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NOVEMBER 20, 2003 - Issue 18
Live from Comdex: Windows winners
by Brian Livingston
LAS VEGAS - PC Magazine announced here on Monday evening the latest
winners of its annual Technical Excellence Awards, as it has done
in a hotel auditorium at the Comdex computer show for many years. Comdex
this time around was almost the smallest show ever - with the
management actually charging $50 to $100 for some exhibit-only tickets,
the registered crowd amounted to only about 50,000. That's down from more
than a quarter of a million before the dot-com bubble burst (although it
seemed to me back then that the entire population of California had
somehow been jammed into the exhibit halls and taxis).
The smaller army of gawkers, however, made Comdex more focused than before -
I saw no sign of the La-Z-Boy recliners that were pitched to passing
technology buyers in the past.
This clarity of purpose was evident in PC Mag's awards, too. Despite
the downturn in startups lately, the magazine's editors managed to
find plenty of new technology to bestow trophies to, including several
that are of particular interest to Windows pros. The editor's picks won't
appear in PC Mag until the Dec. 30 print edition of the publication, but
here's a peek at the best stuff right now:
SYSTEM SOFTWARE
Winner:
•
VMWare ESX Server 2 and Virtual SMP. This software enables you to host
up to eight different operating systems, including multiple copies of
any single OS, on a single server. With its Virtual SMP add-on, you can
allow any of the virtual servers to use the processing resources of two
or more CPUs.
Runners-up:
•
FSLogic Protect.
This is a utility that's useful to even more people
than ESX Server, in my opinion. With Protect, you can let Windows users change
settings as much as they want, but Protect reverts everything back to the
original state at logoff time. Best of all, users can log back in and see
exactly the same files and desktop the way they left it. Great for public PCs
but also any office environment where different people use the same machine.
•
Microsoft DirectX 9.
DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
Winner:
•
BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1. A
development environment for J2EE that PC Mag said "hides the
complexity without limiting the underlying power to develop Web services,
Web applications, portals, and integration projects."
Runners-up:
•
Compuware DevPartner Studio 7.1.
•
Sybase SQL Anywhere Studio 9.
STORAGE DEVICES
Winner:
• Cornice Storage Element.
Pen drives that plug into any USB port are gaining higher capacities, but at
ever-higher costs and ever-larger physical bulk. An alternative to Flash
storage for these little devices is the new Cornice drive, a tiny,
shock-resistant 1.5 GB hard disk that's a mere 1 inch in diameter. A review in the
Nov. 12
Wall Street Journal said a Cornice-based USB pen drive, the Digitalway
MPIOHS100, will soon go on sale for little more than half the price of
competing USB Flash-based pen drives with only 1.0 GB of capacity.
Runners-up:
•
IBM Active Protection System.
A motion sensor that temporarily parks a hard drive's heads to protect your
data if a shock, such as dropping a laptop, is detected.
•
Sony DRU-500A Dual
Format DVD Recorder. One of the first DVD
burners that handles several incompatible formats: DVD-R, DVD+R,
DVD-RW, and DVD+RW, as well as CD-R and CD-RW.
The magazine also handed out awards in the categories of personal computers,
mobile devices, cameras, printers, components, protocols, collaboration
software, and communications software. For the full list, see PC Magazine's
awards page.
For the magazine's judgment on the best new products showing at Comdex,
visit the
Comdex winners
page.
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SPONSORED LINKS
Price Watch
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THIS WEEK'S HOT TIPS - news of the world of Windows
Recovering from a locked-up system
Reader Jim Rohbock describes a situation in which a friend's Windows 2000
system that contained valuable data became unbootable. You may be amused
by Microsoft's recommendation and how Rohbock was able to overcome the
problem:
-
A friend of mine was downloading Service Pack 4 for Windows 2000 on his
laptop when his system locked up and gave him the Blue Screen of Death.
Microsoft acknowledged that this does happen sometimes, and the only
solution was to reformat his hard drive and reinstall Win2K.
He came to me because he had a substantial amount of data on his system
that he couldn't afford to lose. In essense, what I did was boot to a
floppy and then re-size the existing NTFS partition with Partition Magic.
Next I created a new FAT partition and installed a new copy of Win2K
on this partition.
Once the Win2K installation was complete, I had this installation of
Win2K recognize the NTFS partition and, presto, all of his data was
accessible. I've left out a few steps, but to me this seems like it's
pretty easy to get to this data.
Installing an MS patch wiped out Outlook Express e-mails
Joe Lazzara had a disaster that he hopes Brian's Buzz readers can
help him recover from. This sounds like a bizarre problem, so if
anyone out there has a remedy, I'd like to hear about it:
-
Right after installing the update
(KB
824145) from security bulletin
MS03-048
on Windows XP Professional, I lost all of my e-mails in Outlook Express.
The address book was intact, but all the e-mail files were completely empty.
I have found no help on the Microsoft knowledge base on this issue.
Any help or ideas?
To send me more information about these subjects, or to send me a tip on
any other topic, visit
WindowsSecrets.com/contact/.
RECOMMENDED READING - my book reviews of tech topics
PC Annoyances: a lot of tricks, all in one place
Steve Bass, PC World's resident kvetcher, has put together his
first book on how to solve those maddening little glitches that drive
us nuts. PC Annoyances is a 176-page volume packed with tricks -
not just for Windows, but also for PC hardware, the Internet, and Microsoft
Office. Bass explains, for example,
that you can change your NumLock setting by running Regedit, navigating
to HKCU\Control Panel\Keyboard, and
changing InitialKeyboardIndicators to 2. That's not a new trick, but
he goes it one better by offering you a free Numlock.vbs script, which you
can download along with dozens of other free programs from links at
www.oreilly.com/pcannoyances/.
Unlike most O'Reilly books, this one has a full-color cover and an
attractive interior design with two colors on every page. And for a
street price of around $14, it's a bargain, too.
More info
Two of the most-read books on security ever
At Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference on Oct. 27-30 (which I
discussed in the Nov. 6
issue of Brian's Buzz), the software giant handed out to every one of
the 7,000+ developers in attendance a copy of Writing Secure Code,
2nd Edition. It also gave away hundreds, if not thousands of copies of
Improving Web Application Security. These books present truly important
information, and I recommend them to anyone
who writes software or posts Web pages:
Writing Secure Code, 2nd Edition
Michael Howard and David LeBlanc are two software architects at Microsoft
who co-wrote the first edition of this book in 2001. Every Windows developer in
Redmond was supposed to read it back then, and although you might say,
"Microsoft hasn't followed its own advice yet," that's no reason for you
not to check out this book. The range of simple programming errors that can
lead to devastating results is enormous. It doesn't matter whether or not your
company's programs are going to run only on the intranet - they're going
to be attacked in ways you may not have thought of. Just to take one example,
the book fills an entire chapter with methods by which individual software
users can escalate their privileges from Guest to Administrator. Scary stuff,
but the authors bring together the best thinking on how avoid problems
like these.
More info
Improving Web Application Security
If your company posts pages on the World Wide Web, it's especially
critical for you to understand the concepts in this book. A single errant line
of code in one of your Web forms that accesses a SQL Server database,
for example, can give an attacker the ability to read every field in your
supposedly password-protected database using a technique called "SQL
injection." This is just one of a myriad of flaws that are incredibly easy to
write into a Web page but hard to find and fix. Improving Web
Application Security takes on these issues, one by one. The book
suffers from a single-minded emphasis on writing Web apps using Microsoft's
ASP.NET, but the principles the authors discuss will help anyone who is writing
for the Web in any environment.
More info
FORWARDING INSTRUCTIONS - news gains value when it's shared
Please share this information with your colleagues
You're encouraged to refer your friends and colleagues to this free
newsletter. Because most e-mail programs don't correctly display a formatted
message that's been forwarded, simply call people's attention to
the permanent Web address of this issue:
BriansBuzz.com/w/031120/.
HERE'S A TIP - you'll get a better newsletter if you choose the paid version
You're reading the free version of Brian's Buzz on Windows
Subscribers to the paid version receive additional information in each issue.
Some of the extras this week are:
- SPECIAL REPORT: When XP Corrupts Data.
After extensive testing, two writers have found that Windows XP makes
delayed-write errors when used with Windows 2000 Server or NT Server
with SMB signing, a common security feature.
They say that Microsoft's patches for this acknowledged problem - Service Packs
3 and 4 for Windows 2000 Server - don't actually correct the problem. But
you can protect yourself if you know the secret.
- Three new Windows security patches. One of these patches has
significant side-effects that you'll need to work around, while another
(released on Nov. 11) was just re-released today (Nov. 20).
- Office 2000 corrupts Office 2003 documents. Apply a fix to
keep documents that are opened in both Office 2000 and Office 2003
applications from getting hosed.
- New software makes bootable CDs. A new program, which is
donationware, enables you to create emergency start CDs that have
full access to the NTFS partition on a system that won't boot up.
If you make a contribution before December 3, 2003,
you'll be sent the full, paid version of this week's newsletter.
New, faster service. I've improved the upgrade process at my Web
host so you'll receive the paid newsletter as soon as you upgrade, instead
of it being sent to you the next day.
To upgrade to the paid version, please visit
WindowsSecrets.com/upgrade.
Thanks in advance.
BRIAN'S BOOKSHELF - new e-books from the author
Spam-Proof Your E-Mail Address
This 27-page e-book in PDF format gives you step-by-step instructions
that can eliminate 97% of the spam that would otherwise clog your e-mail
account. You could call it "Brian Livingston's Spam Secrets." The book
is the result of months of experiments and tests I conducted, and I now
receive little or no spam to the addresses I used as guinea pigs. These tests
show that you can actually reduce your volume of spam to practically nothing,
not just battle an unstoppable and ever-growing flood. The methods I describe
work with Windows, Apple, and Linux and don't require any filters or block
lists - but you can use those in addition to the book's techniques, if you wish.
More info
WACKY WEB WEEK - playing for you the Internet's greatest bits
On a blog, no one can hear you scream
One of the funniest pages on the Web right now is "Stone's Worst Album Covers
Ever." It's a compendium of vinyl record jackets that somehow survived
the '70s and are now immortalized in a kind of blogger purgatory.
The author of the page in question is named Marc Cenedella, a former SVP
of HotJobs.com, which was sold last year to Yahoo. (His blog is entitled
Stone.) Cenedella credits a reader
named Nick D. with the actual collection of the albums. Fortunately,
there are very few links to the actual music that was contained within
these outrageous covers.
More info
CLOSING REMARKS - the best is yet to come
Links to some other junk
Long-time reader Ron Acher, a contributing technical editor of
Technology Investor
magazine, suggests that I include in each Brian's Buzz any links there might
be to stories that I've recently published elsewhere. This, he says, would
help him and other readers learn about my latest revelations without having to
hunt for them. Until I get an
RSS
feed going, I'll stick such links
into the end section here, so you can check them out or ignore them,
as you please:
- eWeek: Patches That Patch
Microsoft's Patch-a-Month Club is off to a rocky start as some Oct. 15
patches have to be re-released, some more than once.
More info
- Datamation: The Firewall and the Wandering
Workers
With laptops, handhelds, and all kinds of whatnot accessing your
corporate network from outside the firewall, some new authentication
methods may be what you need.
More info
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