Those lousy .NET patches

Hey, you think I’m the only one who complains about the ^%$#@! furshlinger .NET patches.

Susan Bradly has a comprehensive list of what’s wrong with this month’s .NET patches (nevermind last month’s) in the latest Windows Secrets Newsletter, which just hit the stands.

If you don’ t have a subscription to WSN, you’re missing one of the great bargains on the Web. You set the price – pay what you think it’s worth. You’ll get all of Susan’s stuff (mine, too).

Ray Ozzie is NOT a “doomsday” guy

I got ticked off when I read the news reports about Ray Ozzie’s departing blog, saying it’s a “doomsday” memo, or that it’s a slap in the face at Microsoft, or that Ozzie wanted to get back at his almost-former-employer by saying something embarrassing.

It’s nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s incredibly good, free, departing advice from a guy who knows whereof he speaks.

Why did he post it? I don’t know, but I’d guess it’s because Ozzie’s a straight-shooter, and he wants to be able to look back five years from now and feel good that he left MS with the best advice he could give.

Hey, the guy’s demonstrably a genius. I don’t use that word lightly. He’s fabulously rich. He lost in a long-term knock-down, drag-out fight with Steve S, and he’s on to greener pastures.

This reminds me in so many ways of the Allchin vs Silverberg fight, almost ten years ago. Allchin won. Silverberg left. But, in my opinion anyway, Silverberg was right.

So, too, with Ozzie.

See my Infoworld Tech Watch blog.

I look forward to hearing about Ozzie’s new adventures, whatever they may be…

Back in the saddle

I’ve been offline for the past four day. Ran to Bangkok, to get my new son his US citizenship. All is well.

Last week, just before I left town, I posted my personal take on Ray Ozzie leaving Microsoft. The InfoWorld Tech Watch blog got slashdotted, and for a time it was the lead article in Google’s Tech News.

Cartoon: WinXP menus versus Win7 menus

An Original Cartoon for AskWoody.com

Kaspersky’s site hacked

That’s gotta be embarrassing.

Jennifer Scott on the IT Pro site is leading the investigation.

Ray Ozzie’s leaving Microsoft

What took him so long?

InfoWorld Tech Watch.

Expect more Apple in your future

At least, I see it coming for me.

InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.

Unofficial LNK security patches for Win2000 and XP SP2

EP writes:

It looks like some volunteers did make unofficial Shell32 LNK 0day security patches for Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 (the now “unsupported” versions of Windows).

A manual patcher for the KB2286198 fix for Win2000 and WinXP pre-SP3 is available here

Even a guy named “WildBill” from the MSFN forums has created a bunch of new unofficial security updates for Windows 2000 here, including the shell32 LNK zero-day security patch

When Microsoft is no longer patching new security holes in Win2000, someone else will make attempts for them. heh.

Of course, I don’t guarantee any of ’em, but…

 

 

Zune 4.7 memory spike fix

Just saw this from webb842 on the Zune forums:

10-12-2010, 10:09 AM

ZUNE 4.7 MEMORY SPIKE POSSIBLE FIX

For people with headaches installing zune 4.7:

If you experienced the same issue I had, which was a crazy memory leak-type issue, I no longer have this issue! What was happening to me, was after upgrading to 4.7 from 4.2 I was able to navigate through the new software, but after ~ 3-5 minutes, my system would come to an abrupt halt. I witnessed on task manager zune.exe overtaking the RAM (with no real spike in CPU usage). I will outline what I did, and maybe it can help you

UPDATE:

Users have stated that downloading the program from the link below will correct the problem in a MUCH easier way than the way I had to! But it works!

http://tempuri.org/tempuri.html

 

US PCs march to the sound of a botnet drummer

Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report contains interesting information about malware worldwide. The cleaning reports for botnet infections are particularly enlightening.

See my InfoWorld Tech Watch report.

Google’s US search market share increases, but the rules changed

Last month I wrote about Bing stealing Yahoo search market share, and explained why that didn’t mean much: as of August 24, the Bing engine effectively replaced the Yahoo search engine, so even if you see Yahoo on the screen, the results and the marketing oomph go to Microsoft.

This month, comScore reports an important change. According to their just-released report, Google’s U.S. market share went up from 65.4% in August to 66.1% in September. At the same time, Bing/Yahoo declined from 28.5 to 27.9%.

While the numbers seem impressive, you have to take them with more than a dash of salt. comScore changed the way it counts searches, in response to Google’s new Instant Search technology (which some wags note isn’t all that new, but I digress).

As Cameron Meierhofer on the comScore blog explains,

[T]he comScore panel provides visibility into all events that a user is conducting and all the HTTP calls associated with the user’s actions. Based on this insight, we have developed a priority scoring system that allows us to identify search results with explicit user action and interstitial results with a sufficiently long pause to suggest some level of implicit engagement.

If that sounds like a situation just begging to mess up search site usage scores, you’re right. In the end, comScore punted, assigning an arbitrary time-out period of three seconds, “Query result pages without explicit user action, but with a pause of at least 3 seconds, are considered as indicating ‘implicit’ engagement and will count towards Total Core Search.”

As a dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon, I have to wonder out loud if comScore chose that three second threshhold before or after they saw the statistics for September.

Any way, it’s a new race from this point on, and it’ll be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft fare. We won’t really be able to compare apples to apples until the October results are out.

And, of course, the really important numbers in the long run are for mobile search. But that’s another story.

 

AOL and Yahoo making Googlie eyes

As you read this, Yahoo’s stock may be soaring. Or maybe not. Wait ten minutes and check again.

Recent activity seems to reflect a Wall Street Journal report that AOL (remember the company that makes almost half of its US revenue by selling dial-up internet access?) and a bunch of high power venture vult… er, private equity firms “are exploring making an offer to buy Yahoo.”

Yahoo stock’s meteoric rise appears to have started before that report hit the stands, fueled no doubt by insider tea leaf reading and ESP. Or something else.

When I saw the headlines, I first remembered Microsoft’s failed attempt to take over Yahoo, back in December 2008. Microsoft offered more than $45 billion. Yahoo fought back, successfully shunned Microsoft’s advances and, under a new CEO, ultimately saw its market capitalization fall to less than $20 billion. As Kara Swisher reports in her BoomTown blog, three top Yahoo execs recently left for greener pastures, and CEO Carol Bartz is feeling the pressure.

To make things more interesting, AOL – remember, they’re the big fish swallowing $20 billion Yahoo – has a market cap of less than $3 billion.

Yahoo’s more than a dial-up internet portal, though, and its investments make a potential takeover a prickly proposition.

Start with business affiliations. The enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend camp at Microsoft has forged an alliance with Yahoo in which Microsoft’s Bing drives Yahoo’s search. As a unified force, under a ten-year contract, Yahoo and Microsoft are taking on Google for search engine market share. (Details in my post earlier today.)

AOL’s search engine, though, is tied to Google, with a five year contract that started just last month.

Here’s where it gets complicated.

Yahoo owns 35% or so of Yahoo Japan. The majority shareholder of Yahoo Japan is SoftBank. (If you’ve been in the business for a while, you may recall that Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, once owned all of US magazine publisher Ziff-Davis.) That’s a bit, uh, touchy because Yahoo Japan recently joined with Google to corner Japan’s search advertising market place. Microsoft’s suing Yahoo Japan over the snub.

Contrariwise, Yahoo owns 40% of China’s Alibaba, the pre-eminent Asian online business-to-business site. Yesterday, Microsoft and Alibaba announced a grand plan to take over China’s number-one search engine Baidu, launching a new “shopping search engine” called Etao. You may recall that Google and the Chinese government had something of a, shall we say, falling out, which left Baidu with more than 70% of the search engine market in the Middle Kingdom.

Alibaba tried to buy back its 40% stake, but Yahoo wouldn’t sell, and relationships between the two are said to be sour. That’s the polite way to put it.

So Google-affiliated AOL’s rumored to be going after nine-times-larger Microsoft-affiliated Yahoo, which owns 35% of a Japanese company being sued by Microsoft and 40% of a possibly-alienated Chinese company that just started a new venture with Microsoft.

To make it more complicated, many people believe that Yahoo’s most significant assets (some would say “only” significant long-term assets) are its stakes in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba.

Keep that in mind as you follow the machinations of the stock market this week.