Wow. Just Wow. Justin Beiber and XBox

By DustinPosted on

It’s bad enough this little girl thinks she can sing, but come on Microsoft. This is a bit of a stretch. Sure, she may be a popular singer for the pre-teen girls, but there are other (MANY other) ways to get the news about Project Natal out there. And I’m sure most, if not all, of the other options would fit more with the demographics that would actually BUY Project Natal and use it. Sorry, Microsoft, but this is a HUGE mistake. As much as I didn’t like Bill Gates, he made a lot better business decisions for Microsoft than this one. I’m hanging my head in shame. For those that are scared to click the link, Microsoft has partnered with Justin Beiber to promote Project Natal. Most of the people Project Natal is aimed at will NEVER attend one of those concerts.

Eager to experience Project Natal for yourself? Xbox 360 has teamed up with Justin Bieber to bring all the fun of Project Natal to the singing sensation

Windows Live Essentials Preview

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft has been busy redoing the Windows Live Essentials bundle, and are offering a preview of what is in store.

Get Microsoft Silverlight

Windows Live Essentials includes Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Sync and Family Safety. Essentials is available for free and in many cases may already be installed on your PC with Windows. If not, you can get it from http://download.live.com.

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XP SP2 Retirement Irritates Some

By DustinPosted on

The upcoming retirement for support on Windows XP Service Pack 2 is coming fast, July 13th. A lot of IT departments haven’t upgraded from SP2 to SP3 or even Vista or 7. They claim that why fix something that isn’t broken. Windows 98SE worked great when it was retired, as did Windows 2000. Heck, I can put those on a machine right now, and be happy. It’s the support costs that would kill me and Microsoft. It doesn’t make sense to support an outdated product. It’s not so much as a “forced upgrade”, but more of a security issue. Older products are inferior to newer ones, for the most part. Security in the IT field moves quickly. It seems every day a new exploit is found somewhere. Microsoft could hire an entire team to find and patch all these exploits for all their past products, but it would require WAY too many resources for very little (none) return. There comes a point to where you can only do so much before the entire software infrastucture needs to be redone. That was done by moving the consumer OS base to Windows NT with Windows 2000 and XP, same as it is with moving from XP to the Vista code base (and Windows 7). You can’t run your DOS applications forever, even us gamers gave up our DOS games in favor of Windows. Same as you can’t stay with an 8 year old OS with a 6 year old service pack. Time to move on and upgrade. It is broken, and the costs to keep fixing it and maintaining it are getting too high.

“I would expect that come August, SP2 will be getting hard and harder to defend,” said Kandek, referring to the lack of security updates. “I expect to see reliable exploits of unpatched vulnerabilities three or four months later.”

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Firefox x64 Coming to Windows 7

By DustinPosted on

Finally, Firefox is bringing their 64-bit browser to Windows 7. They’ve had a version out for a while, but I’ve found it to be very unstable. Glad to see Mozilla jumping on and joining the x64 revolution! Now, if only we could get Adobe to release a 64-bit version of Flash… Maybe THAT’S wishful thinking!

There has been a great deal of development in the browser market in recent years but, sadly, 64-bit computing has been right at the bottom of the list.

Overscan on Your TV, an Introduction

By DustinPosted on

A lot of people have gone from using their PC’s for email and internet have found that they can hook up their TV to the HDMI port on their video card for big screen gaming or web browsing, or even for Blu-ray (or other) movie watching. But, one question that comes up often, I’ve noticed, is why the whole screen is not displayed on their television. The short and simple answer is Overscan. Engadget has a introduction article explaining what overscan is, and how to correct it. If you have your PC/Laptop hooked up to your TV, this article is worth reading. Although, I don’t agree with the first sentence (most geeks can understand it completely fine, myself included), the rest of the article is very good.

The concept of overscan seems particularly difficult for geeks to comprehend — normal people usually don’t care to even understand it — and some even get down right confrontational when they first learn that all TVs do it. But the fact is that even the latest LCDs and plasmas don’t show all 2 million pixels of a 1080p signal out of the box. Instead about 3 percent of ’em are cropped off the edges (as illustrated by the red line in the image above) and the remaining pixels are scaled to fill in all the pixels of your HDTV. The real kick in the head is that the reason isn’t a good one, especially when you consider the advanced technology that’s available today.

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Microsoft Warns Of Canonical Display Driver Bug

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft warned of an flaw in Windows 7 64-bit that can allow an attacker to cause your system to stop responding and restart. They are currently working on a fix, but in the meantime, you can disable Aero Glass to keep safe from this attack. Of course, using common sense, you could probably stay away from this attack in the wild by staying away from questionable websites.

Microsoft admitted that the Canonical Display Driver vulnerability, which stems from improperly parsed information copied from user mode to kernel mode, could ostensibly allow remote code execution attacks, although it was more likely that an attacker would exploit the flaw to cause a user’s system to stop responding followed by an automatic restart.

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Windows Activation: Friend or Foe

By DustinPosted on

I have posted a new article, this time on the annoyances of Windows Activation. For many people, activation of their operating system is a pain in the … well, you know. There are THOUSANDS of posts on Microsoft Answers that relate to Microsoft’s Activation scheme for Windows Vista and 7 (even XP).

I don’t think Microsoft can chalk the activation scheme to pirates. Before Windows 7 was released to manufacturing, OS pirates had already uploaded a working crack to Windows activation. When a new update comes along that “fixes” the activation, telling you that “This copy of Windows is not genuine”, a new crack is released within hours, if not minutes.

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Windows Activation: Friend or Foe

By DustinPosted on

The huge downside of Windows, in my opinion, is the activation that Microsoft uses to twart piracy. Every day, I see dozens of posts on the Microsoft Answers forums relating to activation. Their PC says that the key is not valid, it is already in use, or some other odd problem.

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