Posts by Steve Coffman

Interesting...

Except when using Outlook in default mode with an Exchange server all the data is left up on the server in your Mailbox and a .PST file is not used... .PSTs are only used for stand-alone instances of the Outlook client, or if the default delivery location is changed from the Exchange Mailbox to a local Personal Folder (aka .PST file.) The only other instance where PST files are used is if you export data out of Outlook to a .PST (for instance if you want to backup or archive your Outlook data.)

"Open sourcers have tired on their own to crack open the Outlook/Exchange hegemony. Past efforts have included the Evolution email, address book and calendar system for Linux desktops with the Ximian connector to Exchange, so Evolution could work with Exchange servers.

These efforts, though, have failed to gain mass market share and left Outlook firmly entrenched as the default email client for business and looking unassailable - until now."

Knowing the internal structure of the PST file isn't going to help you much with developing a client to communicate with Exchange, since how Outlook data is stored and acessed on the Exchange server itself is completely different...

School computers

I work for a school district and we find all sorts of interesting things crammed into computer cases, DVD/CD ROM drives etc.; wrappers, candy, paperclips, pens etc. One time a student hid a container of milk behind a system and no one knew it was there until it burst and rotten milk poured out onto it... luckily it didn't fry anything but it sure didn't smell too good. I think the best one was computer at our alternative High School that some kid was using for his drug stash... his plastic baggie came into contact with the CPU fan and started making a lot of noise...

We also have a control computer fairly close to a CNC mill and it gets pretty full of sawdust that has to be periodically cleaned out. Used to have an old PIII that was running it for 4-5 years that had never been cleaned out and I'm surprised it was still running when we finally upgraded it...

More background...

"A generator failure Sunday at an IBM data center in Auckland, New Zealand crippled key services for Air New Zealand, prompting the airline’s CEO to publicly chastise Big Blue for the failure. The data center outage crashed airport check-in systems, as well as on-line bookings and call center systems Sunday morning, affecting more than 10,000 passengers and throwing airports into disarray.

The problem occurred during planned maintenance at IBM’s Newton data center in Auckland. A generator failed during the maintenance window, dropping power to parts of the data center, including the mainframe operations supporting Air New Zealand’s ticketing. IBM says service was restored to most clients within an hour, but local media reports say Air New Zealand’s ticketing kiosks were offline for up to six hours."

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/12/ibm-generator-failure-causes-airline-chaos/

"IBM expressed its regrets and said the likely cause was a failed oil pressure sensor on a backup generator during a scheduled maintenance session"

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2009/10/air-new-zealand-boss-lands-hard-on-ibm.html

I say let's blame the manufacturer of the generator... it does make you wonder why they didn't have more power redundancy in the data center... although from the article it sounds like they probably do, it's just that the section of the data center that went down was connected to that particular generator that failed. As to the Kiosks not coming back up for six hours, hard to say who's to blame for that... someone else may be responsible for the maintenance of those and not IBM.

Anti-trust

Microsoft has been producing hardware for over a couple decades... so why now all of a sudden would this be considered an anti-trust issue? From the gist of the press release it more or less sounded to me that MS is just guaranteeing that their hardware will be compatible with Windows 7, and some of the hardware may have Windows 7 specific enhancements. Big-woop.

As to the "drivers on the device" comment, the most common USB device that I can think of that most OS's don't necessarily have drivers for are printers. Have you looked at the size of most printer drivers lately? I mean JUST the driver, not all the support software that goes along with most printers? They can be HUGE. I doubt most manufacturers are willing to add a ROM/SRAM to store the drivers for multiple OS's on their device just for your convenience and to cut down on the OS size. You can just install it from the CD/DVD or download it yourself, thank you very much. Interesting idea, but one that isn't going to gain acceptance.

@David Kelly:Simple solution is ...

"Run a UNIX based OS, like Linux or OS X and the need for an anti-virus is gone."

Problem with that is there are many software packages that are used in the industrial and educational fields that are simply not available on Linux (or even Mac for that matter.) So it doesn't do you much good if the OS you use is less vulnerable to viruses/malware/adware if the software you need to run won't work with it. Some examples? AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Rhinoceros NURBS, MasterCAM, Chief Architect X1 (there is a Mac version for this) and just about every software package that now comes with school textbooks, to name a few (as well as drivers for laser engravers, CNC machines, dimensional printers, etc.) And again the reasons for this are market share and also the number of Linux/UNIX variants out there... so until the Linux/UNIX (or Mac) market matures enough to the point that developers are willing to port or write software for it, we are for the most part stuck with Windows and the problems associated with it.

P.S. Yes, I realize that you could probably use WINE to get some of the Windows software to work under Linux, but graphically intensive applications are tricky enough sometimes to troubleshoot under the native OS, not to mention possible performance and hardware issues and you would be SOL for support solutions...

Anti-Virus software

I don't really think you can blame either Vista or Bullguard on this one... a lot of anti-virus programs no longer scan for boot sector/MBR viruses unless specifically configured to do so, or you manually do a "full system scan" and include the boot sector. This is because boot sector viruses are pretty uncommon anymore, and usually due to the restrictions of space, they were pretty limited to what they could do originally. Even if you had an infected boot sector, it would be highly unlikely they would be able to do much in Windows itself, because most of them were designed to work within DOS... and if they did attempt to make modifications within Windows, the "real time scanning" of most modern AV software would pick it up and/or data execuation prevention would stop it... which is why we really haven't seen any major issues with boot sector viruses in years...

Burying cables

In some areas that's not possible to do depending on who owns the land the cable is running over... in my school district where I work in the IT dept., we had to run fiber from poles to get to one of our schools because it had to run over railroad tracks. It took quite some time to get permission from the railroad to do so, since they own the property that the tracks run on. Do ya think they would have let us dig up their tracks to run fiber under it? Not likely...

MSCORSVW.EXE

Luckily my system didn't go haywire after installing the .NET patch, but afterwords I noticed a new process running called mscorsvw.exe. I run my XP system pretty lean and mean and have disabled all non-essential services and processes (I only have a total of 4 non-MS processes and 4 non-MS services that load on startup...) so I was curious as to what it was. Doing a quick web search, it turns out it is a background compiler for .NET assemblies. Theoretically it is supposed to compile the assemblies during idle time (it is set to lowest priority) but mine wasn't doing much of anything while my system was just idling. The info I found says if you run the command ngen.exe executequeueditems from the .NET folder (mine happened to be in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727) it will force it to process everything it has in the queue. I gave it a try, and it worked great - it compiled something like 97 assemblies, and after a reboot the mscorsvw process is no longer running.

BTW, if the process is running at 100% CPU usage after you execute the command, that indicates that the .NET framework is corrupt and should be reinstalled. Check out http://searchwincomputing.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid68_gci1225866,00.html for more info on the process.