Doubt's Log

I rented some snowshoes on Saturday and went with Lassy, Mr Rick, Lampy, Homer and Lassy's Niece on a Snowshoeing trip. It was pure fun after we got off the road, between the constant twists and turns, the work of finding where the path went and the beauty of the waves of snow we saw towards the end. I really wish I had brought a camera. The snow was pretty hard and was more like a ice cone then snow.

Afterwards I found that I was starving and probably ate too much for dinner that night as a result. I need to bring more food with me next time.

Sunday was a nice visit from Debra and Jacob. Jacob is into wanting his own way in walking and staying at the playground after it is time to go. One of the more intresting conversations was about giving kids Jacob and Simeon's age limited choices and another about a young child quizzing Debra about Divorce. "What rules did he break?". 

Last night Pam and I were pretty tired, so we HAVE NOT watched the latest Battlestar Galatica episode yet. We did watch the Dresden Files new episode, The Boone Identity, and caught some of the Teasers for this week's episode, it looks like it plays games with the Baltar as a Cylon angle (which is great) and the Starbuck/Apollo marriage issues (which is pure pain).

The Dresen Files is looking like it's going to be a fun little series that I can watch and relax to. It has some backstory but it doesn't look like the deep intertwined emotional mess Battlestar inflicts every week.

• Bill Gates takes stage
• Reminds us of the GUI bet 12 years ago in Windows 95
• Everything is focused on how to represent in a Digital format
• What's the new innovations?
• Making it easier: search, flip3d, etc
• Safer: anti-spyware, anti-phising, etc
• Entertainment: DX10, Photo Gallery, DVD Maker, HiDef support
• Better Connect: Diagnosing, RSS platform support, XML file formats
• Platform Renovation
• Installing
• Upgrade Advisor
• new system
• Mike, corperate vice president demo
• thanks familys and beta testers
• Familly focused demo
• Photos
• Tagging in Photo gallery via drag and drop
• Search via the tagging
• One beta tester with 40K photos in the library
• Basic adjustments
• DVD Burning
• Videos and pictures into a nice preview
• Document editing
• Live Previews of the entire format of the document changing
• Add a photo and drag it to the size you want in the document, no guessing percents
• Ribbon UI
• Extra effects on photos in the document, shadows and the like
• Games
• Game Explorer
• DX10
• Using the Xbox360 controller
• Cross-platform playing, EX: uno
• Parental Controls
• Time-Limits
• Game ratings
• IM sessions, Games played, Web sites went to/attempted to go to
• Xbox360 media center extender
• Cable Card support -> HiDef TV Recording
• Media Center interface
• Music explorer
• picture explorer
• Extras
• DreamScene - Motion Video on the Desktop
• WoW campaign Commercial
• nice music... look up later
• Steve Ballmer
• Biggest Launch in software history and the broadest
• Today/Tommorow fun across the globe
• 19 Languages today, 99 by EOY
• 39,000 retail outlets
• thousands of OEMs
• 1 million people in europe by EOY
• 2 million in US
• 2,500 certified software products
• NY Times reader application
• 5 Mil beta testers
• Partners Video
• Dell CEO Kevin ??
• Intel Sean Melony(sp?)
• Toshiba CEO and president of computer devision ??
• AMD Chairman and CEO Hector Ruitz
• HP ??
• editorial comment: How much money is on that stage right now?
•  Bill Gates
• Thanks to the employees
• Jim Allchin thank you from Bill
• 5 Million People Downloaded Vista and Office 2007
• Highest quality ever
• Test Automation
• Performance Testing
• Watched 1 billion office beta sessions
• What Famillies said about the product
• 50 famillies in 7 countries
• > contact
• 800 changes
• Lots of DVD burning feedback out of this program
• "Microsoft listened to me"
• One of the Famillies on the stage
• Burn to Disc button in photo gallery was one of thier feedbacks
• Got the first copy in the US.
• Kids push the button, and Screens in Times Square Start going
• Video of Launch events across the world.
• Live Band starts playing
• Caffiteria Ballons drops
• Event is over at Microsoft

From the Windows Vista Blog:

It's important to emphasize that while Windows Vista has the necessary infrastructure to support commercial content scenarios, this infrastructure is designed to minimize impact on other types of content and other activities on the same PC.  For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop.  Similarly, if someone was listening to commercial audio content while viewing medical imagery, none of the video protection mechanisms would be activated and the displayed images would again be unaffected.

This is key to me, the OS has support, but it is compartmentalized in it's reach and effects. The real engineering challenge is to create such a system such that the OS and hardware ecosystem remains open. The comments also demonstrate that many still are confused by the initial poor examples and hyperbole. For example:

Handing over complete control to the RIAA/MPAA and allowing them to have the final say on what a Windows machine can and cannot do is completely unacceptable. I don't care if an exploit has been found in my drivers, unless it's to do with security in the sense of someone being able to compromise my machine I don't expect to see driver revocation just to satisfy some lawyer.

First, they only have control over thier own content. Second, even if the driver is revocated, the only ability you lose is the ability to see thier content.

There a pretty reasonable podcast about Vista DRM in Security Now #75. Key points:

• Worse case is that you can't play content that demnands a super secure path.
• No known media is requesting the super secure path. It is very questionable if anyone will ever want to take the PR hit of actually using it.
• Constriction or "fuzzyness" is for the high quality content; not everything on your screen and only if the content requires it.
• The main device you are probably playing HD-DVD's on is laptops who have onboard graphics and are exempt from a number of things that people are concerned about.

Update: Just to be fair, there are a number of legit concerns that the Gutmann paper talks about, but even in that paper there are examples that people have let thier imagination run away with. The legit concerns include: side effects to how open hardware is when hardware needs to authenticate to the driver (They should do a public key thing here IMHO), Hardware/CPU costs in dealing with encrypting content across an open pci bus, potential cost for splitting out drivers to mitigate potential protect content trust revocation, the potental for hardware manufactures to destablize a PC when creating an implementation of tilt bits and IP/Licencing costs for the content protection hardware. To me these are pretty minor or requires assuming the worst for a true bad effect.

Last night I went to the Seattle Podcast Meetup in hopes of meeting Jon Udell. I'm guessing that I missed him but the reduced panel and the random people mingling was entertaining. I learned some (retroactively obvious) things like, when you interview someone in a podcast form, have a series of questions and topics outlined out. I also saw that there was a huge focus on making money from podcasting this year. Unlike blogs where the bandwidth and level of involvement scales very well, podcasting is considerably more involving. As a result, the question of making money comes out much earlier and is a more universal concern. It was interesting to hear some of the thoughts about podcasting as a marketing device for retention. There was an example of a museum moving from simple letter Q/A to podcasting the answers to questions and charities podcasting as a way to inexpensively communicate to their donors what they are accomplishing with the donations. Chris Pirillo was very entertaining and brought up finger, a good-old-days protocol I haven't thought about for almost a decade. Overall a fun little evening.

This is goodness and it puts The Diamond Age back towards the top of my re-read list :). [Kevin Schofield] 

I've been cruising pretty much all my life, and this is the first time I remember cruising on the Carnival Lines. Carnival has a reputation for being really good for families and we had set our expectations on that. As a result we were a bit disappointed on what they offered for kids under two.

While the night babysitting might be useful for someone who didn't bring a supply of grandparents we were mostly looking for a place for Simeon to be able to safely roam and play. This turned out to be somewhat difficult. They allowed use of the kids area for Simeon's age group 3 times out of 8 days (at sea periods from noon to 2pm). We also grabbed a crib for Simeon in the room, but it was much smaller then a normal crib and ended up being too small for Simeon, so he moved into our bed. We were hoping to just use the crib mattress on the floor, but they took it back when we tried to keep it since after giving up the crib they assigned it to another room. This seemed like a way too little service for charging a full third person in a cabin fare.

We did get a really good beach day with Simeon in Antigua which I would count as the highlight of the trip. The lowlight would be Nassau, which forces you through a very crowded building and makes you walk through a half a market before you can get to the street. However you are there, you are under constant assault be people trying to sell you a service. This extended all the way to the not so great beach on paradise island. This is after navigating the Atlantis Hotel in an attempt to find the beach. While riding the water taxi was nice once, the extra $1.50 for a cab instead was well worth it for the ride back. Totola didn't make much of an impression on me since we stayed with the local shopping. Puerto Rico was cool because of the historical city layout, walls and forts. Which leaves Saint Thomas. Saint Thomas is my mother's favorite shopping destination, especially a shop named Omni.

The food in the ship's dinning room left a bit to be desired, and the main show's volume levels were too loud for the speakers they were using, but it was obvious that they had put a lot of money in the productions. Carnival was a bit more pushy with the drinks and had a very well attended casino and karaoke. Overall I'd give the ship a B mostly over the food and the under two support. I'd give the staff an A. I'd give the itinerary an A-. If Pamela doesn't talk more about traveling on a cruise with Simeon then I'll post again on that topic.

In the Seattle Airport, the police had mountain bikes, in Chicago they have segways. I'm also conviced we are the only parents in America flying without a portable DVD player.

I am often hit with a what feels to me to be concepts that should have a word but do not. I am also not good at coming up with new words, so I'm going to see if the LazyWeb can help. This will (hopefully) be a series where we come up with words that are apparently missing from the english language, because lord knows we need more words. We shall start with a silly one:

The temporary momements of nasal clarity when one is congested.

Here is two attempts to start us off:

• AirFlowBreak - attempt to riff off of sunbreak
• AirShowers

Do you have any ideas?

It's easier then ever to get a continuous stream of Windows Vista FUD. In the past you had slashdot, but had to ignore the pesky rated 5 comments which often would point out the obvious stuff. Now however we have the BadVista blog, which is FSF new foray into the world of pure unadulterated BS. Some of which the press runs away with because there aren't enough people actually using the software to call BS loud enough. Let's look at some of today's news stream:

1. Microsoft Vista is not an option
   This link is about the "Licensing and Activation" hurt hobbiests meme. We have a writer who switches out the hardware inside his case once a week and is using XP. To my spider senses, Something doesn't add up here. XP already has activation. Even If they tightened up the requirements (which in practice remains to be seem) he should already be tripping over activation left and right. In some ways activation has gotten less onerous, especially in cases where you buy a computer from a OEM like Dell or HP. Personally, I have built all the machines in my house, and swap around components regularly (although I guess I'm too busy and poor to swap things weekly on a single machine). I've been bit by re-activation and had to call the activation help for my home machines twice since 2001. I told them that I was moving around components and things worked within 5 minutes both times, this is hardly social engineering. I don't expect Vista to be any different, and I've already moved some hardware around. If the author hasn't been through this already with XP, the the worst I would expect is that he will make the 5 minute phone call once a couple years. If the fear of that potential phone call and not even a real experience is bad enough to make him switch to another OS, then I not sure Vista is the real issue.
2. DRM behind lack of Windows Vista drivers.. and fear new content protection.
   This is based on the Gutmann FUD, which spells out a worse case scenario for the implementation DRM in Vista based on random bits of documentation and conjecture. The basic problem here is that the worst case scenario he envisions isn't  how anything was implemented and causal checks confirm it. There are still class drivers for video. Non-protected content (which is most of what I have) plays unmolested, even while I play DRM'd music and video.  There is an example in the paper of expensive optical system computer in a hospital going fuzzy because the user is playing music. The first question a reader should ask is, even if the hospital bought into that sort of DRM and the system was designed that way (which from casual observation it isn't) why would the hospital not buy a computer system to view the imagery that supported a DRM path in the hardware. It's like buying a CAT scan system and not buying a compatible display to see the results.
   In reality there is more drivers and compatibility for Vista pre launch then there was for XP (probably because of continuation of the move to class drivers and early frequent public releases). Inherent to the whole arguement is a bet that you will have pervasive protected content you want. This is the same bet that iTunes Music Store makes. If you want to watch such content, then you won't want to run an OS where you can't watch such content, and only systems with these protections will be allowed to decrypt it. Back in the early days of DVD's, Linux had zero players until the protection scheme for DVD's was broken. These days the new formats won't be cracked that easily as they have learned a couple lessons since then. (They can remove support from all future media for a player's decryption key once it's known to be cracked and the general purpose cracking is probably much harder)
   There are some real stuff to the story, supporting DRM through hardware is not free, and if you want that feature you will pay for it (similar to how we all pay for DVD support), but none of this is Vista specific. The main thing with Vista that you might complain about is that it supports it at all, or that Microsoft hasn't done enough to fight DRM. Of course if you buy PowerDVD for BlueRay or HD-DVD you are getting pretty much the same thing from a different vendor. This type of stuff really annoys open source purists because licensing and securing implementation runs counter to the basic philosophy, but it's not a showstopper as companies that actually build commercial products using pieces of open source don't have such issues.
   I'll also note that I'm not in love with DRM, but that's a topic I'll save for a different post.
3. Vista: Why Bother?
   This starts with the insufficient hardware meme. If you asked me right after beta 2 shipped, I would be wholeheartedly agreeing. What I have discovered is that a) they fixed much of that between beta and release and b) more RAM fixes the rest . Ironically the RAM part was exactly what I was sitting around realizing when XP shipped. The end rule is if you bought it in the last two years new, get it up to say 1 Gb RAM, it'll be fine.
   The actual piece plays a bunch of games with the facts. First it talks about video editing, which is demanding in general and nothing specific to Vista. Even looking at the Mac's that advertise high end video editing you are looking at some seriously powerful machines. Processor, RAM speed and file system speed are the things I've noticed are the big deal, not OS. Next there is the 94% figure, which pulls a double whammy, first it is a survey of corporate machines, which since they tend to do simpler less CPU/ram intensive things compared to consumer PCs. The more realistic numbers are the CPU replacement numbers (replacing the CPU, especially in older machines usually means a new PC), here we see 84% of corporate PCs will be ready from a CPU standpoint (I suspect many of the 84% will need more RAM, but the numbers aren't in the article). The other little trick done with that number is using the premium level of readiness instead of the minimum. For corporate PCs, the difference between the premium and the Min are features that won't be missed doing day to day work, like the flashier GUI.
   Next in the piece is software compatibility. This is a harder area, although three of his examples are now bogus. The Zune software for Vista is already released on zune.org, I'm running the Vista Powershell (it comes as an OS update, so it's mostly an issue of packaging, not compatibility as people running the old msi versions of Powershell can attest). The new Virtual PC has hit RC status. OpenGL is supported in the major graphic vendors drivers. I've found that most of the real issues with compatibility are from deeply integrated software using unpublished interfaces who aren't in a rush to put the vista versions out and UAC related issues. For many of these companies the clock didn't start until we RTM'd Vista. The latter is a price we will pay for the security it brings, but will be lessened as compatibility updates come out. On the anacdotal side, I'm mainly feel pain with x64 versus x86 rather then Vista versus XP.
   Also in the piece Start Menu issue. My start menu has two options for "shutdown" and a somewhat hidden advanced menu. The two options on my box are: low power mode and lock session. Ironically, I don't even use either of them on my home machine. I just push the power button on my case to go to low power mode. At work I only use the Lock one (assuming I don't just press Windows-L). So it appears they choose the right two.
   For bonus points the author then compares upgrading a point release of openSUSE to upgrading Vista from XP. A fair comparison would be to a service pack update, although I would guess that even that would be more then the dot release.
   Which finally concludes in the classic, why update? If you need a single compelling reason to go to vista, it would be security and maybe the flashier GUI, after that it just feels better, the sum of a thousand little things. This is not great for marketing, but pure addicting goodness as a user and home admin. This should become quite apparent after the OS is actually out there, but you can see it in people like the TWIT crowd who has talked about their experiences since they first installed it and now really like it (oh and they are heavy Mac users). My suggestion is to find someway to use it for a week or two and decide for yourself.

Disclosure: I am a Microsoft Employee who works on Windows, but these views are my personal ones and are not my employers.