Holy cow, I wrote a book!
Post suggestions for future topics here instead of posting off-topic comments. Note that the suggestion box is emptied and read periodically so don't be surprised if your suggestion vanishes. (Note also that I am under no obligation to accept any suggestion.)
Topics I are more inclined to cover:
Topics I am not inclined to cover:
You can also send feedback on Microsoft products directly to Microsoft. All the feedback gets read, even the death threats.
Suggestions should be between two and four sentences in length. As you can see, there are hundreds of them already, so you have three seconds to get your point across. Please also search the blog first because your suggestion may have already been covered. And remember, questions aren't suggestions.
Note the enormous topic backlog. Consequently, the suggestion box has been closed temporarily and will reopen once the existing backlog has cleared, which I estimate will happen sometime in early 2010. If your suggestion is that important, I'm sure you'll remember it when the suggestion box reopens.
One of the things that fascinates me is how each country's view of history is clouded by its own chauvinism. I was reminded of this when researchers were able to reconstruct the original recording from a phonautograph which predated Edison's phonograph, thereby adding another claim to the mix of who invented sound recording.
I think the most contentious invention belongs to human flight. It seems that every country on the planet has a claim to being the pioneer in this field. I'm particularly amused that both France and Brazil claim Alberto Santos-Dumont as their own. Failure is an orphan.
When I visited Portugal, I asked one of the professors, "What is it that students in Portugal are taught is Portugal's greatest contribution to humanity?"
The professor had to stop and think for a while before formulating an answer.
"Portugal has not fared very well of late economically. Our best years were long ago. I would say that our greatest contribution was our accomplishments during the Age of Discoveries."
My question to you, dear reader, is to tell us what students in your country are taught are your country's greatest achievements, or alternatively, what students believe them to be. These beliefs need not be based in fact. I'm more interested in what it is that people want you to believe whether or not it's actually true.
For starters, here's my list of what students are taught (or end up believing) are the great accomplishments of the United States:
Many of these are contested, and two of them are flat-out wrong: Elisha Otis did not invent the elevator, but he made them popular in the United States thanks to safety improvements. Similarly, Henry Ford did not invent the automobile but he made them popular and affordable in the United States by using an assembly line.
Okay, everybody, here's your chance to solve a compatibility problem. There is no answer yet; I'm looking to see how you folks would attack it. This is a real bug in the Windows Vista database.
A beta tester reported that Explorer fails to show more than about a hundred files per directory from file servers running a particular brand of the file server software. The shell and networking teams investigated the problem together and tracked it down to the server incorrectly handling certain types of directory queries. Although the server claims to support both slow and fast queries, if you try a fast query, it returns only the first hundred or so files and then gives up with a strange error code. On the other hand, if Explorer switches to the slow query, then everything works fine. (Windows XP always used the slow query.) Additional data: An update to the server software was released earlier this year which claims to fix the bug. However (as of this writing), all of the vendor's distributors continue to ship the buggy version of the driver.
What should we do? Here are some options. Choose of of the below or make up your own!
Make no accomodation for this particular buggy protocol implementation. People who are running that particular implementation will get incomplete directory listings. Publish a Knowledge Base article describing the problem and directing customers to contact the vendor for an updated driver.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Explorer should recognize the strange error code and display an error message to the user saying, "The server \\servername appears to be running an old version of the XYZ driver that does not report the contents of large directories properly. Not all items in the directory are shown here. Please contact the administrator of the machine \\servername to have the driver upgraded." (Possibly with a "Don't show this dialog again" check-box.)
Explorer should recognize the strange error code and say, "Oh, this server must have the buggy driver. It's too late to do anything about the current directory information, but I'll remember that I should do things the slow way in the future when talking to this server."
To avoid denial-of-service attacks, remember only the last 16 (say) servers that exhibit the problem. (If the list of "known bad" servers were unbounded, then an attacker could consume all the memory on your computer by creating a server that responded to a billion different names and using HTTP redirects to get you to visit all of those servers in turn.)
Add a configuration setting to the Windows network client to tell it "If somebody asks whether a server supports fast queries, always say No, even if the server says Yes." In this manner, no program will attempt to use fast queries; they will all use slow queries. Directory queries will run slower, but at least they will work.
Add a configuration setting to Explorer to tell it "Always issue slow queries; never issue fast queries." Directory queries will run slower, but at least they will work. But this affects only Explorer; other programs which ask the server "Do you support fast queries?" will receive an affirmative response and attempt to use fast queries, only to rediscover the problem that Explorer worked around.
Stop supporting "fast mode" in the network client since it is unreliable; there are some servers that don't handle "fast mode" correctly. This forces all programs to use "slow mode". Optionally, have a configuration setting to re-enable "fast mode".
Be creative. Make sure to list both advantages and disadvantages of your proposal.
(Due to the way the blog server is set up, a new suggestion box gets set up every 30 days, assuming I don't forget to create a new one. If I forget, you can send me a reminder via the Contact page. You can also peek at the previous suggestion box.)
I have kept every single piece of spam and virus email since mid-1997. Occasionally, it comes in handy, for example, to add naïve Bayesian spam filter to my custom-written email filter. And occasionally I use it to build a chart of spam and virus email.
The following chart plots every single piece of spam and virus email that arrived at my work email address since April 1997. Blue dots are spam and red dots are email viruses. The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis is size of mail (on a logarithmic scale). Darker dots represent more messages. (Messages larger than 1MB have been treated as if they were 1MB.)
Note that this chart is not scientific. Only mail which makes it past the corporate spam and virus filters show up on the chart.
Why does so much spam and virus mail get through the filters? Because corporate mail filters cannot take the risk of accidentally classifying valid business email as spam. Consequently, the filters have to make sure to remove something only if they has extremely high confidence that the message is unwanted.
Okay, enough dawdling. Let's see the chart.
Overall statistics and extrema:
From: 15841. To: 15841. Subject: About your account... Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit P
Things you can see on the chart:
As a comparison, here's the same chart based on email received at one of my inactive personal email addresses.
This particular email address has been inactive since 1995; all the mail it gets is therefore from harvesting done prior to 1995. (That's why you don't see any red dots: None of my friends have this address in their address book since it is inactive.) The graph doesn't go back as far because I didn't start saving spam from this address until late 2000.
Received: from dhcp065-025-005-032.neo.rr.com ([65.25.5.32]) by ... Sat, 24 Jul 2004 12:30:35 -0700 X-Message-Info: 10
I cannot explain the mysterious "quiet period" at the beginning of 2004. Perhaps my ISP instituted a filter for a while? Perhaps I didn't log on often enough to pick up my spam and it expired on the server? I don't know.
One theory is that the lull was due to uncertainty created by the CAN-SPAM Act, which took effect on January 1, 2004. I don't buy this theory since there was no significant corresponding lull at my other email account, and follow-up reports indicate that CAN-SPAM was widely disregarded. Even in its heyday, compliance was only 3%.
Curiously, the trend in spam size for this particular account is that it has been going down since 2002. In the previous chart, you could see a clear upward trend since 1997. My theory is that since this second dataset is more focused on current trends, it missed out on the growth trend in the late 1990's and instead is seeing the shift in spam from text to <IMG> tags.
I don't know why it happens, but it happens with disturbing frequency. A customer wants to report a problem, and then illustrate it with a screenshot or two, but instead of attaching the screenshots, they paste the screenshots inside a Word document (and for some reason it's always Word) and then attach the Word document.
It's not a Christmas present. People aren't going to say "Wow, I wonder what's inside? I'm brimming with anticipation!" They're going to say, "Oh great, I can't even see the screen shot. I have to download the attachment, scan it for viruses, then load it into Word. Oh wait, this is a Word 2007 document and I only have Word 2003; let me run the converter first. Okay good, now I can open the document to see, oh, look, it's a picture." Most people won't bother. And then you're going to wonder why nobody answered your first message.
If you insist on attaching the pictures, just attach them directly. And use a compressed image format like JPG or PNG, please. Don't send uncompressed screenshots; they are ridiculously huge. Cropping the image to the relevant portion of the screen helps, too. (This is very easy to do with the Snipping Tool.)
In March of this year, a customer wrote, "I have attached a Word document that describes the problem." (Hey, here's an idea: Why not describe the problem in your email message?)
The Word document contained a screenshot.
The screenshot was of an email message.
The email message contained a screenshot.
Bonus remark from the customer liaison: "Once you open the document, you may need to zoom it further to read it."
Wooden table not included.
The topic backlog from Suggestion Box 3 has nearly cleared out, and I've actually been enjoying not having to write up a reply every Monday for the past several months, but all good things must come to an end, and so, without much fanfare, we now have Suggestion Box 4.
Remember, the suggestion box is for suggestions for future topics. It isn't for developer support, bug reports, or ranting. Topics I'm inclined to cover:
Selected products at Microsoft participate in the Connect program, and many more have official blogs.
Suggestions should be between two and four sentences in length. Think of it as an elevator pitch: You have three seconds to get your point across. Please also search the Web site first because your suggestion may have already been covered. (Possibly as a suggestion that was submitted to an earlier Suggestion Box that was not accepted.) And remember, questions aren't suggestions.
The Suggestion Box will be open for only two weeks, and I will be much more selective about which one I choose to accept than in previous go-rounds. I'll answer one every Monday of 2012 (minus holidays and special events such as CLR Week), and once the end of the year is reached, that's the end of Suggestion Box 4.
Welcome, Slashdot readers. Remember, this Web site is for entertainment purposes only.
Why are INI files deprecated in favor of the registry? There were many problems with INI files.
The registry tried to address these concerns. You might argue whether these were valid concerns to begin with, but the Windows NT folks sure thought they were.
Commenter TC notes that the pendulum has swung back to text configuration files, but this time, they're XML. This reopens many of the problems that INI files had, but you have the major advantage that nobody writes to XML configuration files; they only read from them. XML configuration files are not used to store user settings; they just contain information about the program itself. Let's look at those issues again.
XML manages to sidestep many of the problems that INI files have, but only if you promise only to read from them (and only if everybody agrees to use a standard-conforming parser), and if you don't require security granularity beyond the file level. Once you write to them, then a lot of the INI file problems return.
A customer submitted a suggestion to the user interface team about the device removal notification icon.
The device removal notification icon is far too hard to use. When I click on it, I get a menu that says Safely Remove Hardware, and when I click on that menu item, I get a dialog box that lists all the removable devices, with vague names like USB Mass Storage Device and propeller-beanie details like Connected on Port 0006, Hub 0004. When I click the Display device components check box, I'm presented with a tree view of hardware devices that only a geek could love. This is far too complicated. When I click on the device removal notification icon, I expected to get a simple menu that listed the devices that could be removed in an easy-to-identify manner, such as USB Mass Storage Device on Drive E:. Please consider making this improvement in the next version of Windows.
The device removal notification icon is far too hard to use. When I click on it, I get a menu that says Safely Remove Hardware, and when I click on that menu item, I get a dialog box that lists all the removable devices, with vague names like USB Mass Storage Device and propeller-beanie details like Connected on Port 0006, Hub 0004. When I click the Display device components check box, I'm presented with a tree view of hardware devices that only a geek could love.
This is far too complicated. When I click on the device removal notification icon, I expected to get a simple menu that listed the devices that could be removed in an easy-to-identify manner, such as USB Mass Storage Device on Drive E:. Please consider making this improvement in the next version of Windows.
Um, actually, that menu you are describing is already there, on the left click menu. Because, according to the traditional rules for notification icons (and the device removal icon was written back in Windows 95, when the traditional rules were operative), left clicking gives you the simple menu and right clicking gives you the advanced menu. This customer was so accustomed to right-clicking on notification icons that the idea of left-clicking never even occurred to him.
When I tell this story to other advanced users, I often get the same reaction: "What? You can left-click on that thing and it does something different from right clicking? Dude, why didn't anybody tell me this? I've been doing it the hard way all this time!"
I find this story interesting for a few reasons. First, it shows that differentiating the left click from the right click on notification icons as a way to determine whether to show the simple menu or the advanced menu is now obsolete. Just show the same menu for either click, because users (and these are advanced users, mind you, not just novices) don't even realize that a left click and a right click are different operations at all! And second, it highlights the ineffectiveness of having an Expert mode. These were all advanced users. If there were an Expert setting, they would have set it. And then they not only would have found themselves having to micro-manage the process of removing hardware devices, but also would have asked for a feature that was the same as restoring the novice UI.
Update: Remember, this is part three of a series. Don't forget to read the other two parts.