September 2008 - Posts
I lost my cool a little bit today, when someone on the MVP programme emailed me and asked me to try Internet Explorer 8 beta 2. They said I could try to join the beta program, no guarantee I would be accepted, but they wanted to offer me the opportunity to try. Gee, thanks. Here is my reply in full:
I’m afraid that IE8 beta 2 is well past engineering and is now already a marketing exercise. That’s too late for my involvement. I have already tried and failed to get onto the beta programme. Which is a shame, because I have had a truly miserable experience with IE8 beta 2. I could have provided valuable feedback.
I should have been able to air my concerns through the MVP Early Warning System – but IE8 issues are explicitly excluded by policy on the EWS home page.
My vision for the MVP Early Warning System was so that MVPs – the industry experts that Microsoft itself recognises – would not have to compete with the masses to get their technical feedback heard. However, Microsoft’s vision is somewhat different. As MVPs, we should not have to compete to get onto beta programmes. Microsoft should be actively seeking us out and enticing us onto beta programmes. In fact, we should be involved long before it gets to beta stage. Microsoft has politicised the beta to the point where it is no longer about engineering, but marketing. These days, beta is already too late.
Microsoft home page www.microsoft.com
Yes that’s right, everyone who goes to the Microsoft home page is being encouraged to download IE8 beta 2. You see that? “Now available”. Oh, by the way, it’s a beta. Oh, but don’t bother to try and report any bugs, the beta is closed. That, my friend, is not a beta. IT IS A PRODUCT RELEASE. And now, NOW, you invite MVPs to join the beta?
If only you knew the problems I have had with IE8. I hope Microsoft is taking on extra support staff! Oh but wait, they don’t have to do they, because betas are not supported. That’s right. Try IE8 today! Knock yourself out. Break your system but don’t come running to us for support.
Here’s a handy hard drive cleanup tip for you that is applicable only if you have installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 update. On my system, I used WinDirStat to see where all my hard drive space was going and discovered that my %SystemRoot%\WinSxS folder was over 15 Gb. In this screen shot taken from WinDirStat, you can see the WinSxS folder circled in red and the block of files it contains arrowed and outlined with a white border (click the image for a full size version). WinDirStat is a great utility for visualising this sort of thing and you can instantly see that the WinSxS folder is a significant chunk of the drive space. That red area in the top left hand corner is my music collection, also around 15Gb of data. The two large green blocks towards the bottom right are the Windows swap file and the hibernation file.
It turns out that this folder – the Windows Side by Side assembly cache – is critical to the operation of Windows, so you definitely cannot wade in there with impunity. However, if you have upgraded to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 then the WinSxS folder is likely to contain both the RTM versions _and_ the SP1 versions of all the system files. SP1 contains a utility called vsp1cln.exe that makes SP1 permanent (i.e. cannot be uninstalled) and cleans out the old executables. You can find the vsp1cln.exe file by clicking start and typing it into the search box.
Running vsp1cln.exe took under a minute and saved more than 3Gb. This might be enough to dig you out of a tight spot for a while and uninstalling unused programs can potentially reduce the size of WinSxS even further. However, with hard drives cheaper than they have ever been, maybe now is the time to buy that upgrade.
Email disclaimers are one of my pet hates. They are, on the whole, rather ill considered. Here’s a fairly typical one that I received today in a marketing email:
This Email any attachment may contain information which is confidential. If you are not the addressee, any disclosure, reproduction, distribution, or other dissemination or use of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete this email. E-mail transmissions cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error free, as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender, therefore, does not accept liability for any viruses, or errors or omissions in the content of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. Please ensure that you have adequate virus protection before you open or detach any documents from this transmission
Aside from the grammatical errors, let’s pick this apart.
- May contain information which is confidential. Does it or doesn’t it? Who decides? Am I to take it upon myself to decide whether the information is confidential?
- If you are not the addressee… Surely, if I received the email, then by definition I am the addressee? Unless they mean original addressee – which in this case I was not (the email had been forwarded from a third party). Considering the fact that it was a marketing message designed to get me to do something as a result of receiving it, the disclaimer then prohibits me from acting on the contents of the message.So the message is either a tautology or completely self defeating.
- If you have received this transmission in error… How would I know? What constitutes an error?
- Please notify the sender immediately… But that would require disclosure, dissemination and use of the communication.
- Then delete this email… But what if my email system archives all messages for auditing purposes? Am I then required to delete the message from all systems in addition to my own inbox? Who pays for the expense of that?
- E-mail transmissions cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error free… Well actually that’s not strictly true. Emails can be encrypted and digitally signed and can have delivery and read receipts requested. I take the point though. Plain text email is not secure. But just because one organisation doesn’t know how to do secure email, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
- The sender, therefore, does not accept liability for any viruses, or errors or omissions in the content of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. I suspect it is very unlikely that any of these conditions would arise as a result of email transmission. It is far more likely that such errors arise as a result of human error. In some cases, for example virus infection, the email transmission arises as a result of the error, not the other way around. So again, this attempted limitation of liability is hopelessly inadequate.
- Please ensure that you have adequate virus protection… Well, that’s best practice but a little presumptuous of the sender. “If I send you a virus, it’s your own fault for not having adequate protection”. Hmmm.
I’m not even convinced that a disclaimer delivered after-the-fact is even valid in any legal sense. In other words, how can I be bound by terms and conditions that I haven’t agreed to? I only get to see the disclaimer after I’ve read the email, which may or may not have been intended for me, may or may not be confidential and may or may not contain malware or errors. Is this starting to look silly enough yet? If not, visit the Stupid Email Disclaimers website for more examples and further discussion about why they are stupid.
To drive a final nail into the validity of these stupid darned email disclaimers, TiGra Networks has published an email policy. It reads like this:
TiGra Networks Email Policy
In response to the growing trend of ridiculous disclaimers and terms and conditions attached by some companies to their outgoing email, TiGra Networks has instigated this email policy for all mail being delivered to our email domains. If your organisation uses email disclaimers, please visit this web site for a discussion of the futility of email disclaimers:
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
This policy covers all domains owned and/or operated by TiGra Networks, including (but not limited to) the following:
- tigranetworks.co.uk
- long-family.com
- speechclarity.co.uk
- orientaliadesigns.com
- mapug-astronomy.net
Policy Statement
- All content delivered to any email domain owned and/or operated by TiGra Networks becomes the property of TiGra Networks. TiGra Networks may dispose of such content in any way it chooses, including disclosing, forwarding, copying, publishing, archiving or destroying.
- TiGra Networks hereby explicitly declines agreement to any terms, conditions, non-disclosure notices or other stipulations contained in any electronic correspondence, unless it has agreed to them in writing in advance of the content delivery. TiGra Networks holds that such terms and conditions delivered after-the-fact are unfair contract terms and shall not be bound by them.
- By sending email to any domain owned and/or operated by TiGra Networks, you indicate your acceptance of our email policy. If you do not agree with our policy, do not send us email.
Timothy P. Long, B.Sc.
Business Owner and Technology Consultant
TiGra Networks
26 July 2005
Remember a month or so back I was waxing lyrical about my new broadband provider. I just thought I would run a few quick tests today to see how they were doing. Here’s my speed test result:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/122080020459968828836.html
Demon Internet (aka Thus Plc) on the other hand, are too dumb to realise that I’ve left them. They managed to debit me for a month of service before I cancelled my direct debit. They have invoiced me for a second month and are threatening to cut off the service that they no longer provide if I don’t pay. Knock yourself out, Demon. This is such a shame because Demon were once a premium quality service provider, perhaps the UK’s best in their heyday. Now they are just an ‘also-ran’ who are too stupid to realise their competition if faster, better, cheaper.
It’s not often you hear the words End of the World, Black Hole, Flying Saucer and Loch Ness Monster in the same utterance, so my interest was piqued when I heard exactly that on BBC’s The One Show tonight.
Apparently, the Large Hadron Collider, a gargantuan particle accelerator in a 27Km tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border, will be ready to carry out its first tests next Wednesday in an attempt to detect the Higgs Boson. The LHC is currently cooling to a target temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, which is certainly cool enough to freeze the balls off a Brass Monkey. In an Internet-fuelled circus of bad science, there are claims that when the power is turned on, it will all go a bit pear-shaped, creating a runaway black hole that will swallow up the Earth and everything on it. Scientists are receiving death threats and there are several legal challenges underway to stop the tests.
Patrick Moore, a personal hero of mine, to the rescue. I nominate this for my favourite quote of the week:
“The Large Hadron Collider causing the end of the world is about as likely as a flying saucer coming down to Earth and landing on the back of the Loch Ness Monster.”
Nice one, Patrick. Not quite and outright denial of, but good enough for me.
While I’ve got your attention, let me teach you some particle physics: Large Hadron Rap. Most science I’ve ever learned in the shortest amount of time!