This Old Blog

It didn't take long for a member of the Linux kernel developer community to provide a more proper analysis of what I was able to observe on my own ; that the Linux kernel, and Linux in general, is just so much superior to Vista when it comes to multimedia and network processing. Robert Love, in a blog posting of his own , deconstructs the Vista networking problem by showing how to do it right, via the Linux kernel. Robert nailed it when he said: Critical optimizations such as zero-copy aside, there is no excusable reason why processing IP packets should so damagingly affect the system . Thus, this absolutely abysmal networking performance should be an issue in and of itself. Unfortunately, however, the Windows developers decided to focus on a secondary effect: Tests of [Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMCSS), a mechanism for the automatic priority-enhancement of multimedia playback,] during Vista development showed that, even with thread-priority boosting, heavy network tra...

The fallout continues from Microsoft's WGA failure over the weekend. You would think that a company as large and as rich as Microsoft, with over 30 years of experience in the microcomputer industry, would understand the eight fallacies of distributed computing . They are: The network is reliable. Latency is zero. Bandwidth is infinite. The network is secure. Topology doesn't change. There is one administrator. Transport cost is zero. The network is homogeneous. It's point 1 that should draw the attention of the Softies. The network includes everything in the network infrastructure, especially the computers running the network services such as WGA at the head end. When you sit back and draw up a network diagram showing every connection point, router, and port from your PC to the WGA servers somewhere out in Redmond, it makes you wonder how it can work at all. Don't get me wrong. From a technical perspective Microsoft's WGA across the Internet has worked quietly and...

secure in the knowledge that Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage is back up and running again! According to the latest from Ars Technica , Update : Word from Microsoft is that this problem has been fixed, and all users affected should revisit the WGA site and re-validate. There's no explanation as to why Microsoft was originally telling people to wait until Tuesday, but the good news is that the problem has been solved. So there you have it. You can now validate and re-validate and re-re-validate what you've already purchased, secure in the knowledge that Microsoft will let you use what you've already paid for. Isn't that wonderful?

In the last posting I made a few snide comments about Vista's documented network (un)performance while Vista was playing back something as simple as an MP3. I found a moment this evening to set up an extremely simple experiment where I streamed a movie and played an MP3 at the same time on europa. The movie, ripped earlier this year from a DVD using VLC , was streamed from an Ubuntu 7.04 system (rhea) while the MP3, ripped from my CD of the movie sound track using K3B , was played from a local file. The two multimedia files used in this test were: Movie: " Ghost Rider ", MPEG-4, 720 x 480, two channel audio, 1.2 GiB size Song: "Son of Man", sung by Phil Collins from the Disney movie " Tarzan ", MP3 320 KiB sampling The two systems used in this test were: Europa, a four-year-old 32-bit single core Athlon XP 3200+ system with an ATI 9700 Pro and 1GiB of DRAM running openSuse 10.2, and Rhea, a three-year-old 32-bit single core Athlon XP 2500+ system wi...

ZDNet has been following a problem with Vista's MP3 playback and network performance problem. It's the digital equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time. With Vista, if you play back and MP3 and attempt to move anything across your network connection, then your network connection takes a severe hit (up to 90% performance degradation) until the MP3 finishes or is otherwise stopped from playing. Call me silly, but I put a higher personal priority on network performance than playing back MP3s. If you want to play MP3s, then buy an iPod . That's what they're for. Or buy a Mac. Or run Linux on that Intel hardware you're currently running Vista on. I've never seen any problems with Linux handling multiple tasks, especially tasks involving networking and multimedia. I'm going to have to run some network and MP3 playback benchmarks on Linux, or else find someone who has. Stay tuned.

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage servers have been down since at least Friday, and that they will continue to be down until Tuesday of next week. This outage effects Windows XP and Vista systems that need validation as "genuine" Windows, i.e. it's not a pirated copy. Here's the skinny on what not to do until this is fixed: If you use Windows, do your best to avoid anything that requires a ping to WGA. That means you should stay away from patches and add-ons until the coast is clear. WGA will not reach out across the Internet and deactivate your copy of Windows, but you should avoid talking to a WGA server for any reason. For those of you doing installations and upgrades this weekend, we recommend that you avoid activation at this time. Remember that you can run Windows legally for 30 days without activating. If you attempt a validation and it fails, your install may be marked as non-genuine, which could lead to several annoyances. ...

If you haven't read the news already, there's a Windows zero-day security exploit involving animated cursors. Yes, animated cursors. One of the reasons that get thrown at me as to why Windows is better than Linux. Because Windows is more fun. Because it has, among other fun things, animated cursors. I kid you not. And, of course it effects every version of Windows from Windows 2000 to Vista. Yes, I said Vista. That new and shiny bulwark of Redmond security, the version of Windows that's the most secured to date. The version we can really trust. Bullshit. Microsoft doesn't yet have a patch. But eEye Research does. So you can get theirs, or wait for Microsoft. As usual.