This is dedicated to all the hackers and the crackers, to the hackers and the crackers.
I see in binary, I speak source code, step on my toes, I'll post a million jpegs of you
and a fag pwned.
In your digital stance, getting firewalled ho, cause I'm riding the net in my six-fold.
I was a dick with my 56, now with my cable I'm able to get that stable.
On the out, my name is Ace and I'm a Leo. On the digital highway, my name is Neo and I'm a hero.
In a flash, I'll screw you on burning Dreamcast. You need some ISO? Let me through my hard drive rifle.
Our exchange you could never stifle. In a digital hug, you just caught the love bug.
I bootlegged your CD, I caused a fight between Un and Jay-Z.
Your CG, it's all gonna be free, whether we take it by force or we take it nicely.
You feel that rattling your bones? When I tell you we just hacked out Jones.
And NASDAQ leaves you flat on your back, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack.
Cause I am he who loves to hack and crack.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the creepers.
Serial codes, source codes, ISOs, RANs, SIFs, SIFs.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the crack.
Hello everybody and welcome to Binary Revolution Radio, episode number 153.
And we are on High Speed this week because we don't have enough time to talk about whatever
many topics we've got. I have no idea why I went into that mode, but for some reason I'm
talking very fast today. And I'm going to slow down now and tell everybody that this is
episode 153 of Binary Revolution Radio.
I am StankDawg and we are coming to you on June 20th, 2006, episode 153.
Now let's see, 52 episodes in a season, 52 weeks in a year. So we did 52, 104, so 150, let's
see, where are we going to do it? 158, is that right? No, wait a minute, my math's off.
52, 104, 156 will be the last episode of season 3, is that right?
Oh, yes.
I need a calculator, I think. These numbers are getting too damn, who thought we'd ever
make it past two episodes, let alone 156, two seasons, three seasons. So, we are nearing
the end of season 3 and we have now made a pretty good transition, I think, into this
new format of the show and seems to be pretty successful based on the feedback that I have
heard. So we are going to continue again this week. And what does the future hold for Binary
Revolution Radio? Well, I don't know. For that matter, is there any future for Binary
Revolution Radio? Is this it? Do we go out on season 3 with a swan song? Do we continue
doing it? What do we do with the show? I guess the only way to find out is to stick around
for the next few episodes and see what happens. That being said, our co-host this week to start
off the show is Wright Coast, joining us once again. Welcome, my friend.
Hello, Interweb.
Interweb live. Okay, not live, but pseudo live. All right, what are we going to talk
about tonight? Actually, pretty much one, well, there's one quick topic, I think, towards
the end, but our main topic today is going to be, I hesitate to call it a review because
it's still such a new early release. So let's call it First Impressions of Windows Vista Beta
2. I think that's a little bit safer to say because we haven't had a whole lot of time
to dig into it in detail, but you and I have both done a little bit of tinkering and reading
about the subject matter. So what do you say we'll jump into it?
Well, I guess, let's see, where to begin? Wow, this is kind of tough. I didn't think
about actually flow charting where to start with this. All right, well, okay, first of
all, the install was pretty straightforward, nothing fancy, nothing confusing or new that
I noticed there. No, it's actually easier than the XP install. You think so? I do, sure.
Did you do a full install on a fresh machine, or did you upgrade, or what? I did a full install
to a fresh machine. Now, I installed... But it wasn't Beta 2. It was actually Beta 1 that
I did the full fresh install on. Aha, okay. I actually had an old XP box, and I just put
in the... burned a DVD on another machine and put it in, and ran the setup from there, which
of course does a reboot and a full install. So I was kind of curious whether it took any
of the settings or not. That's actually more interesting, did it? Well, I can't tell. It
was the same thing you described. I did not have... It didn't prompt me for a whole lot
of things. It's pretty smooth, simple, straightforward. Oh, yeah, you know what? Let me preface this
by saying the box that I ran this and tested this on was a... Let's see, this is an old
Dell. Not that old. It's a P4... Gosh, 2.8 or 3 gigahertz, somewhere in that range. I think
it's a hyper-threaded processor. It only has 512 RAM, 512 megs of memory. But this is
to me a kind of prototypical or a standard box that you would find in anybody's home
these days. People that are buying anything more high-end than that are hardcore gamers
or hackers or somebody, you know, that knows what they're buying. But if anybody goes to
a store, buys a computer off the shelf, your typical home user, I'm guessing, you know,
in my opinion, probably has a box similar to the one that I just described. Maybe more
memory, maybe with a gig of memory, but it has a... Actually, funny enough, it did not...
I didn't even have a DVD-ROM drive or DVD burner or anything in it. It just had a CD-ROM
burner. So I had to pull a DVD-ROM out of something else just to get the damn thing installed
so it could recognize my DVD. So nothing fancy, nothing fantastic, but it's a, you know,
decently powerful box. I do not have any sort of video accelerator or anything like that
in it, which actually is going to be something to talk about later on. But it does have an
onboard Intel video card, you know, standard, normal. Gets the job done as far as business
day-to-day applications. It's not going to run any games, that's for sure. But there's
nothing wrong with the video card. Everything looks fine.
Yeah, mine installed okay. It was obviously more powerful than yours. I had a, uh...
Oh, what was it again? Radeon 9600 in that one.
Hmm. Well, I, again, this is just to play with it and test it out a little bit.
By the way, I don't have sweet iced tea today. I'm actually eating a grape freezer pop.
So if you hear me once in a while munching away on that, I'm, uh...
Change is good.
Yeah, that's exactly right. We've got to shake things up. A new format change. Now,
now with Freezy Pops. Um, that's what we should do at Hope. We should take, like, a whole
bunch of Freezy Pops and hand them out or something. Um...
Hacker Pops.
There you go.
Image of ESR.
There you go.
Well, what, wait a minute, what would make the Hacker Pop any different than a regular
old Freezy Pop?
You could make it out of cornstarch and water and watch it change shape.
Uh, okay.
All right, well, that's, uh, yeah, you know what, I think we're gonna, yeah, don't expect
any Freezy Pops at Hope. Don't get your hopes up.
Um, so, yeah, anyway, that's, um, so the install process went pretty straightforward, pretty
smooth. Um, let's see. Create, uh, an account when you first start up, an administrator account,
and regretfully, that's the one thing I wish I had tried before we had to do the show this
week was create a second account, another user account, because all I did was create
the standard admin, and I've been doing everything, playing around under that admin account.
Did you, by chance, create a user account?
I used the default account that was in the install.
Yeah, yeah.
I didn't create a plain user.
Yeah, me either. So I wish I had done that to see if all these dialogues and stuff would
have been the same for that. Um, and, let's see, other than that, it's pretty much came
up with no problems, and when it first installs and you see it for the first time, um, looks
very much like Windows XP. It has a start menu at the bottom. It's not blue by default,
big whoop-dee-doo, but you see the start menu down there, you still have your taskbar, you
still have your quick launch bar, you still have your standard, um, um, I don't know what
you call them, taskbars down there at the bottom for each application that you have open.
Yeah, that works.
I don't know what the proper term for that is. I just realized that. I have no idea.
And they work a little bit differently this time. When you click on it, instead of kind
of cascading them up, it'll actually show you a little, uh, specific one of what's inside
of that tab. You have multiple windows and stuff open. It's kind of hard to describe.
Yeah, very OSX-like.
Yeah, well, and, you know, it's funny you mention that. A lot of this stuff seems to be borrowed
from OSX. And following along that line, like, one of the things is that it comes with a few
new applications by default. The install, I noticed, has, uh, I think it's just called
Windows Mail, or Microsoft Mail, I don't remember, but it has a mail client that's built in with
it. It's pretty much, uh, uh, what is their, Outlook Express or whatever they call that.
It's a, it's a branch of that.
Yeah, exactly.
But it does come with a mail client, which is kind of cool. And, um, same thing with the
calendar. It comes with a little calendar app, which didn't, uh, didn't the OSX come with,
what is it called, iCal or something like that?
iCal, yeah. I'm not an expert on OSX, but yes, it does have iCal.
Yeah, so they copied a few things from that, actually delivering you a few apps with it
instead of just Minesweeper and Solitaire. Although, since I mentioned that, there are also a couple
games that it comes with.
Did it come with Tux? Tux Racer?
Uh, no, I don't think that would, no.
Oh, no, I didn't.
No, I was surprised to not see that myself, but it didn't come with those stupid shareware
apps like they did on the Plus Pack last year, but we won't go there. Um, came with a few
little games, no big deal, um, and some new screen savers, um, which, some of which did
not run because I don't have the graphics accelerator that I mentioned earlier, so whoopty freaking
do. Um, and let's see, uh, this, it does have a start menu, like I said, but what did you
think? I mean, it's, it still works kind of the same, but I didn't like the way, I like
going to the all programs. I pretty much always do that because I use so many different programs.
I go to the all programs and find what I want. Now it kind of, when you go to the all programs,
it kind of slides over to this new, I don't even know how to describe it. Do you know what
I'm talking about? This new way of showing you a list of your applications?
Yeah, it was like all programs was like right at the bottom and it had a, you know, like
obviously different icons set up. Yeah, you're right, it was different. Yeah, I, um. It wasn't
like a, a tree menu to the right where, you know, the old Windows 2000 style. Yeah, it's
almost like a mini Explorer type thing, but it's so tiny that it's, I don't like it at
all. I left it. There's a term for it, I forget the OSX term for that, but it really
reminds me of OSX. Oh, really? See, I did not know that. I don't have enough experience
with the Mac world anyway either, so. Huh, that's interesting to know. Well, yeah, that's
kind of annoying, but I decided to leave that. I, I, I, I'm forcing myself to leave
everything with the defaults to make myself kind of learn how to use it and get used to
it before I say I don't like it because, you know, human nature is to say you don't
like anything that's different or that's changed, but I'm going to give it a chance
and see how it goes. I was actually thinking of Windows Live. That reminded me of the OSX
file browser, not Vista. Sorry about that. Oh, okay. Yeah.
Windows Live, that's a, that's a, that's a subject for another show probably, Windows
Live. I might, might have to do one on that as well. I've been playing around with that
a lot. Um, well, I'll tell you what, what do you think about, well, did you, did I miss
it? Did you have anything else to add as far as the general aesthetic values of it? I mean,
is there anything, well, there's, there's a sidebar. What'd you think of the sidebar?
It's, you know, it's a good idea. What can you say about it? I mean, it's not a bad idea
at all. It's not new, but it's not a bad idea. Right, and it's optional.
It's optional, but, um, isn't that, if I'm not mistaken, I think that's something else
stolen from OSX. Well, let's not say stolen. Let's say maybe inspired by. Inspired by.
Yes, there we go. Um, where, and they call them gadgets, I think, whereas in OSX world they
call them. Yeah, Windows is calling them gadgets.
What do they call them in OSX? I forget.
Widgets. Widgets. Widgets and gadgets. Yeah, gee, big difference. Um, but you can download and
put little applets or gadgets or whatever you want to call them, widgets, onto the taskbar.
By default it comes with a clock, and, um, I think it browses through, like, wallpaper
images or something. I think you can have a slideshow on it. Um, the only thing that...
Right, and you can, uh, bring over, you know, shortcuts to, say, you know, your documents
folder and things like that. Ah, didn't even know that.
Websites even, it, it acts like an active desktop does. You know, actually, that's a
good comparison. It does act very much like active desktop used to, which never, ever
caught on the active desktop thing. No. That was a horrible failure because it was so
resource intensive. It does kind of act like that. Although we use it at work on all the
machines. Really? Mm-hmm.
Wow. Well, um, the only thing that was kind of cool that I did like about it was the fact
that you can add RSS feeds to it easily, so I don't have to open up a browser. I know
that doesn't sound like a big chore, but if you're just sitting there working and you have
your sidebar up, especially if you have multiple monitors, if you have a two monitor
more system, you can leave that sidebar up all the time and just subscribe to your favorite
RSS feeds, and you can sit there and work and glance over at the news headlines and stuff
like that to come through. I don't know how it would react with RSS or with, um, podcast
or feeds with attachments or anything like that. That might be interesting to try, but
I think that's something that's really handy and would save a lot of time over the course
of days and weeks of not having to open a browser to check out the latest news or
headlines. Now, along the same lines, though, there's a lot of communication going on with
the interweb from this version of Windows, I thought. Between the updates, between downloads,
critical downloads, software updates, security updates, validation to validate and make sure
it activates. Activation, I guess, is probably a better word, the software that you've gotten.
The feedback, quality control, RSS feeds, if you add some of those in there. The individual
applications, whether they communicate back to a server. With .NET, they made that a lot more
invisible and more applications in the future are going to run over the internet or at least
interact with databases over the internet.
Yes, they are.
So, there's going to be a lot of traffic going to and from your box. And that is the biggest
probably difference, I would say, the most drastic change that I think most users are going
to have to get used to. It's pretty invisible. There's not much getting used to, but that's
going to be the biggest change as far as the way people think about it. You know, years
ago, Microsoft said when Internet Explorer 1 came out was that they even, back then,
they tried to integrate it with their local browser and integrate it with the operating
system. They wanted to blur the lines between where your desktop ended and where the internet
began. And I think this is another big step towards that. If you're pulling information
and running a lot of apps that invisibly, behind the scenes, communicate with the interweb
to get their data, I think this is going to be the one that finally starts doing that
a lot. So, a lot of it...
Steve's always been open about that being a goal of theirs, you know. They really wanted
to try to, or they always have. It's been something they've been doing a long time now.
Yeah. Well, and they give you a lot of chances to turn that stuff off. You know, it says, do
you want to get automatic updates? And do you want to activate your product now? Well, you
know what? If you don't activate it, it'll run for, what, 50 times or something, and then
it will stop working. Or, you know, activate your copy of Windows or you won't get critical
updates and stuff like that. So, some of it is optional, but not really optional. And you
can turn a lot of the other stuff off, like the feedback and the, I don't know, obviously
you don't have to start creating RSS feeds or things like that. You can block a lot of that
stuff. Or, or you can block stuff at the firewall level. But, I'd be interested to see if somebody
sniffed the traffic and see what kind of data is going back and forth that they don't allow
you to turn off. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. For the Enterprise one, they're really trying to push, you know, feedback agents and
things like that. It's really something that they really want people to do. They have this
grand plan where their OS is going to be great because everybody's going to be really cool.
And, you know, how everybody turns that off, including in an Enterprise setting.
Right. Well, and, you know, this is a beta. So, of course, they want the feedback system
on. But, yeah, I disabled it.
Sure.
You know, I don't want to send that stuff back to them. I mean, I'm sorry. I realize we're
supposed to be beta testing it. But, no. Sorry. And, actually, you know what? Something
else that I've noticed, and I need to spend a little bit more time playing with it, was I actually
did have a kind of a pseudo crash on the system. So, you know, on previous versions, on XP and
stuff of Windows, when your application crashes, it says, do you want to connect to Microsoft
to find out more information? Do you want to send this data? Et cetera, et cetera. Well,
I actually had a crash already. Again, a pseudo crash on Vista, where I opened up. I was purposely
stressing it out. You know, I had probably 10, 12 apps open with only 512 of RAM. I had
a bunch of stuff open, changing back and forth just to see how it would handle it and how
slow it was. And, boy, was it slow when you really open it up like that. And I actually
saw a message pop up. And this was, I'm not comfortable with this. It popped up with a
message saying, Explorer has stopped responding. And you know what? It flashed up there for
just a second. It was your standard dialog box. And it didn't give me any options. It
just was a dialog box. And then it says, Attempting to Repair. And then it says, Restarting
Explorer.exe. And it did it all on its own, without my interacting, without my telling it
to do that, without my authorizing it to do that. So it's got kind of a self-healing aspect
to the whole thing, which I found curious, I guess, is a good word.
I guarantee there's a group policy. I had to turn that off. But that's probably something
that most people would want.
Well, I mean, actually, that's a good question for you. How would you feel? I mean, if you
have to maintain a bunch of these, do you want it to automatically heal itself? Wouldn't
that just, it's kind of like error handling when you're a programmer. You want to write a
lot of good error handling in there so that you know what the problem was and therefore
you can program around it. You don't want to just hide the errors and have it try to
automatically adapt without you knowing what caused it in the first damn place. So it
kind of makes me nervous when it doesn't give you the control. Anything that takes away
control, you know, I don't like.
So how would you feel maintaining that or having to, would you rather, do you like that aspect
of it or would you rather?
I guess it's hard to say yes to that because of the reasons you just said. But that being
said, if it works well and it makes your life easier to administer the network, then probably
yeah. As long as it works well. As long as, like you said, it's not hiding a critical error
from being discovered in a way that, you know, really, you know, if it's trying to restart
a network application over and over and, you know, and, you know, colliding somewhere,
who knows? But that wouldn't be a good thing. But I bet most applications, if it were seamless,
yeah, I'd say that's okay.
Well, and like, you know, one of my worries was when it first happened, I'm like, what in
the hell is it doing? I mean, anybody, well, maybe not. Some people who are listening have
probably at some point in time had Explorer hang on them. And you go into a task manager
and kill Explorer and restart it. And when you do that, you know, it kind of loses track
of some of your applications that you had open. Some of your applications won't show up in
the task bar and the, and the task manager or anything like that. So it kind of isn't
very good. Well, I was kind of surprised when I saw this. I'm like, I saw the start menu
disappear. All the Explorer, which of course is the shell, all of that stuff fade away.
The desktop icons disappear for a second as it basically restarted just the Explorer.
But it seemed to come back fully intact. So it seemed to be okay at first glance.
Windows added control out backspace.
Windows self-healing. I don't know. It could be good, but like you said, what if it's just
go, didn't Windows have a problem recently where they're antivirus or was it, was it the,
was it the new Windows antivirus or was it one of the other antivirus manufacturers
that accidentally deleted something that it shouldn't have?
I remember that vaguely.
Yeah, darn it. I wish I remembered exactly what it was, but you know, that's the danger
of letting something, giving something complete trust and control to completely do whatever
it wants on your system. So I'm hoping there's overrides, not only for that, but for a lot
of things in general in Vista.
Well, there's one other thing. Well, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about
as far as the interface or anything like that? I know you're more, I know you've got a lot
more in-depth information, I guess we'll call it.
Well, I guess the one thing that I really remember from using it when I did with the beta one
that is probably still there, I'd imagine, was alt-tab was different. It had a, it brought
up like a dock on the bottom of the screen where it showed you little, little miniature
versions of the windows that you had open that you could scroll through by pressing alt-tab
instead of just, you know, alt-tab changes your window to window to window like it does
normally or on, you know, former OS's, Windows OS's. Right. It brought up more of a OS X
type dock where it showed like a live preview of the window. Yeah. I don't think I had that
in mind. I think you might have to have that graphics accelerator. That might be an arrow
thing. Yeah. It does require arrow. I'm sure of that. Yeah. So I did not get that, but I
do know what you're talking about. And down under the taskbar down there, I think it'll
also give you a preview of your window. And again, I haven't, I'm going to look in to see
what kind of settings there are under the hood to see if I can turn on and off a lot of these
features. But I tell you what, there's one other thing I want to talk about before we
turn it over to you to talk about some other things is this new hardware rating system that
they have. Did that, did you, have you played with that at all where they give you a number
between one and five to rank your hardware that you have in your machine?
No, I talked to you about it, but I didn't. Yeah. Now see, this thing is just, I don't
know. This to me, I really think this could have been, and this is still beta. Maybe they'll
fix it. Yeah, right. By the time it releases. But basically what they do now is they give
it a rating system one through five on the different hardware aspects of the machine that
you're running this on. So it queries, it pulls your machine to see what you're using
so it knows what kind of process you have, for example. And it ranks five different things
that I saw at first. I don't know if that's default or if that's the only five that it
checked. So the first thing that it checks is your processor. Now, as I mentioned earlier,
I have a P4 2.8, 2.8 or 3 gigahertz, somewhere again in that range. And out of a score of one
to five, it gave me, I believe, a 3.8 or a 3.9 score for that out of five. So I guess
five being, I don't know, a high-end 64-bit dual processor. I don't know exactly what it
takes to get a five. But a 3.8, 3.9 is a pretty decent score out of five. So stop right
there. And if you think about that, that actually can be kind of a cool feature that you can go
into the store. Now, I know a lot of people, most people listening to this show know how to
read tech specs. You can go in and find, oh, it needs this processor's speed and this
many megahertz and this much memory, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of your everyday people,
you know, your typical home user, doesn't know what a lot of that stuff means. And let's
be honest, quite frankly, it has gotten more confusing now when it requires a 2.4 gigahertz
or higher, but then you've got AMD measuring their stuff with different numbers. So it might
not be a 2.4, even though it says 2,400. And there are still some questions. So potentially
this could be really cool that you can go to the store and say, if you're running Windows
Vista, you need this score or higher. It's kind of like when you go to the fair or the
amusement park and it says you must be this tall to ride. That's basically what we got
going on here. All right. So to me, that's kind of a good idea. I kind of like that. It
eases things and it gives you kind of a centralized, uh, it's benchmarking is what it is. Okay.
Well, like you said, unless it's a roving target.
Well, and yes, and that's, that is the problem is, well, and actually let me go back. There's
a couple other, um, there's not one just for processor obviously. There's also one for memory
and the 512 RAM that I have in there, believe it or not, scored like a 3.6, 3.8, uh, on this
five point scale, which is higher than I would have expected, but it scored pretty well
on that, uh, on the disk drive. I think I have an 80 gig drive in this box and all it has is the
fresh windows Vista install. Um, and actually office 2007 beta that I just installed fairly
recently as well, but anyway, plenty of free space. So I think I also got a 3.7 score on that
somewhere in that range. Uh, and then where it's take, then's where it takes a dive for me.
It has two different scores, which first of all, I don't know why it would do this. There's a score
for the video, video card, I think it's called. And again, I have that, that very simple onboard
Intel video card. Um, I think it's got plenty of memory to it. It's not, you know, it's not a bad
card per se. And I think it scored a 2.0, a two out of five. All right. That's fine. I didn't expect
much. I know it's not a fancy card, but then there's a 32 megabytes of memory. I believe that
is 64. I think it is 32. Um, but then it has another score for a grap, what they call a graphics
card. Well, video card, graphics card, what's the fucking difference? You know, I mean, I know what
they, what they're getting at. Obviously it's, they're looking for a gaming card is what they're
looking for an accelerator card. Right. And a graphics accelerator. And I don't have one in
this box. So I scored a one on that one. Um, and again, that's also probably why I can't use arrow
and some of those other advanced flare, the graphics features and stuff on it. Um, so all that's well
and good. All those can be really useful. It combines all of them into one overall score for
your entire computer. Well, my overall score with those five numbers that I just gave you, my overall
score was a 1.0. Now, how is it that my system had fours, almost four on most of the other things?
The lowest score was a 1.0. No matter what the fucking weighting system is for this algorithm,
it would have to be 100% to the graphics card, graphics accelerator score and 0% to all the other
scores to come out with a one overall score. So that overall score to me seems completely useless.
It's absolutely a waste. And the overall score, if it's not useful, why have it? It just seems to
defeat the point. I can't go into a store, for example, and try to buy, let's say, uh, I don't know,
accounting software, for example. I have the memory, the powerful, powerful enough CPU and all that
to run it. But if it says that it requires a 2.0, theoretically, I'm not supposed to be able to run
that. Just because I don't have a graphics accelerator, which is irrelevant. So I'm not
sure how that's going to work in real world applications. Seems kind of dumb to me. Um,
what's going to end up happening, I think, is we're going to end up seeing boxes and software and stuff
that's going to focus specifically on the individual scores. You need a 3.8 or higher on your processor
score. And you need a 4.0 or higher on your memory score. You know, or a game is going to say you
need a 4.0 or higher on your graphics accelerator card, et cetera, et cetera. You know what I'm saying?
Yep.
And which again, kind of, sort of may be useful. It's going to, it makes it a little bit muddier
than I think it should be. But you know, I can still see that happening. But then the announcement
that Microsoft has already stated that this is going to be a moving measurement.
Well, if it's going to move, what works today may not work tomorrow. I mean, if I've got a 3.8
score right now, and then two years from now, processes are much faster, what used to be
a 3.8 score is not a 3.8 anymore. It's going to be lower. So that software that I bought and was
working on a 3.8, now my system's only a 2.8 measurement. Theoretically, it won't work
anymore. You know what I mean? It doesn't make sense logically. Mathematically, that doesn't
make sense. Unless they're going to simply keep the scores moving upwards. The 3.8 will
stay consistent, but new processors will score in nine instead of capping it at five. That's
possibly the case. But then you're also getting it further confused.
Or as they add service packs and more processors come out, your processor, for instance, becomes
a 2.7.
Well, there are some problems with this scoring system.
No, it is a problem, but I'm saying that would be another possibility. Not a good one,
but that would be another possibility.
Right. Well, yeah, that's, yeah, I don't, again, it's beta. Maybe they'll make some changes
to that. But there's one more thing that I found on that screen that really, I think, is going
to be the biggest news or the biggest problem with this. And that is a little something called
Microsoft Marketplace. Now, this, to me, is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Basically, what
they're trying to do here is, on that page where it has all of your rankings and your
scores of your system, there's a, in this page, this is an application that's built into
the OS. This is not like a third, this is not a third-party application. This is not something
you can put plug-ins to or modify or change in any way, shape, or form. It's a Microsoft
embedded application, part of the operating system.
Well, it has a little link in there that looks like what you might, you would think that it
links to the help file. It's got a little hyperlink in there. And when you click on that,
basically what the link says is, click here to buy compatible software or hardware for your
machine. And when you go there, basically what it does is it knows your scores, and it goes
to Windows Marketplace, and looks up to see, oh, well, we know you've got this score, so
here's software that will work on, will run on your machine. Categorized, just like anything
else, or it knows that I only have a 1.0 on my graphics accelerator, so here, if you buy
this card, it'll take you up to a 4.0 on your graphics acceleration score. Well, if you
don't see the problem with this, I mean, does anybody remember when they embedded Internet
Explorer into the operating system and didn't let anybody else install anything? And the
lawsuits and the problems that came out of that? This is not something that you can't
bundle this kind of thing. This is a problem. I do, but let's think, let's go play devil's
advocate for a second and think about how long Apple used proprietary power supplies and even
memory. Well... And they were allowed to, I believe. I don't think that was ever broken
by law. But did they, buying it only from them is something that I've always hated about
Apple. I've made no bones about that, and a lot of people, they are... And they sued clones
and Apple clone sellers and things like that? Yeah. It's not, yeah, but these are not Microsoft,
see, they're selling Apple-branded products for the Apple computer. This is Microsoft selling
not only Microsoft software, but they're selling NVIDIA hardware, they're selling a no-name
power supply, they're selling a, you know, third-party antivirus.
Oh, that's a completely different point. You're right.
Yeah. I mean, it's really potentially a problem, especially integrating it. It's not a problem
if they... Well, I'll tell you one other thing. I think it's Windows Media Player 11, 12, I don't
know what the hell that's up to. The one that comes...
Buy Music Link, I saw that as well.
The one that comes with this one. Well, they did that one a little bit differently. This one is
not so bad. It's a cool idea that if you're listening to music, whether it's streaming,
through a radio station, whatever, it tells you the artist and it gives you an option
to click here to buy it. That can be really cool if it gives you a bunch of options, kind
of like a price watch, but right on your desktop. If I can click on music I'm listening to and
like and it says, and I right click and it says, oh, so Amazon has it for this price and
CD Now has it for this price and so-and-so has it for this price, et cetera, et cetera, that's
cool to me. That's a price marketing, price search engine built into it. That's a cool
thing. And Windows Media Player allows those plug-ins to happen.
This application, however, does not. It goes only to Windows Marketplace. So places like
Newegg, places like, well, you know what, even Bricks and Mortars, even CompUSA, CompUSA,
which I couldn't care less if they died anyway, but all these stores that sell these things,
they're going to be very angry because somebody sitting at home can now click on a link that's
embedded in the operating system. And I don't care what you say, that is an unfair advantage
that takes you to the Windows Marketplace and buy it from Microsoft. Microsoft is now in
the reselling computer peripherals business? Are you kidding me? I see a huge fallout from
this coming up. I see a huge lawsuit coming. If they leave this in and don't make it so that
other people can put there. If it had an option that says, you know, price compare it and see
it from these top retailers where anybody could participate or something like that, that might
be different. But I don't think that's going to happen.
Well, smart business decision. If that is the case, this is just a free beta. I don't think
they can get in trouble for doing it with a free beta yet. If there's an uproar, they can
pull that, I believe. Yeah, I don't think...
Probably have trouble free.
Yeah, I don't think they can get any problems right now with the beta. But yeah, that's
something they better... And I'm surprised I haven't seen more mention of that out on
the interweb somewhere. I would think that, like, slash dotters would be all over that
kind of stuff. But what do I know? Anyway...
Yeah, I'm not a... I'm not a, you know, a monopoly law expert, so it may very well be within
the law.
Yeah, I doubt it.
That's why we're not seeing anything. I doubt it.
I doubt it very seriously.
I don't know.
Well, we'll see what kind of... Mark my words. Let's see what kind of fallback comes
out of that one. Now, I've been bogarting most of the show here, talking about some of
my findings. Now, what kind of stuff have you been playing with with the new Vista?
Well, what I did is on the Beta 2 Machine Network, I, uh, today I spent a little time watching
a webcast from Microsoft. And I spent a little time reading a document that they released,
which is called the Microsoft Vista... Ooh, docu... I forget the name of it. It's a 60 megabyte
file. It's big, and it's a DOC format file. Uh, they have a... a 12 megabyte one, which
is in ASPX format. A lot smaller. But I didn't grab that one. I grabbed the doc file. It's, uh,
actually a decent file. It actually explains Windows pretty well. The webcast was informative.
Let's, uh, let's... the webcast I'll talk about first. That was a webcast on something called
WIM, which is, uh, the Windows imaging format. It's basically like what Ghost does. Images,
hard drives, for deployment. Wow, and that comes bundled with, um, with... This comes bundled
with, I think it was only Windows Vista Enterprise, if I remember correctly. Oh, okay. But that is
a cool app. Now, what... where does that leave a company like Ghost, though? Or like Semantic
Ghost? Well, let me tell you, if I... if from what I understand about the webcast is going
to be true, I mean, who knows? It could be well overblown and not as great as it's cracked
out to be. I haven't used it yet. I don't think anybody has. I don't know. Probably someone
has, but definitely not me. But from what I see, it makes Ghost pale in comparison. Wow.
For quite a few reasons. You can edit your image without ever booting into it. In other
words, patch the image while it's just an image. Wow, that's kind of cool. That's
definitely cool. Um, you can patch the image without even, you know, booting into it, without
uploading patches, things like that. You can download a patch and apply it without ever
using it. Uh, things like that. Like, what... what I wonder about WIM is... another aspect
of it is, like, let's say it's hardware agnostic. It's like hardware independent. You can use
that image. Another reason why it's gonna maybe be bad for Norton Ghost, you know? You can
take this image that you make and deploy it onto any machine. I can use the same image on
my NS7S with a 9600 Radeon card that you used on your machine. Okay. In other words, like,
if you do a... if you do an XP image, you have to have the exact same hardware to put it onto
another machine. Right, right. This is... this is different. You don't need to do that.
All right. What about the, uh, what about the key? I guess the key, if you're using the Enterprise
Edition, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's probably similar to corporate where you're
not using a key. Gotcha. You have to be corporate or copy. Gotcha. Okay.
Yeah, that's kind of cool, too, that you can, you know, the way it is right now in a lot
of labs is they have all their images, that's fine, but then as new service packs and updates
come out, they have to then take an image, update it, and re-image it with those new updates
on there, or stick with their old image, and then when they put it on a new box, update
it. Exactly. After you image it onto a drive, start patching away. Yeah. So, I mean,
either way, it defeats the point. You're not saving time, a whole lot of time anymore
by doing that. Or you're constantly building images. Right, right. And, you know, Ghost
will still have its place as far as maybe Linux, you know, other operating systems. I'm sure
this thing will only work with Windows. It does only work with Windows. And I gotta tell
you, they definitely didn't mention this in the webcast that I'm watching, but as I'm
watching, you know, them talk about hardware independence and, uh, modifiable without booting
into the first thing I thought was Windows corporate copyright infringement times 10.
Hmm. One image gets out of the torrent. It works on any computer in the world. Right.
I mean, and I could be wrong. They may have made it harder than that, but they made it sound
so simple that it might literally be that simple. Wow.
The copyright infringed Vista. Well, that'll be, that'll be interesting to watch and see how
that plays out. I'm sure it calls back to home somehow. Like I said, I, it'll be interesting
to, for somebody to do some captures. I had hoped to have someone on the show that might
have already been doing some of that stuff, but, uh, wasn't able to get ahold of him.
So hopefully somebody will do some, some capturing and see what's coming to and from those boxes.
Um, it's kind of hard to do it. I'd like to see what's happening during the install.
Um, I actually unhooked mine and had it standalone, no communication with the global interweb
while I was doing my install, uh, cause I didn't want anything reported. I didn't know
what it was doing. I didn't want to activate an only key that I had in case I wanted to
put it on a different box later. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of information
is coming in and out. Absolutely. Um, there's a lot more there. They were definitely free
in their document that I downloaded reading about. There's tons of communication home for
all kinds of things. You know, like I said, one of the big ones they're trying to push
is, you know, user feedback type stuff. It's it's the documents riddled with it. You
know, please use your user feedback, blah, blah, blah. Right. Yeah. They want someone
else to do their work debugging work for them. Right. All right. So what else do you find
out? Uh, I went to the CIO's desk and talked to him for a little while because he has it installed
on his laptop and what, and what he was telling me and what he showed me was basically, I hear
a little bit of controversy about it, but he showed me the BitLocker feature, which seems
pretty cool. I got to say, you know, it's, it's full drive encryption. It, and what it
does is it does something that windows didn't do for XP in 2000. It encrypts the whole volume
and it encrypts the system files and hibernation files on a separate partition from the, you
know, profiles and other things like that. Wow. The profiles, things like that. So system
files have to be on a separate partition to use BitLocker. Hmm. Um, he said something about,
uh, BitLocker needed to have a management, a management console to work well with BitLocker
BitLocker for end users to have it seamless. In other words, so that they don't even know
it's there. That, I forget exactly the word that he used for the management console, but
there is a management console that you have to use in conjunction with it so that users
will never even know it's there. It's a full volume encryption, uh, encrypts the system
files separate from data. Very cool. See, that's something that keeps the two separate. That's
something that I would make really good use of. I would use that a lot on my laptops,
especially. Yeah. So you have to have the trusted platform module chip. Hmm. Interesting.
Which is, you know, kind of controversial if you read some of the stuff on Slashdot or
whatnot. Yeah. But that's required for BitLocker to run. Yeah. For, for, for a business machine
though, I think I would be okay with it in that particular application. Absolutely. All right.
Yeah. It makes encryption easy. Anything that makes encryption easy in business, you know,
so that it doesn't have to be done on the sand is good. Right. Right. I may not feel,
you know, privacy aspects of it aside, you know, it's a business machine anyway. The,
the fact that I'd have a drive encrypted if I lost it in an airport or got it stolen or
something like that, that data, the privacy aspect of losing a lot of the data that I have
on there is more so than, than that chip. So. Right. Which is, you know, easy for us to
do on our own right now. Right. But it's not, it's not absolutely easy for somebody who doesn't
have a lot of technology to do on an XP machine. Right. Just full volume encryption is hard
to do. All right. In XP anyway. Right. Seems to be a little easier in Vista from what they're
saying. All right. That's a cool step in the right direction. It definitely is. Uh, there's
other ones for, for end users, you know, uh, restart manager is something that's going to
cut down on restarting of the machine, which is, you know, everybody's big complaint about
XP. Every time I do an update, I need to restart. Well, I hear that, you know, this document
says that Vista is going to cut down on the amount of restarts required. They lied. No.
They lied. They lied. I already had one. I already had one the first time I updated it. It had
to restart itself. Yeah. I mean, what else is new? I mean, I guess it's, it's all new code.
They should have rewritten it differently since it's not based on the old code, but
evidently if it requires restarts at all, except for, you know, what would be the kernel
update is kind of stupid, but. Yeah. I think it had one, you know, one major update when
it, you know, it's just installed. Then again, it may have been a major update. It may have
been an update to the kernel, so. Yeah. I guess it could have. It's only been out for what,
a couple of weeks, a month maybe. Right. So there's already had a security flaw that critical
that they had to patch the kernel. In a beta install. Sounds about right, though.
All right. So what else you got? Let's see, uh, other cool stuff. Protogram, compatibility
assistant. Uh, that is different than what's in XP. The, uh, XP compatibility is backwards
compatible with a lot of different stuff. Right. This is different because it's all new
code. It couldn't be just automatically backwards compatible. But even better than that, it's,
it's backwards compatible with 9X, it's backwards compatible with XP, and it's backwards compatible
with 2000, all without user intervention. There is a thing called program compatibility assistant
in the control panel, which you can use to use, it basically is a wizard where you can make
a program that's, say, Windows 98. It runs on 98, McAfee for 98. Right. You can take that
and use the program compatibility assistant wizard to make that compatible with Vista. Hmm.
In our workings of how that's doing that, I don't know yet. But it's supposed to be any,
any average Joe can do this. And I don't know that I trust a virus scanning engine from seven
years ago, eight years ago. Well, no, that was a pretty stupid, uh, analogy. But there, you know,
let's say you had your, uh, cabinet making program that only runs on 9X. There you go. Gotcha.
Or if I wanted to pay, like, Commander Keen or something like that. Exactly. I could run
it back under DOS mode and, which, yeah, that, that never did work quite right in, uh, in XP.
So that'll be interesting to see how it runs in this, in Vista. Yeah, theoretically, they're
going to be able to make this compatible without, you know, sacrificing all the, uh, security
advances that they worked on Vista to do. So that's a good thing to be able to run 9X apps
without having to run them under FAT32. Right. Yeah. And that's another disappointment,
actually, since you mentioned FAT32 and the file systems in general, is that they did not
get WinFS rolled out in time to be included in, in Vista. That's a big disappointment.
Yep. Noticeable glare. They, uh, you know, they, they took a, they took a hit on the chin for
that one all over the place. It was pretty much all over the internet.
So it's more NTFS. It's all NTFS. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And actually, didn't, isn't there
also, I, I tried to find some of this on just using it myself that it's a little bit more
Unix-like in its controls. I know somebody in IRC was telling me that and I had heard
and read that, but when I actually tried to sit down in the box myself and try to view
it, like I looked at the properties, uh, in Explorer and it'll tell me in the bottom right-hand
corner, um, public has our read, right, uh, uh, read-only privileges to the file. Well,
the simple fact that it said public tells me that maybe it has changed a little bit, but
I couldn't see all of them like I can see in, in, in, in Unix. I couldn't see all of the
file controls for all the different groups. It only showed me.
I'm pretty sure it's still using NTFS permissions. Now, I could be wrong, but.
Well, that's what I'm saying. It seems like it would have to, but on the other hand, I
couldn't tell why it was able to tell me this public and read, read-only format. So, unless
it was just saying, you know, that the attribute plus R, if that's all it was trying to say.
Right. But.
And which is, which is probably what it was doing. It's probably just another different
way of going to, you know, advanced permissions and, and, and, you know, it might just automatically
show the advanced permissions instead of the, you know, just simple read-only permission.
Well, if they're, if they, if it is going in that Unix-like direction, I mean, it's, it's
kind of interesting. The theme that I've, I've heard now listening is they're stealing a
lot of ideas from Mac OS X. They're stealing some ideas from Linux, Unix world, um, from open
source apps. Not only did they miss out on their, uh, you know, WinFS implementation,
they missed out on the scripting language implementation that was supposed to go in
there. Really? I did not hear that one. Well, remember, they were supposed to do a big scripting
language into Windows. Right. I did not hear that they had dropped it though. That's not.
I don't think they dropped it, but it hasn't been included yet. I don't think it definitely
wasn't included in beta one. Wow. Now I don't think that's in beta two either.
All right. I'm going to have to go look for that one. Yeah. The scripting language that
they wanted to include was not ready for beta one. I know that. You know, and I actually
have a beta of the WinFS, the Windows file system. I actually have a separate disk with
the WinFS on it. I might try to throw that on this box and then run Vista under it just
to see if it works and if it acknowledges it and if there's any difference. That could be
interesting. Speaking of how we were just going into, uh, Unix type stuff, they have a new
Unix subsystem. What do you mean by subsystem?
I mean, uh, if anybody remembers POSIX, which is their old, you know, POSIX subsystem, let's
say, let me look here. I wrote down a quote from Microsoft on this. The Unix subsystem and
its accompanying utilities provide customers with an environment that resembles any other
Unix system. Those are big words. Yeah. Okay. Uh, I do know that the subsystem only runs
on SCOs, uh, SVR5 and on VSD. Uh, supposedly it only supports those two environments. Hmm.
Now, why would... Applications that would run natively under those environments, I should
say. Now, see, what, why singled out those two? I don't know. I don't have a good answer
for that. I, I, when I saw that, it jumped off the page at me and I almost laughed out
loud. You know, I, I went, wow, you know, they're only supporting SCOs, Unix, and VSD.
That's kind of odd. Does it have anything to do with the fact that maybe they're avoiding,
like, the free distributions, like free BSD, OpenBSD, or whatever, Linux, stuff like that?
They're only... They didn't elaborate enough on BSD to know. I mean, do they mean, you know,
the BSD old, uh, 4.4? Right. Or do they mean free BSD, any BSD code? I, I don't know that.
Hmm. I do know that obviously SCO Unix isn't free. Right, right. So...
But they didn't mention, for example, Solaris, which also, well, actually, isn't the newest,
didn't they release a version of Solaris that was free recently, 10, I thought?
Yes. But still, you would think they might have support for other Solarises in there.
You would think. Yeah, that's kind of weird. I mean, you would think they'd support Solaris
and Linux if they wanted to offer true compatibility to, to, you know, enterprise users. They're both
big. They're way bigger than SCO. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Solaris would be a huge thing. Well,
all right, I'm not sure what they're thinking on that one, but, uh, okay, whatever, Microsoft.
Good try. Neither do I, but supposedly their, their new subsystem
is going to allow Unix-based tools that can recompile Unix-based applications to run natively
on Windows. And it's going to offer all the command line tools for a Unix environment.
That's what they're saying.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the licensing of, that they're charging money for this operating
system, and they can't include something that was under the GPL. I don't know, you know what we're
thinking about. Well, the BSD license is different than the GPL, and I actually just thought
Yachty say something not long ago, and I mean, he knows more about licenses than me, and he said
something along the lines of where you can take BSD code, alter it slightly, and re-release it without
releasing the source. Right. That's perfectly acceptable under the BSD code. Right, and that's why I'm
wondering, that's the reason maybe the Linux and the other support is not there, because so much of
that code is GPL, and therefore Microsoft might not be able to release it without releasing the
source code to it, and maybe that's why the... It's got to be. That has to be the reason.
But again, I'm just thinking out loud here, so we could be way off on that. So what else you got?
Not much on deployment. Not much on basically the enterprise stuff. Just what I talked to my CIO
about, you know, my other admin, my project manager. Basically, we talked a lot about WIM. It's
supposed to be big. It's going to kind of... It's going to change the way networks are deployed
in the enterprise. And what is this? WIM is the Windows imaging format I was talking about before.
Oh, okay. Yeah, they mentioned earlier. It's going to definitely change it. I don't see any reason why
my, you know, entity. I don't see any reason why anyone would be using Ghost in an environment
if the things they're saying are true. It's just dumb to still use Ghost. And it's probably
not going to be used anymore.
Well, and I think there's going to be a lot of fallout when the time comes. Not only from
that. Well, again, Ghost can be used with imaging any other thing besides Microsoft, whereas
Microsoft's tool is going to be Microsoft only.
I love Ghost. Don't get me wrong.
Yeah, let's be honest. Most people are using it because they've got a Windows lab in their
university or business or whatever the case may be. And they've got 100 Windows boxes that
they're imaging. That's what the majority of people are using it for. So it's going to hurt
not only... Okay, that's just one example. That's just one interesting thing. Okay, the fact
that it comes with a mail and calendar client is interesting because there are, you know, lots
of third-party mail applications like Eudora and Thunderbird is what I use, of course. And
the stuff that it's bundling with the operating system. Not only that, but then you've got that
Windows One care, which does not come... I didn't see that with the Vista, but it's something
else that they're also rolling out right now where it comes with virus protection, spyware
scanning, phishing toolbar stuff, which is built into IE7. A lot of third-party vendors,
a lot of third-party companies that make third-party software for Windows are suddenly going to be
out of business because Microsoft's bundling a lot of stuff in the operating system. Now,
I don't know. That's not necessarily... I'm not even going to touch that, really, whether
that's good or bad. I don't know. That's... You know, what are you going to do? Is it unfair
of them to give those to its users who buy the operating system for free? Is there a
problem with Microsoft giving me a mail client, a calendar software, and this stuff in my operating
system? And do these other companies have a right to cry foul about that? I don't know.
Well, what's funny about that is the business pragmatist in me says no. They don't have any
right to cry about it.
I mean, Mac, like you said earlier, Mac has gotten away. Mac has done that. They've had it
with it for a long time. That's not... You know, I don't think there's anything wrong
with bundling certain applications as long as you're not preventing other applications
from entering the fray and competing fairly. And that goes back to...
Right. Or making it hard to remove Windows components, you know, like Messenger and things
like that.
Right. Exactly. Exactly. So... All right, well...
But Vista's going to definitely catch on. I mean, you know, enterprises are going to want
to use Vista. They actually were very smart by making it, you know, HAL independent for
people that don't know what that is. It's hardware extraction layer. You know, you can
check out what one of yours is by going into the device manager and checking out which HAL
you're using, which XP is using a HAL. If you have one of those, you're using a hardware
extraction layer. Now, Vista isn't using that, which is why the Windows imaging format can work
with any hardware because it's HAL independent. Gotcha. All right, well...
And just for that very reason, it's obviously going to be used. Like, people that... Enterprises
that would have never upgraded from XP because it works perfectly fine are going to save a lot
of money on imaging and deploying. And, you know, when you want to add... Large enterprises
want to add a whole new building, it will take a day instead of a long time. Switching to Vista
saves them money now. Yeah, but I guess to wrap it all up, though, from our standpoint,
I personally... Well, I've got it, so I'll upgrade a couple boxes to it just because I have it for
free anyway. I have it paid for and covered legally. So I'll probably run a couple boxes
like this. But if I were a home user and had to pay for it, there's just not nearly enough
in Windows Vista, based on what I've seen in this beta, to justify me upgrading from Windows
XP. I just really don't see it. No, there's definitely not. I don't think
they're shooting for the home crowd yet. I think they're depending on the home crowd
to start to catch on to Vista in 2008, end of 2008. People start to buy it just as people
started to buy XP and droves in 2002, 2003.
Well, and they're going to release multiple versions of Vista. There's a home version,
there's a pro version, there's a media center version. I think there's even a gaming version.
And then there's a... I don't know what they call it, but I think isn't there like a...
It's called the Enterprise version. Like that Unix subsystem only comes on the Enterprise
version. I think there's like a thin client. I know that for sure. The Unix subsystem,
whatever that's going to be, is Enterprise only. Right, yeah. Enterprise, of course, is going
to be their high end. But I think there's also one really low end that does not have all the
bells and whistles and apps. It's just a very watered down... Let's call it thin client,
for lack of a better word. A very thin client version. Right, the Windows Server 2003 Web Edition
version. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which only uses up to two gigs of memory. But anyway,
we won't go there. All right. Well, I think that's pretty much going to wrap it up. We spent
like an hour on this. So let's get another quick view on it and talk about one other topic from
the forums and then probably do some emails. So, Bright Coast, thank you for being on the
show. And we're going to head off and see what knot theory has to say about the whole thing.
Thank you. See you soon. All right. So next up on tonight's Microsoft Vista Beta 2. Do we
call it Windows Vista Beta 2? Is that the proper term? I have no idea. Well, anyway, for those of you
who recognize the voice knot theory is on the line with us tonight. I'm in the heezy. All right. So
we're going to actually, you're going to probably have the last word on this. So what did you think
in your... Now, you used it kind of differently than everything else. You did it in a virtual
session, right? Yeah. I'm special. Mom always said I'm special. So I do things in special ways.
So I installed Vista into VMware. And, you know, other than the install running in 16 color
mode, once you get it up and running and you install VMware tools, it runs just fine. It's
not super fast because Vista is so dependent on your graphics accelerator to do everything
because everything's got to be rounded and shiny and all kinds of stuff. So it's a little
sluggish. But I have to say my absolute favorite thing about Windows Vista, and I'm sure you
can tell I'm not being serious now, is Internet Explorer. And I'll tell you why. Okay? They
came up with this new technology called tab browsing. I still don't understand it yet,
but it's magic. It's a new technology. It's going to take time for you to catch on to that.
Yeah. You know, you just, you can't get used to it right away. You know, it's a total shift
in the way people use browsers. So anyway, seriously, the best thing about Internet Explorer
and Vista is that on my computer, the only website I can go to is Google.
Yeah. Now, see, I don't know what's up with that because I didn't have any problems like
that. I saw you mention that in the forums, but I didn't have any problems. I had one funny
problem. I installed Microsoft Office, which I was going to talk about a little bit maybe
later. And when Office installs, the first thing, like when it's done installing, it says,
do you want to go to the website to look for updates or something like that? And you
say, okay, or you say no, finish installing or something like that. And when you go to
that website, it tells you that you're not authorized to go to that website. You have
to actually activate the damn thing. Other than that, though, I didn't have any problem
going to any other site.
Well, I only tried the two sites. I tried Google, of course, Google work, but not the first
time, only the second time. Then I decided, okay, well, if other websites aren't coming
up, let me go to Microsoft's webpage and see if their website at least comes up. The only
thing that comes up on the Microsoft page for me is the top bar that says Microsoft.
Not even all the navigation comes up. And then it pops up this little message that says that
the phishing filter has been activated, which is pretty cool. And then when I try to go to
slash dot, the only thing I can get on slash dot is the title bar. Like it says slash dot
news for nerds, and then the screen is black.
That's strange. Is it a rendering issue?
No, I mean, it's not even downloading the whole webpage. It's got that little progress bar
on the bottom, and every time you reload it, it gets a little bit further, but it never
gets all the way, and it never renders anything.
Wow, that's really weird.
Yeah, it's pretty strange. I didn't really try to do anything else other than use Internet
Explorer, and I didn't really want to bother to install any applications, but
I don't know. It didn't really wow me. Like nothing made me think, like, people are going
to need Vista because it has this feature. You know, I couldn't put my finger on anything
that it's going to have. Like, you know, you can turn off the themes and all that other
nonsense so it looks just like regular Windows, so it's not like they've really changed the
user interface very much at all. You know, they haven't made it completely different,
so I don't know what all the fuss is about.
Wow.
All I know is that it's really heavy at my graphics card. That's it.
Well, I was getting ready to say that. You mentioned it. You kind of buzzed by it earlier,
but let's back up. Actually, let's back up two steps.
The install process itself. You briefly mentioned the install process. You said 16 colors.
Did you install... Now, installing it on a virtual session like you did, does that...
Basically, it's like installing it on a fresh, brand-new hard drive for the first time,
right? Yeah, exactly.
Okay, now, what I did is I actually upgraded, or I actually fired the installer, I should
say, to set up from inside of a Windows XP box that they already had installed. So, of
course, it restarted and rebooted from the CD and did the install, but it was pretty much
a hands-off experience. It did not prompt me for a lot of things, and I thought that that
was probably because it pulled a lot of the settings from the previous version of Windows
somehow. Ah, yeah. Did you have any... I was actually going to say that this is absolutely
by far the most hands-off Windows install ever, and it was fast. Even on my little VMware session
that I only had 512 megs of RAM allocated to, and, you know, it flew. You know, I think
it only took, like, maybe 10 minutes to install. It was super fast. And it asked me, like, three
things. It asked me what my name was, what the name of the computer should be, and what
time zone I was in. I don't think it asked anything else at all.
Hmm. Now, you were using the beta 2, the 1.3 gigabytes? Is that how big the file was?
I thought it was, like, the 3 gigabytes. I think so, or something.
Was it 3 point something?
I thought it was 3 point something. 3 point 4, maybe, something like that.
Yeah, now that I...
I got it from Microsoft. I got it legit.
Okay, so, yeah, so it's definitely the beta 2, the latest one that came out.
Yeah.
All right. Well, um... Oh, I know what the killer app is. I know what the... You said
there was nothing on there. Dude, you didn't check out the new screensavers.
Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. I don't... I don't necessarily did.
Dude, they have new 3D screensavers that are, like, direct 3D enabled or something. I don't
know what I'm talking about. They had some new screensavers on there. That was pretty
much the highlight of it for me.
Wow. Wait, did they bring back pipes from Windows 11?
Um, pipes never went away. Pipes has always been around.
Oh, really? Yeah, that shows you how much I use Windows. I thought it was gone.
Oh, no. Pipes is the bomb. Especially if you sit there and watch it and wait for that
little teacup to pop up in random mode. But anyway, that's a whole nother story.
Um, anyway. I actually... And this other thing you mentioned that I wanted to agree with
is the stupid graphics accelerator deal. I don't have an accelerator card of any kind
in my machine. So I don't get any of those pretty glass, aero, whatever the hell the thing
is called. I don't have any special effects. It pretty much looks and acts like regular
Windows XP as far as the interface. I mean, it's a little bit different, but not too awful
much. Right. Yeah, the aero glass thing is just... It's... You know, I really thought
it was going to be somewhat of a different user interface, but it's like... It's rounded
and it's shiny, and maybe there are a few things that are a little different, but it's
the same old minimized, maximized, closed content. Um, and it just... It makes it so heavy
that there's no reason that I want to use it. So it's flair is what you're saying. They
have the requisite amount of flair. Yeah, they have like... I mean, they have like
95 pieces of flair when they really only need 12. Yeah, but you don't want to have
the minimum flair now, do you? Yeah, what do you think about somebody who has just the
minimum of, you know, amount of flair to get by? I want you to want more flair. Doesn't
Microsoft want to express itself? I think... Wasn't that the slogan at one time? Express
yourself or something, Microsoft? Oh, I don't know. That's like a cheesy dot com, like
everybody is like express yourself. Fucking pet food dot com. Express yourself.
Oh, man. Oh, man. I made it through this whole thing without cursing except once, I
think. Oh, well, we don't care about that anyway. Of course, the listeners might hear
a little wind whistling by or something as you're recording this episode while driving
through, uh, I don't know where you're driving through. I'm driving through
Westchester County. Is that an undisclosed... Okay, you're going to drop docks?
Yeah, it's my docks. I live in Westchester County. What's anybody going to do about it?
Yeah, what up? What up, bitch? Oh, shit. Yeah, unfortunately, it's raining, so I can't
really drive very fast like I want to in my new car. I was just waiting, not for the
spontaneous cursing during the recording. I was waiting for you to curse at another
driver who cuts you off or gets in the slog in front of you in the fast lane or something
like that. Yeah, how about this mom who's doing 20 miles an hour in front of you right
now? God. Oh, man. And driving one of these stupid, um, I don't even know what the term
for it is. It's one of these trucks where it's got, like, the bed in the back, but you
can, like, open it up. It's kind of like, uh, it's like the pickup truck equivalent of
a convertible. Like, you can take this panel out of the back and... Yeah, is that like that
Avalanche? It's really stupid. I don't know why anybody buys a truck like that. It's got
to be the dumbest thing in the world, especially if you live where I live. Like, you're not
hauling lumber or anything, morons. You're taking your kids to soccer. Maybe. Anyway.
Well, is that like the Chevy Avalanche or something, I think, is that... See, you know why they
drive that? That's the closest thing we have to a Transformer so far. The closer and closer
we get to a Transformer, the more and more people will buy it. I'd buy a Transformer, wouldn't
you? You know, I probably would. If it was like... I forget what show this was or what
cartoon this was, but back in the day, there was a guy who had a motorcycle that turned into
a hovercraft, and it was just the coolest thing ever. If they had that, bet your ass
would buy it. Oh, shit, I'm all over it. I'm all over it. Yeah, but when would I not...
I'm all over it like white on rice. When would I not hover, though, is the question. I mean,
if it's a hovercraft and a bike, I'd be hovering all the time. Who doesn't...
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I wouldn't be hovering all the time. I would
get up next to people and race them around a little bit until they thought they were real
hot stuff, and then I would hover, and it'd be game over.
Well, what does this have to do with Windows Vista? Not a damn thing, but we're going to
do that.
Basically, my verdict on Windows Vista is that, honestly, until somebody shows me what's special
about it, I'm not even going to bother to boot it anymore.
Hmm. Well, he has spoken. Actually, this turned into like an episode of Default Radio there
for a few minutes.
All right, well, there's one more thing I want to talk about while I got you on the
phone, because you boned me last week. We were going to do this last week.
There's one other thread in the forums that I... You're the person to answer this question.
There was a thread in the forums about... People were throwing around these ridiculous
numbers, I thought, anyway, of how many phone numbers there are available in the United
States. How many total official available phone numbers there were for distribution,
or even potentially... I wasn't even sure. The question was kind of vague. But how many
valid phone numbers are possible in the United States? So, I looked at the math, and I have
said many times I'm not a big phone guy, but it didn't even look remotely close. So, you're
the man. What do you think about this? How many possible phone numbers are there in
valid phone numbers in the United States right now?
Well, you know, this is like the third or fourth time this has come up, and a long time ago
when it first did come up, I took the Bells Mind database, and I made a little script that
would go and count the number of assignable exchanges that there were in the U.S., and then
just multiply it by, you know, 10,000, so that you could find out how many numbers are available
and how many, what percentage of the U.S. used up. And I think, I want to say that there's
288,000 exchanges in NAMPA, but only 140,000 of them are assigned.
Yeah, 136,027 according to you.
There you go.
Okay.
So, that number times, unless I'm losing my mind, that number times 10,000 is how many
numbers there are assignable. I mean, obviously, not counting test numbers and all that other
stuff, but that's about as close as you're going to get. That's the number of numbers you
can actually dial and have it do something.
Okay. So, your program here does not calculate the fact that a certain block of numbers cannot
be used or certain strings or sequences of numbers cannot be used?
No, it does take that into account, except for, I mean, I guess you can't really count test
numbers at all. Test numbers are just assigned by the phone company randomly. There's no, like,
pattern to the bulk of them. You know, some phone company may use one way to assign them,
some phone company may use another, but there's no standard, so there's no real way to tell
that. But it does, I mean, it does exclude all the things that start, like, 2-1-1, 3-1-1,
4-1-1, all that stuff is excluded, because it's just the exchanges that are assigned.
So, technically, there are that times 10,000 assignable numbers. Whether they're, whoever
they're used by, I mean, I can't really give you any stats on that, but those are the numbers
that you can dial, and that shouldn't, shouldn't give you some weird error message about the
exchange not being assigned.
Okay, so it excludes the 4-1-1, 3-1-1, et cetera, et cetera. It also excludes the 8s?
Yeah, it excludes 8s.
Excluding 8s. So, so, iTinyURL this for anyone who wants to see it themselves. It is tinyurl,
et, the number 2mr, which will take you straight to this little program that Not Theory wrote
a long time ago. So, check that out. But the number is, wow, there's a lot of numbers. I
don't know if I can count this high. I'm going to go with, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 1,360,750,000 numbers.
That's a lot of numbers.
I probably have half of them, considering how many DIDs I used to have.
Well, apparently you don't have enough to get something up and running, but we won't go there.
Yeah, that's true.
We won't go there.
I asked people in the forums, I said, if anybody has DID providers that they can recommend
that are, you know, decent and let me use as many channels as I want incoming, let me know.
Nobody let me know. I don't know. I have one company that I can go to that I think is okay,
but other than that, I've had some pretty bad experiences, so recommend something, please.
That's all I can say. Email me, fax me, call me, stop by at my house, let me know.
At 127 West Oak, no? We don't want to drop that much docs?
Yeah, 127 West Oak, White Plains of New York. I'm on the third floor, and it's the really short
John Malkovich style floor.
No, what's the, what's that place in Pueblo, Colorado? We should have given out that address.
Pueblo, Colorado? I don't know.
Oh, you know, the one on other commercials all the time. Damn it, am I on my own here,
people? Somebody help me out. The fulfillment center in Pueblo where you get the catalogs
or some shit like that. I don't know.
Oh, yeah, where you get all the toys and stuff?
Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. It's like Slave Labor Colorado or something like
that. Child Labor Avenue or something. I don't know, whatever.
All right, well, you have to run, is that right?
Yeah, I'm where I need to be, so I'm going to get out of here.
All right, well, everybody check that out again. It's tinyurl.com slash et2mr. And yes,
contact him, us at the radio show, contact you directly. What email address do you want
to drop?
I think, in theory, it still works.
I don't even know. Let's go with that. If that doesn't work, send it to radioatbinrev.com
or copy us or whatever, and we'll make sure it gets into the right pans. And hopefully,
Freak Factor can be revived at some point in time, right?
We'll talk about it.
You'd love it when I put you on the spot.
Yeah, no, I have every intention of doing it. I just, I can't, I can never guarantee any dates
because they never happen.
There you go. Busy, busy man, but thank you for spending part of the day with us. And
we are going to do some email now.
And joining us to do our email portion of the show this week is a first timer on Binary
Revolution Radio, but someone we know very, very well. Logos X joins us on the show. Welcome,
my friend.
Hey, what's up?
So, can you help me out with a little email here?
No, not a problem, man.
Okay. First thing I need you to do is sing the email theme song. No, I'm just kidding. Okay,
first email this week goes to, or excuse me, comes from, goes to us, of course. Comes
from Too Geeky. Too Geeky says, Stank, I wanted to tell you I love the show and give you
an extra resource to share with the other listeners. On episode 150, Freak Toolkits, it
was good to hear two of my favorite hosts on the same episode, Stank and the Doctor, with
the bonus of hearing Ponyboy, who is absolutely crazy. Smoke bombs, I have to see that. Yeah,
I got to see that myself. I like the format. I think that it allows you to get a broader
spectrum of content. I also like that the show is no longer live. I think it allows the
guest host to be more natural and not worry about whether they should say something or
not, and it allows you to have more freedom when scheduling guest hosts. Not to mention
you can also scrub up any advertent doc drops. I have been going back through episodes of
RFA and Default, and I have a question about general phone freaking. Oh, man. See, I don't
know if I can answer this, but let's give it a shot. He says, what is so illegal other than
the blue, red, and beige boxing and opt diverting? It seems to me, other than that, you are either
simply using the phone, more dialing or collecting numbers, or protecting your privacy. Now, 2Geeky
has, okay, I'm going to stop the email in the middle. He goes on a little bit more. Let's
stop it right there and answer that first question. And that is, what is so illegal about freaking
other than boxing? Well, boxing, of course, is the controversial part of freaking, and that's
the, a lot of the real freaks hate referring to freaking as just getting free phone calls. It's
one of the things they've always emphasized and said, that it's not about getting free
phone calls. Freaking is about finding out how the phone system works. So, I do not see
anything wrong with trying to understand and learn how something works. It's like anything
else. It's, um, exploring to a certain extent is fine. I can do pretty much anything I want
to my own computer system to make a metaphor into hacking. But as soon as I go, let's say
I want to find out how my computer machine works, and then I go to how, go the next step
further to how my hub, computer hub machine router works, router machine works, and then
I want to take it outside. I mean, at some point, I'm going to cross a line where I'm not
supposed to be looking anymore. So, I can be making phone calls and stuff like that,
but as soon as I find a system out there, like, for example, a DATU, which is something
that's, you know, people talk about a lot, um, which is a computerized system out there
that lets you do some diagnostics. I'm not authorized to use something like that. So, dialing
a number is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but at some point, you have to hang up and
say, I'm not supposed to be here, and that's where that fine line gets crossed, because
sometimes you don't know what it is you've dialed until it's kind of too late. So, the
act of phone freaking is not illegal in and of itself, making a lot of phone calls, listening
to error messages, which is another huge part of it, finding out what, uh, interactions there
are between phone companies. That's all perfectly fine. I mean, unless there's something, can
you think of anything, Logos, that might be...
Um, besides stealing servers, I think everything should be fine, you know. If, you know, if they
don't want you to have access to DATU, then it shouldn't be there.
Yeah, but they're there for them, for authorized... It's kind of like authorized users. It's kind
of like putting your computer on the interweb, and then when somebody accesses it, you're
the one that put it there, for whatever reason, and that doesn't mean that it's okay to hack
it. That doesn't mean it's okay for somebody to have unauthorized access. So, I guess there's
basically two, two things in freaking that are dangerous or illegal. That is, uh, fraud,
fraud, that is, getting free phone calls of some kind, committing fraud, or committing
unauthorized access of a protected system. That's the only two things I can think of
that are illegal.
What about, like, spoofing or something?
Well, see, the jury is still out on that one. That's a big controversy that's still ongoing,
because spoofing... The FCC regulates the telephone industry, and they require certain information
to be sent through phone lines. It's in their regulations, and the phone companies have to
comply with that. However, with the onset of VoIP, VoIP does not fall under FCC regulations,
which is why they've been trying so hard, and fighting so hard, to get control of VoIP, because
if they do, then they can start controlling that. But right now, there's nothing technically
illegal. Now, I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this completely to heart, but I'm pretty doggone
sure that there's nothing innately illegal about spoofing a phone number when it's your
system, your software, your asterisk box, your whatever, your PBX, and you're doing all
the controlling. I don't think there's anything inherently illegal about that. But, again, I
am not a lawyer, so I would not know for sure.
Well, that's given you're not spoofing with law enforcement.
Well, yeah, that's who you're spoofing to and what you're spoofing. You know, you don't
want to mess around with 911, because that's a whole other federal jurisdiction level when
you mess around with things like that. So, I'm afraid that's pretty much the best answer
I can give. Maybe I'll get Black Ratchett or somebody on the show in the future to follow
up to this a little bit more, with a little bit more detail.
Now, the second part of this email goes back to episode 149. Too Geeky goes on to say,
episode 149, Digital Forensics. For other listeners who might want to know more about
digital forensics, they should listen to the Cyberspeak podcast at cyberspeak.libsyn.com.
It is done by a couple of cybercrime investigators. I think their feed goes back to episode one.
They talk about in-case, cell phone forensics, subpoenas for information from Google, and the
most recent podcast, one of the topics they discuss is how much info they can get from
your RAM. Essentially, they can get a snapshot of the last application you were running.
It sounded Windows-specific. It's a good listen if episode 149 got your Jones on for some digital
forensics, or if you want to know how screwed you are when the hammer drops. Of course, if
you hack responsibly, you will not need to worry. So, yes, Too Geeky, thank you for that email.
And, again, that is cyberspeak.libsyn.com. That sounds really interesting. I'm actually
going to check that one out.
No, one thing you said about the RAM, though, like, well, if they can read the RAM, a lot
of times when they find these boxes, they leave them all on purpose to save the memory that's
on the RAM.
Oh, yeah, that's standard practice, because I did some research for that episode, because
that is, again, that was not my forte. I'm learning a lot about that, too. Standard practice,
the first thing is to not touch the computer, not turn the computer off. You know, there's
a certain way, and they actually have a chart, and maybe I'll try and find that somewhere and
put it on the show notes. They have a chart that you're supposed to tell what operating
system it is, and it tells you the best way to shut it down so that you do not cause harm
to the forensic evidence. Some operating systems, it's better to power it off, do not go through
a shutdown process. Some operating systems, it's better to type in a certain command.
Some operating systems, it's better to leave it on and grab an image of memory before you,
there's all these different steps that they can take. So, you know what? I think, I don't
think we're going to have enough time to do any more emails, and I think we're going to
have to wrap the show up. So, Logos X, do you have any shouts? I'll let you take first
crack of shouts tonight.
Well, I've got to give shouts to the BinRev 561.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
My old crew at the 561 still holding it down. And since we're along the same lines, I'll give
shoutouts to the BR662 meeting. All the guys at the BR662, shoutouts to them. They are having
a meeting today while the show is airing. Probably in their meeting right now, probably
having just nasty, wild, just butt naked, all kinds of nastiness and carrying on. All
right, maybe not. I don't know what I'm talking about. But I wouldn't put it past those guys.
So, shoutouts to them. And our side of the week. Let me think. What is our side of the
week, I guess? You know what? I'm going to go, I'm going to give the side of the week
to that podcast that Too Geeky just told us about. And that again is Cyberspeak, all
one word, C-Y-B-E-R-S-P-E-A-K dot L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. If you have email for us, feedback of
any kind, good, bad, ugly, indifferent, something we missed, something we made a mistake, or just
to tell me that I sound sexy as hell, or not, you can email us, radio at binrev.com, or
yell at me how I didn't even let Logosex get a word in edgewise on the show. You're going
to have to come back. We're going to have to have you on for a longer part of the show.
This was a late night, last minute fill-in, the last few minutes of the show tonight.
So we're going to have to have you on an upcoming episode.
Closing music tonight is from Nurse Hella, and the track is called Nurse Hellamentry. Kind
of a cool track with a beat from Bad Spella, a good friend of MC Frontalot and several other
nerdcore artists. So always putting out some cool beats, and this one is no exception. So
we're going to close out with that. And Logos, thank you for helping out with the email and
to all of our other hosts tonight. And if you can help me close out the show, we'll tell
everybody that we will see them next week. Same Hack Time.
Same Hack Channel.
This is a world premiere.
This is all the passengers.
This is a world premiere.
I'm super evil dead so won't you hail to the queen
I'm a birthling in courage, there's elementary
I'm a ultra blinginist, I'm a nerdlinger, see
But I'm precocious, fractal mackalicious, then pedale, alatom
I'm a birthling in courage, there's elementary
I'm a ultra blinginist, I'm a nerdlinger, see
But I'm precocious, fractal mackalicious, then pedale, alatom
Cause trouble, man, I do it for kicks
I'm sneaking backstage with my jet and mine tricks
And my VIP fix, in the thick of the mix
Wanna go back to my place, party really licks
Got a humping in the lobby, heavy bedding in the car
Lay around on my court, see if you can score a call
Stop fucking get so boring, all to do is talk and talk
Take us out, I sneak how I can play, bubble bomb
I'm a birthling in courage, there's elementary
I'm a ultra blinginist, I'm a nerdlinger, see
But I'm precocious, fractal mackalicious, then pedale, alatom
Sometimes I stomp fighters, sometimes I get high
Yes, I listen to Rush, no I ain't gonna lie
I brought the science in my rhyme, doesn't fly like Bill Nye
Fuck your H2O, give me a double coke and rye
Let's play, spin the bottle, you'll look like Harry Potter
My kisses never miss, you'll be reduced to Bantha Potter
I'm like a real hop, but if I make it any hotter
I'm gonna make you cream on 80 million dollars
I'm a birthling in courage, there's elementary
I'm the ultra blinginist, it's dancing
I'm a nerdlinger, see
But I'm precocious
It is fractal mackalicious, then pedale, alatom
I'm a birthling in courage, there's elementary
I'm the ultra blinginist, it's crack in C
I'm a nerdlinger, see
But I'm precocious
It is fractal mackalicious, then pedale, alatom
I'm a birthling in courage, there's elementary
I get an ultra-blankin' instant
and see
I'm in earth legacy
I bet I'm precocious
It's fractal now we'll just
but a retaliation with precocious
That's Bella
Dr. Sella
You better tell her
to somebody