Scot’s Newsletter Blog

It will come as no to surprise to those of you who’ve been at this computer technology thang for a while that — given that Vista sales haven’t been great over the nearly one year since Microsoft released it to manufacturing on November 8, 2006 — Microsoft has to do something. And that something appears to be Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), which the company intends to ship sometime in the first quarter of 2008.

On Friday I interviewed Microsoft Vista SP1 production manager David Zipkin. And while Zipkin insisted that SP1 isn’t just a roll-up of patches, updates, and security fixes that you’re already getting on Windows Update, he was hard pressed to tell just what exactly is new in the forthcoming service pack. The truth is there are new things, but very few that you or I really care about.

In the end, maybe it’s all a moot point anyway, since most people will get SP1 when they buy a new PC or download it as part of Windows Update, where it will be about a 55MB download. Microsoft will be distributing it on DVD, both to enterprises with license agreements and to consumers who are willing to sign up for it on a Web form, pay a modest fee for shipping, and wait several weeks. But my guess is that waiting won’t be a huge hardship.

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It’s taking forever to kick the door closed on the long-term Windows software firewall evaluation. In the last installment of the series, Windows Software Firewalls Evaluation Rolls On, I wrote about issues with Comodo 2.4 that Scot’s Newsletter readers have reported — and which the Comodo folks graciously owned up to. With a rearchitected version of the firewall on the way, I decided to hold out to see whether the new product would get the job done with fewer issues.

A couple of days ago, Comodo released what some have dubbed Comodo 3.0 Beta 3 (version 3.0.9.229). With this new rendition of the code, for the first time you get the sense of what the company expects the user experience to be. The product relies heavily on user prompts to warn you of possible threatening actions, but you can tell it to remember your answers and make specific programs “trusted applications,” which effectively silences future prompts. The user experience is pretty good, overall, but it’s way too early to determine whether the product will perform without bugginess on some desktops.

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In early September I wrote a column titled Apple’s Taking a Pass on the Enterprise Prize. It appeared in Scot’s Newsletter and also on the Computerworld site. I was attempting to take Apple to task for its lack of an apparent big business strategy. Many Computerworld and Scot’s Newsletter IT pro readers have written me over the past year to say they prefer Macs but don’t feel that Apple supports business buyers as well as their Windows-related vendors. Many readers also feel the existing Macs are more consumer-oriented than business-oriented. So I wrote about that. And I wrote that I had contacted Apple weeks earlier and hadn’t gotten any real response from it about the company’s enterprise strategy.

The week after the column appeared (after I returned from a vacation), I received a call from Apple acknowledging for the first time that, yes, it has an enterprise division headed by Al Shipp, senior vice president of enterprise sales. Only hitch was, Apple’s PR department wasn’t authorized to let me talk to Mr. Shipp or, in fact, anyone in Apple Enterprise.

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Those of you who’ve been reading me for a while know that I love my FiOS broadband connection, but I’ve had no end of trouble with my Verizon FiOS Internet account. Over the past few months I’ve written several items about my flirtation with Verizon’s FiOS TV (conventional and digital HDTV television programming — like the cable or dish companies — via fiber optic). I backed out of the idea on installation day when I discovered I needed to opt for a new router, which would be assigning IP addresses to Verizon’s set-top TV boxes along with the other 20-plus computers on my network.

There followed some several items on these pages about another concern I had with FiOS TV, the fact that video-on-demand movies and shows use the same bandwidth pool in the FiOS architecture as the Internet access. I became concerned that concurrent video-on-demand programming and heavy Internet usage might result in slower performance. Verizon has been peeling back the onion and explaining this to me. There’s a little additional detail later on in this post.

But first let me deliver some good news. The account problems I’ve had with FiOS — which have amounted to Verizon’s records showing me as having standard DSL instead of FiOS — have been fully rectified. Frank Boersma, director, set-top box and in-home network engineering at Verizon, whom I quoted in this recent post, was able to set in motion a resolution process. The problem dates back to my original FiOS Internet installation date, early in January of 2006.

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My essay a few weeks back called A View of Our Automotive Future stirred up a lot of controversy and generated a lot of reader email. It’s easy to forget that as wound up as people get about Microsoft, Apple, and Linux, nothing compares to what happens when you poke people where they really live: their automobiles.

I also managed to anger a whole ton of people with my comments about climate change being — to my mind — man-made. Almost no one wrote me to disagree that we’re experiencing climate change; but many SFNL readers wrote to tell me that global warming is not caused by the significantly increased CO2 levels generated in part by humanity. OK, well, everyone is entitled to their opinion. My concern is that the polar ice cap is melting, and we’re standing around debating whose fault it is. My tendency is to focus on solving the problem.

I’m happy to report that another huge batch of readers wrote to tell me that they, too, have purchased a hybrid gas/electric vehicle of some sort. Interestingly, though, a lot of people also wrote to tell me hybrids aren’t really the answer. Of course they’re not the last word. They still burn nonrenewable resources, don’t they? The point many were trying to make is that the complexity and weight involved with internal combustion/electric hybrid vehicles makes them imperfect — especially as replacements for larger vehicles. They also make small vehicles heavier with their battery packs. This is all true. It’s the engineering trade-off for a vehicle that has two means of propelling itself. But that doesn’t change the fact that even my wife’s relatively heavy Toyota Highlander Hybrid gets better gas mileage than its lighter nonhybrid Highlander brandmates. It also gets nearly two times the miles per gallon delivered by the SUV it replaces in the Finnie household. And it generates fewer harmful emissions.

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This Link of the Month delivers probably more than you ever wanted to know about 1080p, the current high water mark for quality of digital media presentation on flat-panel HDTVs and Blu-ray and HD DVD players. But a number of Scot’s Newsletter readers have written to ask me why I felt it was important to pay extra for 1080p with 1,920-by-1,024-pixel resolution when I made My Panasonic Plasma Purchase back in June.

This article, High Definition 1080p TV: Why You Should Be Concerned, authored by Brian Florian and Colin Miller from the March 2007 edition of the Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity, explains and shows why 1080p is better than 1080i and lesser-resolution HDTV formats. If you’re buying a large flat-panel HDTV that’s 50 inches or larger in size and you’re into watching movies, the 1080p format delivers noticeably better quality with a Blu-ray or HD DVD player.

While I’m revisiting this subject, it’s probably worth pointing out that Consumer Reports just picked the Panasonic’s 50-inch 1080p HDTV model TH-50PZ700U as it’s best rated plasma. That’s the model I purchased. The same Consumer Reports article (in the November 2007 issue) provides some insights into the advantages of 1080p. CR makes the point that there are 720p sets that provide at least as good picture quality as some 1080p sets. That’s especially the case with HDTVs that are smaller than 50 inches, where the quality improvement is harder to discern. If you’re not a movie lover or if you’re buying a second widescreen TV, 720p is probably just fine for, say, a 42-inch set.

Earlier this month I wrote a review of Corsair’s 2GB Flash Padlock USB stick. The USB drive is unique to my knowledge in that it has push-buttons that create a padlock, so the casual data protection it offers comes with a very fast and convenient way to lock and unlock the drive. In fact, it locks automatically whenever it is removed from your computer.

I still like the thinking behind the Flash Padlock, but there are a couple of issues with it. Thanks to SNB (Scot’s Newsletter Blog) reader Jonathan March for writing with his concerns about it, which prompted me to go back to Corsair for more answers.

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It’s the unofficial motto of the lottery industry: You’ve got to play to win. A couple of decades ago, the vast majority of microcomputer companies realized that the jackpot was in sales of computers to businesses. Apple opted not to play, and as a result, it had a troubled history throughout most of the 1990s.

Now, for the first time since the Mac was introduced in 1984, Apple has a real opportunity to play to win by focusing some of its resources on selling computers to the enterprise. Apple isn’t a large company, however, and it’s headed in an entirely different direction, transforming itself from a consumer computer company to a consumer electronics company. But is that truly the right move for Apple? It might be, but it’s not without risk. And it may mean passing up a golden opportunity.

Small Window
Don’t believe the siren song emanating from Redmond about how well Vista is doing. It’s not doing all that well. That doesn’t mean Microsoft is in trouble long term, because as things stand now, Vista (and its mildly improved derivatives) will eventually take over the Windows marketplace and wind up being the largest-selling version of Windows ever.

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Editor’s Note: In a later review of Lexar’s JumpDrive Lightning USB stick, I updated my USB stick recommendation in favor of that product. I also ran into some issues with the Corsair Flash Padlock that caused me to rethink it entirely. From a pure hardware-security standpoint, I now recommend the IronKey Secure Flash Drive.

I’ve been searching for a USB stick with large storage that I can use as my everyday portable storage. I require this device to have security protection. USB sticks are too easy to lose, and I might have sensitive personal or corporate data on it from time to time. I don’t want to worry about prying eyes should the darn thing fall out of my pocket.

For the past few years I’ve been using a highly portable 5GB Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive, which contains a 1-inch mini-drive.

It works with Macs and PCs, but unfortunately the built-in security is software-based, and it requires Windows to run. While almost every USB storage device works on the Mac, most of them are using Windows-based software — not hardware — to encrypt or lock up your data.

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Over the past few issues of the newsletter, I’ve discussed the pluses and minuses of Verizon’s FiOS TV service. I’ve had Verizon’s FiOS Internet service since January of 2006, but I recently decided to skip Verizon’s FiOS TV digital entertainment package. I decided to upgrade my existing Comcast digital cable TV service to support my flat-panel HDTV. To get caught up, check these articles:

• Good News About FiOS TV
• FiOS TV Has Drawbacks

Last time, I offered something of an apology for my earlier surmise that there might be some impingement of broadband Internet throughput because Verizon also uses that pipe to send video-on-demand programming, such as movies and shows. In my household, I have five televisions and set-top boxes connecting them to digital programming. My kids are addicted to on-demand children’s programming, and my oldest loves to order free on-demand movies. Personally, I’m more into Netflix. But there’s a lot of on-demand programming going on in the Finnie household. So I got to thinking: Would multiple on-demand TV programming coming down the pipe diminish the bandwidth available to my Internet connection?

It turns out that my concern actually does have some merit, although only in the worst-case scenarios.

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