Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Cute story:

http://www.neowin.net/news/report-nokia-asked-stephen-elop-to-reduce-his-bonus-but-he-refused

Now a new report from Finland's Helsingin Sanomat claims, via unnamed sources, that Nokia's board has been urging Elop to accept a smaller amount for his severance package in an effort to stop the growing amount of hate towards the company. The report claims that Elop has refused that request. Apparently, Elop is getting a divorce from his current wife and he has told Nokia's board his wife would not accept a reduced payout.

Hi FF,

Sorry I didn't mention your posting that first, you must have got in here as I was proofing those last four comments! It takes a lot longer now thanks to this insane IPB editor that changes the content with each pass. Unbelievable story though.

[JorgeA]

Microsoft: Security Essentials provides "baseline" protection ( NeoWin 2013-09-26 )

Holly Stewart, senior program manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, has told Dennis Technology Labs in an interview that Security Essentials is intended to provide "baseline" protection and recommended that users install an anti-virus on top of it for better security from advanced threats.

Stewart said,

"Its not as efficient to have one kind of weapon. Like anything you must have that diversity. Its a weakness to just have one."

This makes no sense. Do these MSFT managers even know what they're talking about?

Everything I have ever read about PC security tells me that you're not supposed to install one AV "on top of" another. You can install (for example) anti-spyware on top of anti-virus, but not one anti-virus program on top of another anti-virus program. The idea (as I understand it) is that they can interfere with each other and you end up just as badly off as if you didn't have any protection installed.

Windows Defender (as MSSE was previously known) was an anti-malware program and thus could run concurrently with an AV suite, no problem. But MSSE is billed as a full-fledged AV program, so Holly Stewart's advice strikes me as terrible.

Unless she knows something that no other AV vendor is willing to admit to...

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

This makes no sense. Do these MSFT managers even know what they're talking about?

Everything I have ever read about PC security tells me that you're not supposed to install one AV "on top of" another. You can install (for example) anti-spyware on top of anti-virus, but not one anti-virus program on top of another anti-virus program. The idea (as I understand it) is that they can interfere with each other and you end up just as badly off as if you didn't have any protection installed.

I would agree with that advice. Two realtime antivirus applications that actually worked correctly would lead to a race condition and 100% CPU as they each battled each others' "suspicious" cloaked background processes.

Having said that, you already know my advice for savvy non-sheeple, no realtime antivirus, a hardware firewall in NAT router, not using MSIE and switching the default browser to something else. Keeping a separate HDD mirror of the main drive, incrementally updated, ready to drop in as a replacement at a moment's notice covers the worst case scenario. Funny thing is, I never get to that worst case scenario. It's all FUD IMHO.

Regaining 100% CPU is the main benefit, because so many Windows annoyances are harder to pinpoint when you have these extra tasks, autoruns, services and processes as variables to almost impossibly rule out as the root cause of a crash or slow or unresponsive application. But other benefits include less programs that are autoupdating ( MSSE seems to have new definitions every single night ) and the pay-for suites always seem to be updating engines, probably to either justify their subscription price or simply to thwart people from non-paying somehow.

Another crazy thing is that when they try to protect your online activities such as scanning attachments it usually means that it first downloads everything locally, then scans them and finally deletes them. A lot of security professionals don't even realize this, instead believing it somehow remotely scans whatever server is holding the attachments, which is crazy because running software on the server side ( pretty much taboo and impossible anyway due to the variety of online server hardware and software ) would be even dumber than on your PC. Protecting you from malicious websites is another farce because it often means pre-visiting all the links on the webpage you happen to be looking at, and there are even worse ideas than that involving using your browser history and a predictive algorithm to guess what you might do. Performance, bandwidth, privacy, security ... everything is taking a severe hit.

Most of these suites monitor your own file access so that when you click on a folder or insert a flashdrive it first scans and "cleans" it and then finally allows you to do what you wanted to do a moment ago. It is a maddening way to work. They routinely wipe out utilities like NirSoft ( almost anything that is or looks like UPX is routinely quarantined ) and open ZIPs and RARs as well.

The biggest nightmare is when you go to play a game or do something highly CPU bound like diff'ing drives full of files or do audio, photo and video processing. There is no reason on Earth for some crazy set of processes to be watching and chaperoning these local tasks when that local disk is already supposedly clean because of the antivirus suite. Almost none of these antivirus have a useful "game mode" or "expert mode" anyway. Well, their definition is pretty loose about this, my definition is the easy ability to disable the thing, perhaps right from the systray. As it stands every one causes you to go through a different set of hoops to "disable" it, and even then check out AutoRuns and ProcExp to see that it is not really disabled at all.

If we had 8 core 10 GHz CPUs with the ability to assign a core or two to service these stupid antivirus suites it would be more tolerable. But even that wouldn't help regain lost I/O bandwidth from them opening and scanning gigantic archives, and nothing will save the lost networking bandwidth which is the narrowest bottleneck for most people.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

NOTE: I hope this isn't a double post but this one seems to somehow have gotten eaten. Strange!

Dell drops Windows RT, only Microsoft remains selling the OS ( NeoWin 2013-09-25 )

Is Dell not out of the Windows RT business after all? ( NeoWin 2013-09-25 )

Did they or didn't they bail? That is the question. We'll find out soon enough but in the meantime enjoy the funeral procession in that first thread comment section.

Microsoft Goes After iPhone Users with Minimum $200 Trade Offer Towards a Windows Phone ( Maximum PC 2013-09-26 )

Report: Microsoft to Pay iPhone Users to Trade-in Phones ( Tom's Hardware 2013-09-26 )

Rumor: Microsoft to launch iPhone cash trade-in program Friday ( NeoWin 2013-09-26 )

This has got to be the most novel approach of gaining marketshare. Has anyone ever tried this before? Buying the competing PRODUCTS rather than the competitor itself! Maybe we'll see a stunt similar to that one in the 1980's when someone hauled a boatload of Seagate hard drives out into the ocean.

Microsoft to delay Surface mini launch until early 2014 ( TechSpot 2013-09-26 )

It's hard to believe that they are actually planning to go up against Nexus and iPad 7 inch devices at all! Out of all the strategic possibilities they could ponder this simply has to be the one with the most predictable result.

Bill Gates: using Ctrl-Alt-Del as a login command was a mistake ( TechSpot 2013-09-26 )

Bill Gates Says Control-Alt-Delete Was a "Mistake," Points the Finger at IBM ( Maximum PC 2013-09-26 )

Bill Gates: Making people press Ctrl+Alt+Del to log into Windows 'was a mistake' ( NeoWin 2013-09-26 )

~yawn~ no Bill, that wasn't your mistake. The real problem was not designing an extremely low-level hook tying CTRL-ALT-DEL to a non-maskable interrupt. From the beginning of DOS and right through to this very day it is still possible for Windows or a hosted application to scramble kernel code and lock out the keyboard entirely requiring a warmboot and sometimes a coldboot. This could also have been solved at the chip level if Intel and IBM had thought to design a separate pushbutton that doesn't warmboot and signals the OS to display a maintenance menu. I used to opine for a larger interrupt controller with more than the typical 16 ( being generous ) signals seen for so many years. Even with the modern dynamic APIC's there still are situations where collisions or lockups occur. They have always been doing this particular critical function on the cheap. Of course none of this would be necessary if the OS disn't seize up in the first place.

EDIT: typo

Edited September 27, 2013 by CharlotteTheHarlot

[Tripredacus]

Microsoft: Security Essentials provides "baseline" protection ( NeoWin 2013-09-26 )

Microsoft Security Essentials has been having a tough time with AV tests for quite some time and now, Microsoft has finally admitted that the security software is not sufficient to protect users from high-level threats.

High level my butt. Any level threat is more like it from what I have seen.

Holly Stewart, senior program manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, has told Dennis Technology Labs in an interview that Security Essentials is intended to provide "baseline" protection and recommended that users install an anti-virus on top of it for better security from advanced threats.

Stewart said,

"Its not as efficient to have one kind of weapon. Like anything you must have that diversity. Its a weakness to just have one."

In truth though, MSE ( ummm wouldn't "MSSE" be a more logical acronym? ) is probably no worse than anyone else out there. They all demand that you sacrifice a huge chunk of CPU performance on realtime protection and yet you still get infected or compromised.

The comments naturally are full of clueless sheeple who just happen to be the target audience for MSSE anyway. Many are on about the "a hardware firewall is no protection". Where do these people come from? A hardware firewall is no protection for sheeple, that is true, but it is a critical layer. Meanwhile the customer machines pile up here containing malware to be removed. Keep up the good work Microsoft, and AVG, and Norton, and Intel/McAfee, and Avira, and ...

MSSE is perfectly fine. Its lightweight enough for me, however I'm not going to porn sites and clicking on banner ads and downloading strange attachments. We've already talked at length about how companies (including MS) are trying to make things more secure without teaching the users how they are the cause of their security problems and not really the software or OS themselves.

A hardware firewall is fine. That should stop any threats coming into the network. Then what happens the only other threats are caused by a user's action. I would bet that 99% of virus attacks on regular folks' PCs come through either the browser or email client. Which then, in that case, a firewall is useless!

My only complaint about MSSE is that it doesn't detect the EICAR file, or at least not the last time I tried it.

[jaclaz]

I would bet that 99% of virus attacks on regular folks' PCs come through either the browser or email client. Which then, in that case, a firewall is useless!

i.e. (extension on the bet) 98.9% through Internet Explorer and Outlook (or Outlook Express) and 0.1% through all other web-browsers and e-mail programs combined.

jaclaz

Edited September 27, 2013 by jaclaz

[MagicAndre1981]

for me MSE is not fine. It is soooooo slow. With MSE the PC acts like a 486.

[JorgeA]

Is the search function in Windows 8 crippled? Alex Castle reports in the November 2013 issue of MaximumPC that:

Search only finds files in your libraries.

If you're looking for a particular file in a program directory, for instance, you're out of luck. The best choice for more-comprehensive searches is the crazy-fast free search software Everything, available at www.voidtools.com.

Any thoughts on what he says about Search in Windows 8? What about his suggested alternative -- ever heard of it?

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

for me MSE is not fine. It is soooooo slow. With MSE the PC acts like a 486.

LOL

[jaclaz]

Any thoughts on what he says about Search in Windows 8? What about his suggested alternative -- ever heard of it?

--JorgeA

Sure, and it is much faster, but we have also a new kid on the block :

http://reboot.pro/topic/18855-windows-file-search-utility-that-is-fast/

jaclaz

[JorgeA]

Thanks jaclaz, I checked it out and will monitor it for further improvements.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

In line with our theme of the history of MSFT screw-ups, here's one put together by Woody Leonhard, dating back all the way to MS-DOS 4.0.

Windows 8 features prominently, of course...

Enjoy the trip down memory lane.

--JorgeA

Edited September 29, 2013 by JorgeA

[JorgeA]

We may have missed this when it first came out, but back then Woody struck again with a list of the most important fixes to Win8 that he'd like to see in a Windows 9.

I've been using Windows 8 for almost a year now, and I constantly bump up against gaping holes in its design. From the beginning, Microsoft has offered users an awkward experience, one that, even when fully baked, has not impressed, leaving desktop diehards in the lurch as to how to make the most of Windows 8.

It's almost as if Microsoft is banking on Windows 8 being a fertile feedback loop for Windows 9 -- where to steer its direction and how to make up for what two-faced Win8 lacks.

Notice his "must-have features" Nos. 7 and 1...

He draws an interesting parallel to the evolution of the Office interface, which he says has returned to a higher level of sanity (away from the Ribbon) in the 2013 version.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Somebody other than Elop is looking increasingly likely to take over for Steve Ballmer:

Is Ford’s Alan Mulally Now in the Lead to Be New CEO of Microsoft?

Hmm -- I know that we've made the automotive analogy before in this thread (with respect to the UI), but does it also hold for running a tech company? Can a car guy direct Microsoft successfully?

Note that Mulally is 68. How long could he be expected to stay on the job? I wonder if the kingmakers view him as a sort of transitional figure, or maybe a Friend of Steve (it's in the article) that they can control.

--JorgeA

P.S. Or maybe he'll have enough of an outsider's perspective to finally steer the MSFT ship clear of the Metro iceberg, and force some of the current brilliant execs to walk the plank. One can hope, anyway...

Edited September 29, 2013 by JorgeA

[TELVM]

Short Takes: September 27, 2013 - Company Meeting: Windows 7 Will Not Be the Next Windows XP by Mr. Thurrott

"With Windows XP support finally winding down, the firm recently revealed that about 30 percent of all PCs in use worldwide are still running the aging OS. But at its company meeting, the real figure—27 percent—emerged, which means there are about 405 million XP PCs in use worldwide, an eye-opening figure. But Microsoft is determined not to let this happen again. So while many of us believe that Windows 7 will neatly slip into XP's role and become the next XP—partially because so few businesses are interested in Windows 8.x—Microsoft will instead push its newer OSs and let Windows 7 die a quicker death. It believes that by "listening" to customers with Windows 8.1, it can make this happen, and that the business-oriented changes in that version of the OS put it over the top. We'll see, but I've yet to hear anything like that from the enterprise."