I saw this post over on Microsoft’s Peter Torr’s blog titled “High Definition Facts” where he talks about the HD-DVD/Blu Ray content protection mechanism (called AACS)

Now, in my mind, AACS is the stupidest thing that has ever come out of hollywood (well, maybe not quite). All it does is take rights away from me – rights I’ve had since cassette tapes were invented in 1963.

But thing I really don’t get about AACS is that while the HD content is copy protected, you can still get unprotected content at a “reduced” resolution of 940x540. Forget about the fact that 940x540 is actually higher resolution than DVDs today, the thing you must remember about pirated DVDs is that people are willing to watch movies recorded with a Camcorder! (Although they’re even trying to foil that). So if people are willing to watch crappy camcorder-recorded movies, don’t you think that 940x540 would be a significant upgrade?

Sorry Hollywood, but until we all get digital chips planted in our brains, we’ll still be able to record your movies. Deal with it.

The Windows Task Scheduler is a service which run all the time and allows you to schedule jobs at specific intervals. And it’s really powerful: you can run a task as any user, you can terminate tasks that take too long, you can put ACLs on tasks to allow only certain people to modify them.

So I was totally baffled when I saw Larry complaining about how DnD Online installs a system-tray application to check for updates every four hours.

Now, let’s ignore the fact that it’s checking for updates every four hours anyway (after all, do they really expect to be releasing that many patches?) Just the fact that they’ve got a process running all the time which is exactly duplicating the work that the Task Scheduler service does seems like a total waste of effort to me.

Not only that, but as someone pointed out in the comments to Larry’s post, if the currently logged-on user is a LUA user, it’s unlikely that their custom task scheduler will work at all – how will it overwrite files in the Program Files directory? If they’d used the Task Scheduler like they were supposed to, they could have set the task up to run in the context of an administrator and all would be well. I pointed out in the comments that in Vista, LUA users can patch applications that have been properly set up to allow such patching. But apparently, Least Privilege User Account Patching is a feature of Windows XP as well! You learn something every day.

Anyway, I think the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t try to duplicate effort that’s already been done for you. And especially not in the way that DnD Online has done it – there are much better options available.

I thought this article in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning was interesting. Not so much the broadband usage, but the mobile phone use. Apparently 887 in 1,000 people in Australia use a mobile phone. In fact, I just got given one of these babies by my company – it’s awesome, I must say.

But the really interesting point is that in Britain, 1,047 people in 1,000 use mobile phones – that’s more than one per person, on average. Now, I can understand that some people may have more than one phone (maybe a work one and a personal one?) but on average people in Britain have more than one phone. That means, if I lived in Britain and only had one phone (or no phone!) then I’d be in the minority! Wow!

What’s with all the ranting I’ve been doing lately? I should post something nice for a change :)

But before I do, I’ve got another rant... It’s about what I’m going to call “in your face” software – software that thinks it knows better than you, and that’s it’s the greatest thing since... well, since ever.

Case in point: Acrobat Reader (I’m not going to link to it: you all know what it is). I recently installed an “update” for version 7.0.7. But the “update” also installed new icons on the desktop and in my start menu. I say “new,” even though they were technically there when the first version installed itself, but I deleted them because I never use them. After all, for a program which only lets me view documents and not create new ones, why would I ever want to run it on its own? Wouldn’t I always want to just double-click a file and open it?

And, even worse than this, after installing the “update”… it asked me to reboot!!

Hello? Adobe? Reader is nothing more than a glorified notepad! In fact, not even – at least notepad lets you edit documents as well! Why on earth would I have to reboot after installing this thing?

OK, I promise my next post will be something a bit more up-beat...

So I’ve just started using SQL Server 2005. When I sat down at the SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, the first thing I thought was “Wow, this thing is great! Finally, everything is in one application!” But the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve grown to hate it.

And not because of anything fundamentally wrong with it – it really is a great tool. But it just feels as though it was really rushed out the door and so it’s got very little “polish.”

The most obvious thing is that almost all queries are done in the UI thread, which means the UI seems to be very unresponsive at times. And there’s never a way to cancel a long-running query. For example, if I select all the stored procedures in my application, and select “Script As → CREATE statement” then there’s no way to cancel that command – which takes forever (much longer than in SQL 2000, and I don’t really know why…)

But the thing that really annoys me are the keyboard shortcuts. Specifically, the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a way to change them. There’s an option to switch between a “SQL Server 2000” scheme and a “Standard” scheme, and you can change the shortcuts for CTRL+1 – CTRL+0 (by assigning them to stored procedures to execute), but that’s it!!

Now, it wouldn’t be such a huge deal, after all, I could probably get used to the new keyboard mappings (why do Microsoft like to change keyboard mappings with every release of a product?) but there’s one shortcut which really pisses me off. And this if you right-click a table and select “Open”, you can enter a new row at the bottom of the window. It’s great for just quickly adding stuff to a table. But if you’re typing something, and you accidentally press SHIFT+SPACE instead of just SPACE, then bam! you’re out of the editbox for that column and it selects the whole row.

Here’s a quick demo. Say I’m trying to “SOME TEXT” into a column, I get up to the first “E” and here’s what I got so far:

Then, since I’m typing all capitals anyway, I “forget” that I can’t type SHIFT+SPACE, so when I do, I get this:

Which means I have to let go of SHIFT, type a SPACE, then press SHIFT again. It’s really jarring to my typing “flow”

I hate it!!

Oh yeah, and to make matters worse, it doesn’t even mention this “shortcut” (that is, the shortcut to frustration) in the help file. So I don’t know where it comes from.