Famous
Monday 19th February, 2007 11:06 Comments: 1
Sadly, I wasn't famous on Friday. After writing a critique of the latest article by Thomas C Greene, my friends suggested I send it in to the The Register (without the swear words), so I did. In hindsight, I should have used a spell checker to catch the couple of typos, rather than do it in notepad and then paste it into the text area on their website. Anyway, seeing as none of it appeared in "Letters", I might as well place it here:
Hi Joe,
I know he's one of your associate editors, but I'd really appreciate if you'd stop publishing articles by Thomas C Greene.
He spent the first part of his most recent article (a "first look", two weeks after it was launched) complaining about the cost of Vista, and the fact he had to pay with his own money. Is he unaware that he can purchase a TechNet Plus Direct subscription for well under £300 to gain evaluation copies of almost all of Microsoft's products? Plus he could always think of it as an investment, seeing as he's (sadly) paid to write reviews of such software.
Despite the outrageous cost that he mentions - at length - he explains how he was caught out by the small print. I admit it might be helpful if the diagram seen on the webpage he linked to was also on the back of the product, but you'd think he'd research this expensive upgrade product, especially when he's ignoring the recommendation from the Upgrade Advisor. In his last article he was confident enough to write that he had to open the package to discover "Microsoft's blunder" but admits now that all he had to do was read the back of the box, or perhaps visit the Microsoft site to find the pages that he seems to have now discovered. He said that the "Upgrade Advisor did recommend the Vista Business edition" and that he was "hardly inclined to trust its software recommendations" due to his bad experience when it told him that third party manufacturer hadn't provided drivers for his hardware. I can understand why he might question the hardware support (clearly he is aware of the concept of "research"), buy you'd think he might believe the upgrade recommendation from Microsoft about their own software. Also, after purchasing the Home Premium upgrade, against Microsoft's recommendation, his attempt to upgrade didn't actually "fail", it just meant a clean reinstall.
Next, he complains about his graphics card, which he thinks might be down to the drivers. That statement makes it clear that he hasn't put a lot of effort into researching this issue before writing this detailed rant... I mean "review". Perhaps he didn't notice NVIDIA's new 100.xx beta drivers that came out on the last day of January?
He also complains about his soundcard, and the lack of sound from the centre speaker. That's expected behaviour with stereo music (or should be), and if it was coming out of the centre speaker before then I suggest he fix it there rather than complain about Vista doing things properly. Besides, stereo music tends to sound better if nothing is coming out of the centre speaker. It (again) sounds like a driver/configuration problem to me, as Vista is now very flexible with its audio support. You can stop applications from taking exclusive control, and you can configure the soundcard and Windows to have a default format of Dolby Digital Live, allowing you to mix 5.1 surround sound with stero music, as it all gets sent to the receiver as 5.1 surround sound. Perhaps he has already done this, which is why he's only getting stereo music out of two speakers. Perhaps he should invest in some better speakers, I'm not sure how "wonderful" his audio system can possibly be if the satellites aren't as good as his centre speaker.
He discusses the little row of pixels that are visible whenever the taskbar is hidden. He admits it's "probably a driver problem", but is clearly too lazy to try and fix it before writing a damning review. A lot of these new drivers aren't difficult to track down either, especially for someone who is probably quite familiar with how to use Google. Did he even connect the computer to an additional monitor?
Greene criticises the Vista Security Centre because he can't disable it. Why on earth would anyone want to disable it? It turned out to be useful to me when the Sophos service had stopped after I had brought my system out of hibernation (unsurprisingly, I am now using different anti virus software). All it does it tell you when something is wrong. If everything's fine then you'll never spot it's there. There really is no need to turn it off.
He complains that "Every time I boot, the craplet pops up and demands to be enabled. But if it really is disabled, then why am I seeing the bloody thing?" Erm, perhaps because he's not. He's presumably seeing a message from another program because the disabled progam has been... er... disabled. Does this other "immortal craplet" he speaks of have a name? Perhaps that's why he had trouble "killing it". So there is something "ridiculous" in Vista that appears to be immortal, and no one else has mentioned it, and he can't put a name to it. Quality reporting there.
He adds "how about a decent text editor, for God's sake? Would it be so difficult to give it a little of the magic that Kwrite has got?". How about we throw in a free browser or media player program while we're at it... Microsoft's been in lots of legal trouble for giving away functional programs that aren't essential parts of an operating system. Or has he forgotten about those expensive rulings? They couldn't even provide PDF support out of the box in Office 2007 due to legal objections from Adobe Systems, despite the fact that Adobe don't seem to mind OpenOffice exporting to PDF.
Seeing as most users don't understand, want or need encryption, I can see why Microsoft only includes BitLocker in the Ultimate edition. If the user is savvy enough to want to encrypt certain files, perhaps they're savvy enough to find one of the various freeware programs that offer such functionality.
Although I don't have it as the default browser on Vista (as I quite like IE7's Protected Mode), Firefox can be made the default browser. It's easily done via Control Panel -> Programs -> Default Programs -> Set Default Programs. In fact, if you bring up Control Panel, it's listed as "Set your default programs" once you click on Programs. It's not exactly hidden away. Firefox is right at the top of my "Set Default Programs" window too. I suspect he's having trouble because he's trying to set Firefox as the default browser through Firefox itself (it reports it's the default browser even when it's not, but this is hardly Microsoft's fault).
I'm not surprised that he had trouble installing security patches to Word 2000 (especially given his problem making Firefox the default browser), a program that is 7 years old, onto a brand new OS. An application that is so incredibly old that it has been replaced not only by Word XP, but also Word 2003 and Word 2007. Well, putting aside the question of why anyone would want to install such old software, the warning that he mentions clearly states that it requires elevation. So he probably has a choice of either turning off UAC until he's finished installing the update (preferably done offline), or he could try running the installer with Vista's compatability mode. I'd test it myself, but I forget where my copy of Office 2000 is. I suspect it's hiding under a thick layer of dust.
Vista's Sleep option brings the system up very quickly (literally straight away) and Microsoft appear to be encouraging people to leave their systems in that state unless they plan on being away from the computer for a long period of time (in which case they shoudl use the Hibernate option). Vista doesn't actually require many reboots. With so little stuff in the kernel, you typically only need to reboot if you're using badly written memory leaking applications from several years ago, or if you need to install kernel updates - which should be a maximum of once a month unless Microsoft decide to break their monthly schedule. And god forbid users are given options when they try and log out of Vista. Maybe we should offer "Shutdown" as the only option, so as not to confuse the poor soul?
As for the security and privacy issues in Vista, please, pretty please don't publish that article. If you do I'll probably cry. I suspect he might miss features like how Vista will encrypt (using AES) data that's stored on USB pen drives when you use them with ReadyBoost to improve system performance? Perhaps he'll fail to mention how Vista introduces several features that makes it competitive (and arguably superior - see David Maynor's blog at Errata Security - http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/02/bill-gates-fights-back-against-evil.html) against other operating systems. I suspect we'll end up seeing a poor re-hash of Robert Lemos' excellent article on Address Space Layout Randomization, which was already published on The Register a fortnight ago. Perhaps we'll be lucky and see a comparison similar to the one at http://www.matasano.com/log/611/gunar-petersons-os-security-features-chart/
Greene compains that Vista "simply doesn't work very well" - even though I've been using RTM on two systems (x64 on a desktop with DirectX 9 and x86 on a laptop with DirectX 8) for three months now. I initially found NVIDIA's drivers didn't offer great gaming performance on the x64 system, especially at 2560x1006 with 8xAA, but the latest beta drivers fixed that on the day that Vista was made available to the public.
Vista is ready, it's some of the third party manufacturers that aren't. Vista is better than XP, it's more secure than XP. There are some thrd party driver issues, but delaying Vista would not have made the manufacturers release drivers any sooner. The APIs have been locked for several months, and it still took ages for drivers to appear (it appears that some manufacturers didn't start any development until after the code went RTM in November). People like Apple don't have that trouble with OS X when they have such tight control over the hardware. The cost of Vista is quite high for retail, but most people will get it with their new PC or buy an OEM copy (£125 for Ultimate is a bargain). For those that pay retail prices, perhaps they should look at how much OSX has cost Apple users since XP was released: OS X 10.0 was £99, 10.1 was free, 10.2 was £84, 10.3 was £84, 10.4 was £89. So over 5 years that's a total of £356. More than twice the price of Windows XP back in October 2001.
I admit that Greene does have a few valid points, but they're mostly ones we've heard before. His previous articles are usually rants about "hot topics" (e.g. Firefox, Vista) that typically re-iterate details that everyone else has mentioned at least a week earlier.
He also has an entire article that promotes, and arguably advocates, installing a full version of Vista using an upgrade for a previous version of Windows that you don't necessarily have (many - including MVPs like Susan Bradley http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2007/02/05/you-can-t-get-there-from-here.aspx - have pointed out that "an upgrade by definition means you have a qualifying prior operating system and the 'upgrade only' media does not act as a qualifier of it's own upgrade license"). Using an upgrade without having a previous legal copy of Windows is against the licence agreement, and (I believe) therefore illegal. Is this really the sort of behaviour that you expect to see from an Associate Editor?
I know that I'll be lucky if you publish even one paragraph from this obscenely lengthy letter; but I'm not writing this for fame, I'm writing this in the hope I'll never have to read a poorly written article by Greene ever again.
Hope you're having a great week, and keep up the good work. I wouldn't get through Fridays if it weren't for The Register!
Rob
I think it was harsh, but fair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my name didn't appear anywhere.
But I did spot Elle's name in a PC magazine over the weekend. She told me "that was super embarrassing, they aren't meant to quote my name".
EDIT: It seems a few people on SecurityFocus have spotted additional errors that I hadn't picked up on. Such as individual file encryption has been possible since Windows 2000, through the use of EFS. And that PNG support is available in MS Paint in Windows XP, although it does default to BMP.
Hi Joe,
I know he's one of your associate editors, but I'd really appreciate if you'd stop publishing articles by Thomas C Greene.
He spent the first part of his most recent article (a "first look", two weeks after it was launched) complaining about the cost of Vista, and the fact he had to pay with his own money. Is he unaware that he can purchase a TechNet Plus Direct subscription for well under £300 to gain evaluation copies of almost all of Microsoft's products? Plus he could always think of it as an investment, seeing as he's (sadly) paid to write reviews of such software.
Despite the outrageous cost that he mentions - at length - he explains how he was caught out by the small print. I admit it might be helpful if the diagram seen on the webpage he linked to was also on the back of the product, but you'd think he'd research this expensive upgrade product, especially when he's ignoring the recommendation from the Upgrade Advisor. In his last article he was confident enough to write that he had to open the package to discover "Microsoft's blunder" but admits now that all he had to do was read the back of the box, or perhaps visit the Microsoft site to find the pages that he seems to have now discovered. He said that the "Upgrade Advisor did recommend the Vista Business edition" and that he was "hardly inclined to trust its software recommendations" due to his bad experience when it told him that third party manufacturer hadn't provided drivers for his hardware. I can understand why he might question the hardware support (clearly he is aware of the concept of "research"), buy you'd think he might believe the upgrade recommendation from Microsoft about their own software. Also, after purchasing the Home Premium upgrade, against Microsoft's recommendation, his attempt to upgrade didn't actually "fail", it just meant a clean reinstall.
Next, he complains about his graphics card, which he thinks might be down to the drivers. That statement makes it clear that he hasn't put a lot of effort into researching this issue before writing this detailed rant... I mean "review". Perhaps he didn't notice NVIDIA's new 100.xx beta drivers that came out on the last day of January?
He also complains about his soundcard, and the lack of sound from the centre speaker. That's expected behaviour with stereo music (or should be), and if it was coming out of the centre speaker before then I suggest he fix it there rather than complain about Vista doing things properly. Besides, stereo music tends to sound better if nothing is coming out of the centre speaker. It (again) sounds like a driver/configuration problem to me, as Vista is now very flexible with its audio support. You can stop applications from taking exclusive control, and you can configure the soundcard and Windows to have a default format of Dolby Digital Live, allowing you to mix 5.1 surround sound with stero music, as it all gets sent to the receiver as 5.1 surround sound. Perhaps he has already done this, which is why he's only getting stereo music out of two speakers. Perhaps he should invest in some better speakers, I'm not sure how "wonderful" his audio system can possibly be if the satellites aren't as good as his centre speaker.
He discusses the little row of pixels that are visible whenever the taskbar is hidden. He admits it's "probably a driver problem", but is clearly too lazy to try and fix it before writing a damning review. A lot of these new drivers aren't difficult to track down either, especially for someone who is probably quite familiar with how to use Google. Did he even connect the computer to an additional monitor?
Greene criticises the Vista Security Centre because he can't disable it. Why on earth would anyone want to disable it? It turned out to be useful to me when the Sophos service had stopped after I had brought my system out of hibernation (unsurprisingly, I am now using different anti virus software). All it does it tell you when something is wrong. If everything's fine then you'll never spot it's there. There really is no need to turn it off.
He complains that "Every time I boot, the craplet pops up and demands to be enabled. But if it really is disabled, then why am I seeing the bloody thing?" Erm, perhaps because he's not. He's presumably seeing a message from another program because the disabled progam has been... er... disabled. Does this other "immortal craplet" he speaks of have a name? Perhaps that's why he had trouble "killing it". So there is something "ridiculous" in Vista that appears to be immortal, and no one else has mentioned it, and he can't put a name to it. Quality reporting there.
He adds "how about a decent text editor, for God's sake? Would it be so difficult to give it a little of the magic that Kwrite has got?". How about we throw in a free browser or media player program while we're at it... Microsoft's been in lots of legal trouble for giving away functional programs that aren't essential parts of an operating system. Or has he forgotten about those expensive rulings? They couldn't even provide PDF support out of the box in Office 2007 due to legal objections from Adobe Systems, despite the fact that Adobe don't seem to mind OpenOffice exporting to PDF.
Seeing as most users don't understand, want or need encryption, I can see why Microsoft only includes BitLocker in the Ultimate edition. If the user is savvy enough to want to encrypt certain files, perhaps they're savvy enough to find one of the various freeware programs that offer such functionality.
Although I don't have it as the default browser on Vista (as I quite like IE7's Protected Mode), Firefox can be made the default browser. It's easily done via Control Panel -> Programs -> Default Programs -> Set Default Programs. In fact, if you bring up Control Panel, it's listed as "Set your default programs" once you click on Programs. It's not exactly hidden away. Firefox is right at the top of my "Set Default Programs" window too. I suspect he's having trouble because he's trying to set Firefox as the default browser through Firefox itself (it reports it's the default browser even when it's not, but this is hardly Microsoft's fault).
I'm not surprised that he had trouble installing security patches to Word 2000 (especially given his problem making Firefox the default browser), a program that is 7 years old, onto a brand new OS. An application that is so incredibly old that it has been replaced not only by Word XP, but also Word 2003 and Word 2007. Well, putting aside the question of why anyone would want to install such old software, the warning that he mentions clearly states that it requires elevation. So he probably has a choice of either turning off UAC until he's finished installing the update (preferably done offline), or he could try running the installer with Vista's compatability mode. I'd test it myself, but I forget where my copy of Office 2000 is. I suspect it's hiding under a thick layer of dust.
Vista's Sleep option brings the system up very quickly (literally straight away) and Microsoft appear to be encouraging people to leave their systems in that state unless they plan on being away from the computer for a long period of time (in which case they shoudl use the Hibernate option). Vista doesn't actually require many reboots. With so little stuff in the kernel, you typically only need to reboot if you're using badly written memory leaking applications from several years ago, or if you need to install kernel updates - which should be a maximum of once a month unless Microsoft decide to break their monthly schedule. And god forbid users are given options when they try and log out of Vista. Maybe we should offer "Shutdown" as the only option, so as not to confuse the poor soul?
As for the security and privacy issues in Vista, please, pretty please don't publish that article. If you do I'll probably cry. I suspect he might miss features like how Vista will encrypt (using AES) data that's stored on USB pen drives when you use them with ReadyBoost to improve system performance? Perhaps he'll fail to mention how Vista introduces several features that makes it competitive (and arguably superior - see David Maynor's blog at Errata Security - http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/02/bill-gates-fights-back-against-evil.html) against other operating systems. I suspect we'll end up seeing a poor re-hash of Robert Lemos' excellent article on Address Space Layout Randomization, which was already published on The Register a fortnight ago. Perhaps we'll be lucky and see a comparison similar to the one at http://www.matasano.com/log/611/gunar-petersons-os-security-features-chart/
Greene compains that Vista "simply doesn't work very well" - even though I've been using RTM on two systems (x64 on a desktop with DirectX 9 and x86 on a laptop with DirectX 8) for three months now. I initially found NVIDIA's drivers didn't offer great gaming performance on the x64 system, especially at 2560x1006 with 8xAA, but the latest beta drivers fixed that on the day that Vista was made available to the public.
Vista is ready, it's some of the third party manufacturers that aren't. Vista is better than XP, it's more secure than XP. There are some thrd party driver issues, but delaying Vista would not have made the manufacturers release drivers any sooner. The APIs have been locked for several months, and it still took ages for drivers to appear (it appears that some manufacturers didn't start any development until after the code went RTM in November). People like Apple don't have that trouble with OS X when they have such tight control over the hardware. The cost of Vista is quite high for retail, but most people will get it with their new PC or buy an OEM copy (£125 for Ultimate is a bargain). For those that pay retail prices, perhaps they should look at how much OSX has cost Apple users since XP was released: OS X 10.0 was £99, 10.1 was free, 10.2 was £84, 10.3 was £84, 10.4 was £89. So over 5 years that's a total of £356. More than twice the price of Windows XP back in October 2001.
I admit that Greene does have a few valid points, but they're mostly ones we've heard before. His previous articles are usually rants about "hot topics" (e.g. Firefox, Vista) that typically re-iterate details that everyone else has mentioned at least a week earlier.
He also has an entire article that promotes, and arguably advocates, installing a full version of Vista using an upgrade for a previous version of Windows that you don't necessarily have (many - including MVPs like Susan Bradley http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2007/02/05/you-can-t-get-there-from-here.aspx - have pointed out that "an upgrade by definition means you have a qualifying prior operating system and the 'upgrade only' media does not act as a qualifier of it's own upgrade license"). Using an upgrade without having a previous legal copy of Windows is against the licence agreement, and (I believe) therefore illegal. Is this really the sort of behaviour that you expect to see from an Associate Editor?
I know that I'll be lucky if you publish even one paragraph from this obscenely lengthy letter; but I'm not writing this for fame, I'm writing this in the hope I'll never have to read a poorly written article by Greene ever again.
Hope you're having a great week, and keep up the good work. I wouldn't get through Fridays if it weren't for The Register!
Rob
I think it was harsh, but fair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my name didn't appear anywhere.
But I did spot Elle's name in a PC magazine over the weekend. She told me "that was super embarrassing, they aren't meant to quote my name".
EDIT: It seems a few people on SecurityFocus have spotted additional errors that I hadn't picked up on. Such as individual file encryption has been possible since Windows 2000, through the use of EFS. And that PNG support is available in MS Paint in Windows XP, although it does default to BMP.
Yamahito - Monday 19th February, 2007 11:28 Of course they haven't published it. They're still reading.