time OS into RC1 status as he bolted for a new gig at Amazon. Having repeatedly assured everyone that Valentine was staying with the company post-Vista, Microsoft backpedaled and explained that Valentine decided to leave since the company had shipped a near-final version of Vista. Not so. Although analysts fell for the PR line, it seems Valentine had actually signed an Employment Agreement way back in June calling for him to be on board at Amazon on Sept. 11 if he wanted to pick up a $1.7M signing bonus, $150K base salary, another $500K bonus, and 400K shares of Amazon stock (now worth almost $30M). Who says you have to shell out $999.95 for MS-Project to come up with accurate planned completion dates?"

A large number of readers are submitting the news that Microsoft has made a major announcement about interoperating with others including specifically the FOSS world. The impetus is the ongoing EU antitrust case against Microsoft. The announcement comes in the context of the release of 30,000 pages of API documentation for Microsoft Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 — and a listing of patents that apply to these technologies, and a pledge not to sue open source developers who use the APIs. InfoWorld summarizes by saying that Microsoft "promised greater transparency in its development and business practices." Fortune is blunter, saying "Microsoft declares truce in open source war." Here's Microsoft's FAQ on the open source interop initiative.

A large number of readers are submitting the news that Microsoft has made a major announcement about interoperating with others including specifically the FOSS world. The impetus is the ongoing EU antitrust case against Microsoft. The announcement comes in the context of the release of 30,000 pages of API documentation for Microsoft Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 — and a listing of patents that apply to these technologies, and a pledge not to sue open source developers who use the APIs. InfoWorld summarizes by saying that Microsoft "promised greater transparency in its development and business practices." Fortune is blunter, saying "Microsoft declares truce in open source war." Here's Microsoft's FAQ on the open source interop initiative.

RCanine writes "Microsoft is attempting to curry mind share with the 3-12 age bracket with their new event, the Source Fource, a series of developer-based action figures. Windows Vista Sensei, SQL Server Gal and some lame gender stereotypes presumably seek to rid the world of bearded, katana-wielding evil-doers. From the article: 'Between March 15th and April 15th 2007, the new super dudette will be offered and will be sent to developers who get their act together and attend at least two live MSDN Webcasts or two MSDN Virtual Labs, or one of each.'" I just can't figure out what to make of this, except that I hope someone can tell me if it blends. Or melts. Or burns.

RCanine writes "Microsoft is attempting to curry mind share with the 3-12 age bracket with their new event, the Source Fource, a series of developer-based action figures. Windows Vista Sensei, SQL Server Gal and some lame gender stereotypes presumably seek to rid the world of bearded, katana-wielding evil-doers. From the article: 'Between March 15th and April 15th 2007, the new super dudette will be offered and will be sent to developers who get their act together and attend at least two live MSDN Webcasts or two MSDN Virtual Labs, or one of each.'" I just can't figure out what to make of this, except that I hope someone can tell me if it blends. Or melts. Or burns.

Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. "[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You'd be wrong on all four counts."

Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. "[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You'd be wrong on all four counts."

Tendraes brings us a story about legal experts who are warning that Microsoft's "covenant not to sue" over use of the OOXML specification is both ambiguous and untested. Developers wishing to make use of OOXML are unlikely to understand the complex legal language of the Open Specification Promise, and such a document - being neither a release nor a contract - has never been tested in court. From ZDNet Asia: "David Vaile, executive director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Center at the University of New South Wales, said that Microsoft participants at a recent symposium on the issue found it challenging to explain how an ordinary person 'or even an ordinary lawyer' could easily determine which parts of the specification were covered. 'This lack of certainty would mean a cautious lawyer may be reluctant to advise any third party to rely on the promise without extensive and potentially quite expensive analysis, and even that could be inconclusive,' Vaile said. 'In turn, this could restrict its viability as a usable standard for less well-resourced users, including small developers and many public organizations.'"

Echostorm writes with word that Windows Vista SP1, which began rolling out via Automatic Update, has left some users' machines unbootable. The update loops forever on "Configuring updates: Stage 3 of 3 — 0% complete. Do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down"... restart and loop. Echostorm notes having found traces of what sounds like the same bug in early beta releases of SP1. It's unclear how many users are affected. So far there is no word on a fix from Microsoft.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton adds his experience to the litany of woes with Microsoft Vista. Unlike most commentators who have a beef with the operating system, Bennett does a bit of surveying to bolster his points. Read his account by clicking on the magic link.

My brand-new-out-of-the-box Windows Vista machine could not access www.facebook.com. A nearby XP machine could, but the Vista machine couldn't. I went back to Circuit City to try out the other Vista demo machines, and they could access other sites but not Facebook, either. And that honeymoon feeling that you get when you buy a new computer and expect it to solve all your problems, was over for me. Having built my latest career on helping people access Facebook where they were blocked from it, by some cosmic joke was Vista now blocking me from getting to Facebook on my own machine?

I know, another article bashing Vista, what could be more banal. (Kids! That word, meaning "trite" or "unoriginal", is pronounced "ba-NAHL". If you say it the wrong way like I did in an interview, it sounds naughty and you sound stupid.) But in my own random survey of 30 Vista users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (a handy way to check these things), three quarters (23) said the only reason they were using Vista was that the PC store they went to didn't sell XP machines any more, and about half of all respondents (14) said that they would go back to Windows XP if they could. So I don't want to get a bunch of e-mails with Ron Paul links in the signature saying "Nobody has to use Vista if they don't want to!" (I'm aware that a survey of 30 people is too small to be scientific, but it's enough to get a ballpark figure for about $5 on Mechanical Turk.) Besides, the more people write testimonials to what they found frustrating about Vista, the more likely it is that some future version will keep what is good about the new OS, while providing a less frustrating interface (suggested name: "Vista 98").

It turns out the Facebook issue was not really Microsoft's fault -- www.facebook.com had a broken IPv6 record, and Vista defaults to using IPv6 where XP used IPv4, so that's why the host wasn't working. (In case you run into this with any other Web sites on Vista, I fixed the problem by disabling IPv6 in network settings and rebooting.) But it was one more example of something that used to work pre-Vista and then stopped working, and every case like that adds up to the overall frustration of switching to a new system, regardless of whose fault it is.

I hasten to add that I am not some partisan Microsoft basher. I like XP just fine, never more than when I went back to it after a few days on Vista, and I still think for that matter that Vista would be easier to switch to than Linux. Having been involved for years with free speech activism, I run into a lot of people in the same circles who are strong Linux advocates, apparently because the concept of "freedom of speech" is closely aligned with "making every file search as simple and stress-free as a Hamas hostage negotiation". So every year or two I'll try out the latest version of some Linux distro to see how long it would take to get used to it. In 2005, full of optimism, I cheerfully booted up the latest version of Shrike, then tried to find a directory and discovered I could not right-click on the hard drive root dir and specify the name of a directory I wanted to search for (that only worked for files, not directories). I posted a query to a Linux newsgroup, and a respondent told me that the solution was to open a command prompt and type "man find", which I am aware is a polite way of saying "screw you, newbie", but which I dutifully followed anyway and got an output screen of which the first paragraph was:

find searches the directory tree rooted at each given file name by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence (see section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for or), at which point find moves on to the next file name.

and that was all my Linux for that year. Maybe I'm overdue to try it again. (Microsoft gives away their Virtual PC program that makes it easy to try other operating systems; I think it's a ploy to make us appreciate Windows more.) Now, I love the concept of a freely-distributable, freely-modifiable operating system, and I've recommended Linux to people when you need it to do something cool that Windows can't do, like bypassing Windows security by booting a PC from a CD. And it's done a lot of good for organizations like the One Laptop Per Child program, which can keep their costs down by using a free operating system. But to this day I've never heard an answer to one question: Since even Linux advocates admit that it's harder to use, what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows, to make it worth switching over to? If I was nervous about Vista because some of the interface had changed and some of my old programs no longer worked, it wasn't helpful to tell me to switch to a system where all of the interface would change and none of my old programs would work.

So, I wanted to like Vista. I knew that eventually everyone would have to upgrade anyway, so, not wanting to be left behind, I wanted to switch to Vista because of the same factor that spammers use to get your attention: "Other guys are improving themselves, why aren't you?" But there were some things I ran into almost immediately:

• Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer no longer have the "File / Edit / View" menu bars across the top of the window. Was this a big problem under XP? When the menus gave quick, two-click access to most actions that you could take within the application, was there a grassroots movement to have them removed? I did eventually find that you can hit the "Alt" key to bring the menus back, but why put people through that frustration? The most annoying feeling while using a computer is being yanked out of thinking about what you're doing with the computer to having to concentrate on how to use it.

  Perhaps the idea was to steer users towards using the buttons on the toolbar, but there aren't enough buttons to cover all the options located under the menus. If the UI designers wanted to steer users gently towards using the buttons, my suggestion would have been: Whenever the user picks something under a menu that corresponds to something accessible from the toolbar, display a dialog box which says for example, "In the future, you can print faster by clicking the printer button on the toolbar", along with a picture (and a "Do not show this message again" checkbox -- important!).

• Windows Explorer also did away with the "Up" button that lets you browse from the current directory to the higher-level directory. Again, probably not in response to a groundswell of users demanding for that button to be removed, when it took up about one square centimeter of screen space. Supposedly Windows Explorer makes up for this by displaying the entire path to the current directory in the address bar, so that if the path is "C:\Financial Records\Chris Pirillo\ Pectoral Real Estate\", you can click on "Chris Pirillo" to go one directory higher. The trouble is that I frequently give my directories extremely long and descriptive names like (this is a real example) "Flash-Player-8.5.0.246-beta2.downloaded-2006-03-20-from-labs.macromedia.com" so that I can keep track of where and when I got each piece of downloaded software, in case I ever need to go back to a previous version that the software maker no longer makes available because they're trying to steer me away from it (ironically, "Vista syndrome"). With a directory that has a long name like that, the higher-level directories aren't visible in the address bar, so I had to locate it manually in the left-hand tree view panel. OK, knock off the violins, the point is that I didn't have to do that in XP.
• I have an older monitor, so I wanted to turn ClearType off. The IE7 help file describes how to do this in IE, but that didn't work for me no matter how many times I tried, and my eyes were aching by the time I found out that in Vista it's a default system-wide setting that overrides IE's setting until you change the system-wide one. I would have suggested putting one line in the IE7 help file: "Note: if your operating system such as Windows Vista is set to use ClearType system-wide, you must disable this as well to disable ClearType in IE."
• Virtual PC, which worked on all versions of Windows XP, is not supported on Vista Home Premium. I need Virtual PC (for reasons other than Linux-bashing), so this was a deal-breaker.
• Telnet no longer installed by default. Even though I use a different telnet program for regular use, telnet.exe was handy to test whether a remote machine was reachable on a given port. (For example, in a command prompt, type "telnet www.yahoo.com 80" and when the command prompt screen goes blank, that means the machine www.yahoo.com is accepting responses on port 80, the standard port for Web traffic. Try connecting to port 81 instead, and you get no response on that port. This can be useful when diagnosing problems with Web servers and other programs.) Even though it's not hard to get telnet back, why would they go to the trouble of removing it?
• The aforementioned Facebook problem. This seemed so startling at the time that I almost stopped everything to write an article just about that, musing on Microsoft having so much power that all PC stores were now exclusively stocking computers running an OS that, at the time anyway, couldn't access Facebook. But then I asked another bunch of users on Mechanical Turk, and all respondents using Vista said they could access Facebook after all. Of course, this wasn't a random sample, since users who bought Vista and couldn't access Facebook, probably would have returned their machines a long time ago, but I'm still not sure what caused it to work on some machines and not others -- all I know is that Facebook was inaccessible until I disabled IPv6.
  
  I know Facebook is reading these articles, since in November I wrote about how you could circumvent Facebook's system of verifying that users were real high school students, by doing the following: "(1) create a profile of a non-overweight girl and sign up as a member of a high school network, pending confirmation; (2) search for several boys in that network and send them friend requests; and (3) wait for at least one of them to confirm you back". Shortly afterwards, Facebook changed the verification system, so that now, if you're confirming someone who is a pending member of a high school network but no one else has confirmed them yet, Facebook warns you, "Only check this box if you're absolutely sure that you know this person." So, whichever of Mark Zuckerberg's friends is reading my articles: Clever idea, and, keep the IPv6 records working.

That was as far as I got before I stopped trying to get used to Vista and started taking notes for this article (working title: "Vist Vucked"). From the Mechanical Turk users who responded to my survey, the other most common reported problems were: software compatibility, hardware compatibility, difficulty with the UI, and running too slowly. Presumably the first two problems will improve over time, but the UI will always be hard to switch to as long as users can't find functions that were easy locatable in the old interface, and if it runs slower than XP, that will always be a factor no matter how fast your computer is. (However fast it runs Vista, you'd always be able to make it run even faster with XP instead!)

The best things I've heard about Vista have been that (a) it is the most secure Windows ever (which Dave Barry says is like calling asparagus the "most articulate vegetable ever"), and (b) it features better multimedia integration. To which my responses were: (a) the number of incomprehensible warnings that Vista flashes at a user whenever they look at the computer funny, does not make it more secure, because users will condition themselves to just ignore those warnings, and (b) I hate watching TV on my computer anyway.

Since TV/PC integration is a major selling point for Vista, I thought this last issue was worth looking harder at: Do people really want to use their computers to watch TV? My computer monitor is in an office where I sit up close when I'm working; but TV feels more comfortable to watch from several feet away, and in my office I can't even scoot my chair back that far. (And if I lived with family, I doubt they'd want to crowd into my office to watch a movie.) In fact, I like the psychological separation of the TV set in the living room from the distractions of the computer in the office: I go in there when I'm done with everything in here. The only way I'd regularly download and watch movies would be if I had a way to send them wirelessly to my TV, but a wireless PC-to-TV converter and the corresponding receiver together cost about $200.

Seeking more validation of my opinions from strangers, I did another survey of 30 Mechanical Turk users, asking if they would rather drive to a movie rental store or download a movie online for the same price. Almost half (14) said they'd rather drive to the movie store, citing the comfort of watching the movie on their TV as opposed to on the computer. Another fourth of the respondents (8) said they'd download the movie but only if they could send the content to their TV to watch, and only the last fourth (8) said they'd actually watch it on their computer monitor. So the future of convergence between PC and TV will probably be not in all-in-one systems but in devices that link the PC in your study with the TV in your living room, and since there's no household name yet for PC-to-TV linkage, the field is wide open for some lucky company to make a product that becomes synonymous with the concept, the way "TiVo" is easier to say than "Digital Video Recorder". Maybe that will be a boost for systems like Vista. If that happens at about the same time that a Vista successor is released that makes the interface easier to switch to from XP, I'll bet that will be the tipping point that gets people switching voluntarily. (Of course many people will switch by then just because they need a new computer and they couldn't find one with anything but Vista on it.)

Anyway, I was only trying a new Vista machine because the hard drive on my old computer died, but after all the data had been recovered, I just installed a new drive in the old machine and went back to XP, while my Vista machine was returned to its perch, gargoyle-like, on the shelves at Circuit City, waiting to pounce on the next unsuspecting wretch with dreams of self-improvement through newer computer purchases. The only remnant of Vista that I have left is IE7, which was installed by my Windows XP restore disk and can't be removed, and which is incompatible with some sites and programs that I need, so I've been using Firefox more and getting to like it. That's lucky, since I've already offended the loyal software-logo-wearing constituencies of Vista and Linux, and wouldn't want to deal with the Firefox crowd too. As my friend Anne Mitchell says, "Admitting you hate Firefox is almost as bad as admitting to being Republican." (Except that when Firefox screws with a page, the chat logs don't end up on national television. Ba-dump-bump!)

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton adds his experience to the litany of woes with Microsoft Vista. Unlike most commentators who have a beef with the operating system, Bennett does a bit of surveying to bolster his points. Read his account by clicking on the magic link.

My brand-new-out-of-the-box Windows Vista machine could not access www.facebook.com. A nearby XP machine could, but the Vista machine couldn't. I went back to Circuit City to try out the other Vista demo machines, and they could access other sites but not Facebook, either. And that honeymoon feeling that you get when you buy a new computer and expect it to solve all your problems, was over for me. Having built my latest career on helping people access Facebook where they were blocked from it, by some cosmic joke was Vista now blocking me from getting to Facebook on my own machine?

I know, another article bashing Vista, what could be more banal. (Kids! That word, meaning "trite" or "unoriginal", is pronounced "ba-NAHL". If you say it the wrong way like I did in an interview, it sounds naughty and you sound stupid.) But in my own random survey of 30 Vista users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (a handy way to check these things), three quarters (23) said the only reason they were using Vista was that the PC store they went to didn't sell XP machines any more, and about half of all respondents (14) said that they would go back to Windows XP if they could. So I don't want to get a bunch of e-mails with Ron Paul links in the signature saying "Nobody has to use Vista if they don't want to!" (I'm aware that a survey of 30 people is too small to be scientific, but it's enough to get a ballpark figure for about $5 on Mechanical Turk.) Besides, the more people write testimonials to what they found frustrating about Vista, the more likely it is that some future version will keep what is good about the new OS, while providing a less frustrating interface (suggested name: "Vista 98").

It turns out the Facebook issue was not really Microsoft's fault -- www.facebook.com had a broken IPv6 record, and Vista defaults to using IPv6 where XP used IPv4, so that's why the host wasn't working. (In case you run into this with any other Web sites on Vista, I fixed the problem by disabling IPv6 in network settings and rebooting.) But it was one more example of something that used to work pre-Vista and then stopped working, and every case like that adds up to the overall frustration of switching to a new system, regardless of whose fault it is.

I hasten to add that I am not some partisan Microsoft basher. I like XP just fine, never more than when I went back to it after a few days on Vista, and I still think for that matter that Vista would be easier to switch to than Linux. Having been involved for years with free speech activism, I run into a lot of people in the same circles who are strong Linux advocates, apparently because the concept of "freedom of speech" is closely aligned with "making every file search as simple and stress-free as a Hamas hostage negotiation". So every year or two I'll try out the latest version of some Linux distro to see how long it would take to get used to it. In 2005, full of optimism, I cheerfully booted up the latest version of Shrike, then tried to find a directory and discovered I could not right-click on the hard drive root dir and specify the name of a directory I wanted to search for (that only worked for files, not directories). I posted a query to a Linux newsgroup, and a respondent told me that the solution was to open a command prompt and type "man find", which I am aware is a polite way of saying "screw you, newbie", but which I dutifully followed anyway and got an output screen of which the first paragraph was:

find searches the directory tree rooted at each given file name by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence (see section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for or), at which point find moves on to the next file name.

and that was all my Linux for that year. Maybe I'm overdue to try it again. (Microsoft gives away their Virtual PC program that makes it easy to try other operating systems; I think it's a ploy to make us appreciate Windows more.) Now, I love the concept of a freely-distributable, freely-modifiable operating system, and I've recommended Linux to people when you need it to do something cool that Windows can't do, like bypassing Windows security by booting a PC from a CD. And it's done a lot of good for organizations like the One Laptop Per Child program, which can keep their costs down by using a free operating system. But to this day I've never heard an answer to one question: Since even Linux advocates admit that it's harder to use, what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows, to make it worth switching over to? If I was nervous about Vista because some of the interface had changed and some of my old programs no longer worked, it wasn't helpful to tell me to switch to a system where all of the interface would change and none of my old programs would work.

So, I wanted to like Vista. I knew that eventually everyone would have to upgrade anyway, so, not wanting to be left behind, I wanted to switch to Vista because of the same factor that spammers use to get your attention: "Other guys are improving themselves, why aren't you?" But there were some things I ran into almost immediately:

• Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer no longer have the "File / Edit / View" menu bars across the top of the window. Was this a big problem under XP? When the menus gave quick, two-click access to most actions that you could take within the application, was there a grassroots movement to have them removed? I did eventually find that you can hit the "Alt" key to bring the menus back, but why put people through that frustration? The most annoying feeling while using a computer is being yanked out of thinking about what you're doing with the computer to having to concentrate on how to use it.

  Perhaps the idea was to steer users towards using the buttons on the toolbar, but there aren't enough buttons to cover all the options located under the menus. If the UI designers wanted to steer users gently towards using the buttons, my suggestion would have been: Whenever the user picks something under a menu that corresponds to something accessible from the toolbar, display a dialog box which says for example, "In the future, you can print faster by clicking the printer button on the toolbar", along with a picture (and a "Do not show this message again" checkbox -- important!).

• Windows Explorer also did away with the "Up" button that lets you browse from the current directory to the higher-level directory. Again, probably not in response to a groundswell of users demanding for that button to be removed, when it took up about one square centimeter of screen space. Supposedly Windows Explorer makes up for this by displaying the entire path to the current directory in the address bar, so that if the path is "C:\Financial Records\Chris Pirillo\ Pectoral Real Estate\", you can click on "Chris Pirillo" to go one directory higher. The trouble is that I frequently give my directories extremely long and descriptive names like (this is a real example) "Flash-Player-8.5.0.246-beta2.downloaded-2006-03-20-from-labs.macromedia.com" so that I can keep track of where and when I got each piece of downloaded software, in case I ever need to go back to a previous version that the software maker no longer makes available because they're trying to steer me away from it (ironically, "Vista syndrome"). With a directory that has a long name like that, the higher-level directories aren't visible in the address bar, so I had to locate it manually in the left-hand tree view panel. OK, knock off the violins, the point is that I didn't have to do that in XP.
• I have an older monitor, so I wanted to turn ClearType off. The IE7 help file describes how to do this in IE, but that didn't work for me no matter how many times I tried, and my eyes were aching by the time I found out that in Vista it's a default system-wide setting that overrides IE's setting until you change the system-wide one. I would have suggested putting one line in the IE7 help file: "Note: if your operating system such as Windows Vista is set to use ClearType system-wide, you must disable this as well to disable ClearType in IE."
• Virtual PC, which worked on all versions of Windows XP, is not supported on Vista Home Premium. I need Virtual PC (for reasons other than Linux-bashing), so this was a deal-breaker.
• Telnet no longer installed by default. Even though I use a different telnet program for regular use, telnet.exe was handy to test whether a remote machine was reachable on a given port. (For example, in a command prompt, type "telnet www.yahoo.com 80" and when the command prompt screen goes blank, that means the machine www.yahoo.com is accepting responses on port 80, the standard port for Web traffic. Try connecting to port 81 instead, and you get no response on that port. This can be useful when diagnosing problems with Web servers and other programs.) Even though it's not hard to get telnet back, why would they go to the trouble of removing it?
• The aforementioned Facebook problem. This seemed so startling at the time that I almost stopped everything to write an article just about that, musing on Microsoft having so much power that all PC stores were now exclusively stocking computers running an OS that, at the time anyway, couldn't access Facebook. But then I asked another bunch of users on Mechanical Turk, and all respondents using Vista said they could access Facebook after all. Of course, this wasn't a random sample, since users who bought Vista and couldn't access Facebook, probably would have returned their machines a long time ago, but I'm still not sure what caused it to work on some machines and not others -- all I know is that Facebook was inaccessible until I disabled IPv6.
  
  I know Facebook is reading these articles, since in November I wrote about how you could circumvent Facebook's system of verifying that users were real high school students, by doing the following: "(1) create a profile of a non-overweight girl and sign up as a member of a high school network, pending confirmation; (2) search for several boys in that network and send them friend requests; and (3) wait for at least one of them to confirm you back". Shortly afterwards, Facebook changed the verification system, so that now, if you're confirming someone who is a pending member of a high school network but no one else has confirmed them yet, Facebook warns you, "Only check this box if you're absolutely sure that you know this person." So, whichever of Mark Zuckerberg's friends is reading my articles: Clever idea, and, keep the IPv6 records working.

That was as far as I got before I stopped trying to get used to Vista and started taking notes for this article (working title: "Vist Vucked"). From the Mechanical Turk users who responded to my survey, the other most common reported problems were: software compatibility, hardware compatibility, difficulty with the UI, and running too slowly. Presumably the first two problems will improve over time, but the UI will always be hard to switch to as long as users can't find functions that were easy locatable in the old interface, and if it runs slower than XP, that will always be a factor no matter how fast your computer is. (However fast it runs Vista, you'd always be able to make it run even faster with XP instead!)

The best things I've heard about Vista have been that (a) it is the most secure Windows ever (which Dave Barry says is like calling asparagus the "most articulate vegetable ever"), and (b) it features better multimedia integration. To which my responses were: (a) the number of incomprehensible warnings that Vista flashes at a user whenever they look at the computer funny, does not make it more secure, because users will condition themselves to just ignore those warnings, and (b) I hate watching TV on my computer anyway.

Since TV/PC integration is a major selling point for Vista, I thought this last issue was worth looking harder at: Do people really want to use their computers to watch TV? My computer monitor is in an office where I sit up close when I'm working; but TV feels more comfortable to watch from several feet away, and in my office I can't even scoot my chair back that far. (And if I lived with family, I doubt they'd want to crowd into my office to watch a movie.) In fact, I like the psychological separation of the TV set in the living room from the distractions of the computer in the office: I go in there when I'm done with everything in here. The only way I'd regularly download and watch movies would be if I had a way to send them wirelessly to my TV, but a wireless PC-to-TV converter and the corresponding receiver together cost about $200.

Seeking more validation of my opinions from strangers, I did another survey of 30 Mechanical Turk users, asking if they would rather drive to a movie rental store or download a movie online for the same price. Almost half (14) said they'd rather drive to the movie store, citing the comfort of watching the movie on their TV as opposed to on the computer. Another fourth of the respondents (8) said they'd download the movie but only if they could send the content to their TV to watch, and only the last fourth (8) said they'd actually watch it on their computer monitor. So the future of convergence between PC and TV will probably be not in all-in-one systems but in devices that link the PC in your study with the TV in your living room, and since there's no household name yet for PC-to-TV linkage, the field is wide open for some lucky company to make a product that becomes synonymous with the concept, the way "TiVo" is easier to say than "Digital Video Recorder". Maybe that will be a boost for systems like Vista. If that happens at about the same time that a Vista successor is released that makes the interface easier to switch to from XP, I'll bet that will be the tipping point that gets people switching voluntarily. (Of course many people will switch by then just because they need a new computer and they couldn't find one with anything but Vista on it.)

Anyway, I was only trying a new Vista machine because the hard drive on my old computer died, but after all the data had been recovered, I just installed a new drive in the old machine and went back to XP, while my Vista machine was returned to its perch, gargoyle-like, on the shelves at Circuit City, waiting to pounce on the next unsuspecting wretch with dreams of self-improvement through newer computer purchases. The only remnant of Vista that I have left is IE7, which was installed by my Windows XP restore disk and can't be removed, and which is incompatible with some sites and programs that I need, so I've been using Firefox more and getting to like it. That's lucky, since I've already offended the loyal software-logo-wearing constituencies of Vista and Linux, and wouldn't want to deal with the Firefox crowd too. As my friend Anne Mitchell says, "Admitting you hate Firefox is almost as bad as admitting to being Republican." (Except that when Firefox screws with a page, the chat logs don't end up on national television. Ba-dump-bump!)

willdavid writes "Paul McDougall reports in InformationWeek on Microsoft's new online comic. The Heroes Happen Here comic strips are being created by Jordan Gorfinkel, a former DC Comics editor who helped revitalize the Batman series. 'Tech workers who in the middle of the night fix a downed server or take on a computer virus don't really have extraordinary powers. It just seems that way. But a new comic book has debuted in which IT pros literally are superheroes. The daily Web comic, called Heroes Happen Here, features tech savvy crime fighters like Lord Firewall, who "stands between chaos and order" and says things like "begone vermin!"'" And because it's never easy, in order to read the archives of the comic you're going to need to install Microsoft's Silverlight.

billstewart writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will be announcing a virtualization strategy on Tuesday. Of course there's plenty of focus on the competition with VMware, including the obligatory reference to Microsoft's entry into the browser wars prior to cutting off Netscape's air supply. The pieces of the picture will include: an alliance with Citrix Systems, owners of XenSource; acquisition of privately held Calista Technologies of San Jose, which has software that speeds up the performance of applications running in a virtualized environment; and lower price for Windows Vista used on virtualized computers. Microsoft also reversed its earlier position and will now allow the Home Basic and Home Premium versions of Vista to run under virtualization. The company confirmed its plans to deliver its Hyper-V hypervisor within six months of the launch of Windows Server 2008 (betas available now), which is expected this quarter."

billstewart writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will be announcing a virtualization strategy on Tuesday. Of course there's plenty of focus on the competition with VMware, including the obligatory reference to Microsoft's entry into the browser wars prior to cutting off Netscape's air supply. The pieces of the picture will include: an alliance with Citrix Systems, owners of XenSource; acquisition of privately held Calista Technologies of San Jose, which has software that speeds up the performance of applications running in a virtualized environment; and lower price for Windows Vista used on virtualized computers. Microsoft also reversed its earlier position and will now allow the Home Basic and Home Premium versions of Vista to run under virtualization. The company confirmed its plans to deliver its Hyper-V hypervisor within six months of the launch of Windows Server 2008 (betas available now), which is expected this quarter."

HalvarFlake writes "With all the hoopla about the remotely exploitable, kernel-level buffer overflow discussed in today's security bulletin MS08-0001, what is the actual bug that triggers this? The bulletin doesn't give all that much information. This movie (Flash required) goes through the process of examining the 'pre-patch' version of tcpip.sys and comparing it against the 'post-patch' version of tcpip.sys. This comparison yields the actual code that causes the overflow: A mistake in the calculation of the required size in a dynamic allocation."

Sunday evening saw the final CES keynote delivered by Bill Gates in his current role with the Microsoft corporation. Speculation about big announcements generally seemed to be for naught, as his last address at the show focused more on broad concepts than blockbuster news. "Gates outlined three major themes for the second digital decade-high definition displays with 3D experiences and high quality video and audio, connected services and the power of natural interfaces. Gates had a vision early of those themes, but his quest to make the Tablet PC, Media Center PCs and natural interfaces, such as speech and touch, more mainstream has not been realized." A full description of the talk, including his Guitar Hero finale with Slash, is available in Engadget's liveblog of the event.

wilkinism writes "Microsoft released several detailed documents explaining just about everything you ever wanted to know about Vista SP1. Highlights include a Deployment Guide, list of included hotfixes, and a 17-page list of 'Notable Changes'. In reviewing the Notable Changes document, it seems the company focused on improving reliability & performance in really specific scenarios, so it's no wonder that most reviewers are reporting no noticeable gains."