In part of the end-user agreement in a recently leaked beta, a keen-eyed tester has noticed mention of a “Family Pack” version of Windows 7. The concept will be familiar to Apple users who have had such a thing for around seven years now, allowing users in the same household to install the same copy of the OS, to keep all their machines in sync.

It appears Microsoft will limit the pack to three machines, which isn’t bad – the main family desktop and mummy’s and daddy’s laptops is an obvious permutation – but somewhat down on Apple’s limit of five. Clearly Apple users have big families, or just rows and rows of Macs, carefully polished by a daddy who doesn’t get out much.

According to the Ars Technica story, the text in the Home Premium edition EULA says:

“b. Family Pack. If you are a “Qualified Family Pack User,” you may install one copy of the software marked as “Family Pack” on three computers in your household for use by people who reside there. Those computers are the “licensed computers” and are subject to these license terms. If you do not know whether you are a Qualified Family Pack User, visit go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?Linkid=141399 or contact the Microsoft affiliate serving your country.”

The link is not yet live, but that’s a pretty firm confirmation of what a lot of users had been hoping. Microsoft isn’t saying anything, yet, but will probably be waiting a week or two to let the pricing announcements sink in. Plus, it will want to get the Fourth of July holidays out of the way, when Americans have other things on their minds. Ultimate moral of this story, you really can’t keep a secret in the tech world any more.

Source : APCMag.com

Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 blog has just been updated with a detailed look at one of the unsung developments in the desktop experience. ClearType has slowly been improved and the blog covers a bit of the history, development and research that has gone into delivering what you see on the Windows 7 desktop.

It also explains how to alter the rendering settings in Windows 7 and how to turn it off if you prefer your fonts to be all jagged and industrial looking. There is also details of the ClearType tuner that is part of the Windows Control Panel, allowing you to beat the desktop fonts into the shape you desire. For example, “Because there are differences in monitor characteristics and differences between readers’ eyes, there are font rendering options that can only be optimized by a reader looking at text on their monitor. The ClearType Tuner uses various samples of ClearType, presented in the form of an eye-test, to make fine grained adjustments to the ClearType algorithms. Each wizard page tunes a parameter such as monitor gamma (relationship between voltage and brightness), your sensitivity to color artifacts, and your preference for letter heaviness.”

Some of the research that they have undertaken is oddly interesting too, did you know that word recognition is improved 17%, reading speed is improved 5% and eye tiredness is reduced. So next time you realise you’ve read an entire document without blinking, raise a glass to ClearType, new and improved in Windows 7.

Source : APCMag.com

Vista SP2, which also includes SP2 for Windows Server 2008 due to the fact that both the desktop and server OS share the same codebase, requires that SP1 is already installed on your PC.

But SP2 doesn’t play well with vLite, the put-Vista-on-a-diet software which many to trim the OS back to size by removing unwanted components.

Microsoft’s even posted a specific warning on this hurdle, which during the SP2 install tosses up the error message that “One or more system components that the service pack requires are missing”.

“This problem occurs because system components that are required to install Windows Vista SP2 are not present on your computer” Microsoft explains. “A common reason for this problem is that the vLite software was used to customise the Windows Vista installation and some required system components were removed.”

Ah, but there’s a solution. “To resolve this problem, use genuine Microsoft software media to reinstall Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 and then install Windows Vista SP2.” Of course – that makes everything so easy!

You can grab the 32-bit edition of SP2 (a 348MB download) from here, or click here for the 64-bit (577MB) version.

Source : APCMag.com

I should probably feel ashamed — I’ve been using Gentoo since *counts on fingers*… almost since it began. Back when Daniel Robbins was leading the charge, and it quickly became the world’s most popular source distribution.

Because that’s the other side of the double-edged source-distro sword: optimised performance, complete configurability — and anywhere from minutes to hours for any application you install. Now, granted I have Gentoo on a RAID 0 stripe, but oh my gosh how did I ever miss this simple tweak?

The following line added to /etc/fstab will speed up your compile times, reduce disk thrashing, and make you attractive to the opposite sex:

none /var/tmp/portage tmpfs size=1512M,nr_inodes=1M 0 0

Just make sure you set ’size=’ to a value less than your total RAM. Here I’m using 1.5G for my 2G system.

What does it do? It knocks out the slowest component of your system, your hard drive, from the compiling process mapping /var/tmp/portage — where Portage stores all the temporary files during compilation — to a tmpfs in memory. And tmpfs, bless it, is dynamic and only uses as much as it needs — so the 1.5G setting I use is only its maximum allowable size. If nothing is being compiled, no memory is used.

The speedup is nice but dependent on what’s being compiled, and the speed of your drive (less benefit for 10k RPM drive users, for example). Only caveat: some large compiles may need more space (Open Office for example needs at least 3G) and when it does the kernel will page tmpfs out to swap, slowing the whole process down. Only a handful of applications may need this in the hundreds you compile however. Still, if you have less than 1G, you don’t want to be allocating most of that, and you may need to disable it (just umount /var/tmp/portage) for the super-large packages.

tmpfs has many other uses, but this one never occurred to me until I read it in passing in a forum post. Simple and effective, all the best tweaks are.

Source: APCMag.com

Without getting too deep into the philosophical and developmental debates, one of the greatest strengths of open source — freedom of choice and open code for anyone to work and develop on — is also one its weaknesses. In a world where everyone can do their own thing, standardisation and consistency aren’t usually invited to the party. The LSB (Linux Standard Base) was one key step in helping to solve this, and now Portland is another.

Many years ago now, from two completely separate toolkits, the popular Gnome and KDE desktops were born. Built as they are for themselves, interoperability between applications of one on the desktop of the other wasn’t a priority for a rather long time — it’s only been in the last couple of years for example that you could install applications that will work in KDE’s system tray the same way it will with Gnome’s, for example. While the applications always ran, as long as you had GTK or QT installed, they weren’t generally aware of their host desktop if it wasn’t native.

And this was especially true when it came to updating menus. If the functionality was included at all, the author of a Gnome application for example would only bother about updating menus under Gnome, leaving KDE users to scratch their heads and manually create a new entry.

Generally, it’s been up to the package maintainers of distributions to fix this, to create install scripts that properly add a program to the menus of the installed desktops (KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, XFCE and others). But the onus then is on the distribution package maintainers to do this for each and every application where applicable, and it doesn’t help at all if users install programs not part of the distribution’s package portfolio.

So back to Portland — a great idea that’s sorely needed, Portland provides a set of tools primarily for use at application installation that standardise the process completely, so no matter whether you use Gnome or KDE, an application can simply call the same Portland tools to update the user’s desktop, and Portland will do the rest.

While, generally, this isn’t going to remove the entire workload of package maintainers — as distributions generally have their own configuration formats to maintain — it’ll certainly help automate the process.

Best of all, however, is if everyday developers start using the Portland tools — this way users can install an application not provided by a distribution and find, miraculously, that their desktop is aware of it and they can get right on and use it, just like under Windows. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s been missing from Linux for too long. If there’s one thing we can learn from Microsoft, it’s that consistency matters.

Actually, it’s more just common sense: people want to use their desktops, so don’t make them work for it. Linux as a desktop has come a long way — Ubuntu is a testament to this — and projects like Portland that are one more step in the yellow brick road.

You can check out Portland’s releases and documentation at the official homepage.

Source : APCMag.com

When the global economic crisis unfolded last year, Linux advocates were quick to predict the rise of their favorite operating system.

However, these arguments were met by seemingly logical counter-arguments that foresaw otherwise. One of them even went as far as predicting the downfall of open-source projects.

Well, contrasting forecasts like these can be treated in equal footing until the numbers finally come out.

This month, some numbers finally came out and have been basically favouring Linux.

In a recent global survey conducted by IDC (but sponsored by Linux vendor Novell), results have revealed how IT decision makers feel about a Linux adoption in their organizations in the midst of the global recession. A white paper entitled “Linux Adoption in A Global Recession” summarized the results of the survey.

A glimpse of the white paper’s introduction reveals a clear indication of what most CIO’s, IT Directors, IT Managers, IT Staff, IT Consultants and the like, who were the usual respondents of the survey, thought of the adoptation concept. The introduction states:

“Economic downturns have a tendency to accelerate emerging technologies, boost the adoption of effective solutions, and punish solutions that are not cost competitive or that are out of synch with industry trends.

“IDC research finds that Linux users are clearly satisfied about their choice to deploy Linux, and during trying economic times, the potential for those same customers to ramp up their deployment of Linux is strong”

Among the 330 organizations surveyed, those from Asia Pacific appeared the most aggressive in increasing Linux adoption. Of the 134 respondents coming from the region, 73% expressed interest in increasing adoption on server deployments and 70% expressed interest in increasing adoption on clients.

For comparison, 53% of the total number of respondents expressed interest in increasing adoption on server deployments and 48% expressed interest in increasing adoption on client deployments.

This interest in Linux adoption, according to IDC, stems from the fact that while most organizations aim to reduce spending because of the the economic downturn, they don’t have the intention of implementing a directly proportonal reduction in deployments. In order to achieve this, they turn to Linux and its low-cost nature.

The respondents also indicated that the top 2 reasons that would enable them to accelerate new deployments of Linux would be cost reduction and stronger interoperability with Windows and other operating systems.

This raises the interesting question: Will Microsoft try to stick to its guns and promote the value of its product and service ecosystem against ‘free’ Linux in tough times, or will it discount to retain market share, as it has done with Windows on netbooks?

Despite all of its successes during the global recession as revealed by the research, the study did not fail to recognize the fact that Windows stood in the way of Linux’s long-term growth potential; i.e., beyond the economic crisis.

In fact, Windows is still identified as the platform holding the majority position on both PCs and the x86 server hardware, one of the architectures where Linux has strongly benefited due to the crisis.bull

A free downloadable copy is available for those who are interested in viewing the IDC white paper.

Source: APCMag.com

You can see the ad on train arrival displays, airport screens, on the LCD display in elevators, on video games in entertainment parlours, on massive projections on the sides of buildings or even while Bill Gates is on stage demoing Windows.

B

SOD in Times Square: high profile advertising for Windows

Your bus is arriving: but you’ll need to run CHKDSK /F first to find out when

Stable. Reliable. Dependable: as demonstrated by this Vista PC right here…

Thank god: Boeing doesn’t use Windows to fly the autopilot.

Yes — you know what I’m talking about: the dreaded bluescreen of death. Or if you’re really behind the times and still running a beta version of Vista, you might even get the infamous red screen of death.

It’s when Windows just throws up its hands and ditches its slick-as-spit Aero GUI altogether, in favour of a stark DOS-style text-mode screen that reels off some technical data that is largely unintelligible to the average user, like “0×0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED”.

There’s a whole group on Flickr dedicated to public bluescreens of death. There are some fricking huge examples. Like whole sides of buildings showing the bluescreen for days.

World’s biggest BSOD?: Toronto’s The Bay department store

It has been giving Apple’s Fake CEO endless material to work with.

Case in point from the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: “See here. This woman says Dell shipped her a defective machine and when she complained they sent her four more, all of them also defective. The “defect,” which still plagues her fifth machine is that her computer “goes to a blue screen, which indicates a serious error that requires the PC to be restarted.” Poor lady didn’t realize, apparently, that in the world of Windows this is not a defect. It’s normal operating procedure.”

Or this, also from Fake Steve, about the massive Toronto department store bluescreens above: “A few people have sent me this and asked if this was our work. They think maybe we rented these screens and did this on purpose. You know what? We didn’t. You know why? We don’t have to. That’s the beauty of Windows. The wow is now. As in, Wow, that OS is wicked unstable, isn’t it?”

It’s confounding that Microsoft hasn’t twigged to what an image problem the BSOD creates.

For all its multigazillion dollar marketing campaigns dreamed up by the “wow is now” geniuses, nobody at Microsoft seems to have twigged that the best thing they could do is do away with the ubiquitous bluescreen.

Nothing says “sloppy programming” better than a tech-dump bluescreen which says “yeah, ok, somebody’s crummy software caused our kernel to fail, but we couldn’t handle the fault elegantly enough to actually stay in graphics mode.”

Apple twigged to this years ago in OS X, introducing an unassuming semi-translucent charcoal screen overlay that says “you must reboot your Macintosh” in multiple languages. Simple. Unintimidating. Actually quite visually attractive.

Kernel panic: much less panic-inducing than Microsoft’s bluescreen

Admittedly, Apple’s relatively elegant handling of a total system failure is a first in computing terms. It used to have a “sad Mac” face if there was a boot problem, and in really bad cases, the Mac would actually have a black screen and make a very alarming car crash noise.

The Amiga had “guru meditation ” — a cryptic error message upon total system failure

It seems to be a running joke among software engineers to make system failures either humorous or full of technical info to help the infinitesimally small proportion of users who happen to be software developers debug their software.

But I ask again: how thick is Microsoft? Seriously, nobody likes to get a BSOD. Isn’t it time it was replaced with something slightly less offensive?

Today, though, Microsoft went ahead with the change, making it a lot less expensive to run Vista virtually.

Previously, Microsoft’s license for Vista limited virtualization — using programs such as Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware’s offerings — to Ultimate and Business. The new license adds Home Basic and Home Premium.

How much cheaper is it to use these editions? If you buy OEM versions of Windows — which come with no support from Microsoft — it costs significantly less. At Newegg.com, for example, an OEM copy of Home Basic is $95. Home Premium is $110. Ultimate is $170 and Business is $145.

Retail copies of Vista are much more expensive. The full, retail version of Ultimate costs $320 at Newegg.

This is something Microsoft should have done long ago. The company had argued that, because virtualization was something done by power users and IT shops, Ultimate and Business were more suitable editions. But the popularity of consumer products, particularly for Macs, undercuts that argument.

Microsoft also announced that it had acquired Calista Technologies, which has technology that can improve the graphical and 3D capabilities of virtualization products.

Additional coverage from Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Source : TechBlog 

There are apparently three “milestone” builds planned for 2008, and the first one – M1 – has already shipped to key partners for code validation. M1 is for the English language build only, but is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will most likely be the last Windows operating system available in 32-bit, and given the rapid advances Windows Vista is making in the 64-bit computing market, this seems a sensible decision.

Is this Windows 7: This screenshot, floating around on online forums, purports to be from an alpha of Windows 7. Probably fake, but interesting nonetheless

M2 should ship around April/May, and M3 some time in the third quarter of 2008. There’s no available roadmap information about further milestone, beta or release candidate builds, except the updated RTM release date of H2 2009.

If Windows 7 is released in the second half of 2009, this will be three years after Windows Vista which went RTM in November 2006. A three-year major product cycle would take the Windows operating system out of cycle with Windows Server, which is on an approximate four-year cycle.

The big question is who in the market will respond to an early release. The transition to Windows Vista seems to have caused a lot of angst amongst users, but I think has far more to do with moving out of the Windows XP comfort zone, rather than any indication of Vista’s quality or stability. In which case, perhaps a shorter product cycle from here on in will get users and businesses thinking ahead much quicker, not to mention the hardware vendors who were the major contributors to Vista’s shaky start.

Source : APCMag.com

Microsoft has quietly made the release candidate for XP SP3 available on its web site. For the most part, the service pack rolls up previous patches, and only “includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system”, according to Microsoft’s release notes. (The idea that you can “include functionalities” might change your experience of the English language, of course.)

The most significant of these additions include support for Network Access Protection, a much-touted feature of the forthcoming Windows Server 2008 which allows network access to include assessments of system health (in other words: if you’re not patched and up to date, ain’t no way you’re connecting to this network, bud).

The size of this patch, while unquestionably smaller than the Vista equivalent, is a matter for some conjecture. The current download page lists it as 336MB. Microsoft’s white paper on the subject suggests that the eventually released version on Windows Update will only be 70MB in size, but that the full download version for enterprise deployments will be 580MB. Whichever way you slice it, people stupid enough to sign up for plans with 200MB download limits will be found sobbing quietly in the corner.

There are two possible ways of interpreting this release. If you’re feeling optimistic, then it’s further evidence that there’s no immediate need to rush onto Windows Vista, since Microsoft is continuing to maintain the somewhat more stable and generally less painful XP alternative. Break out the champagne!

If you’re conspiracy-minded — and who wouldn’t be at Christmas? — then the release of the new service pack might actually be seen as part of Microsoft’s ongoing attempts to get corporations and, frankly, anybody, more enthused about moving to Vista. The logic would go a little like this: you’re going to have to do a bunch of compatibility testing to roll out XP SP3 anyway. So why not go the whole hog and shift to Vista anyway? (Possible answers to that question include hardware requirements, networking at the speed of a crippled gnat and User Account Control.)

Source : APCMag.com