joeware - never stop exploring... :)

I was playing with Vista RC2 on a new desktop machine the last couple of days, I have to say, not too shabby. The number of UAC messages really decreased to something far less annoying and even when they did pop it seemed somehow less annoying. Much more “perfomant” than the last rev I loaded as well.

Actually I only had two issues with the machine. The first was that AVG free got stuck thinking its signatures were out of date but weren’t and telling it to update just resulted in it saying everything was fine. A reboot solved that. The second was an issue with an HP Photosmart printer. That was downright annoying. The HP install kept telling me that you couldn’t run the driver installation using “RUNAS”. I was using an actual admin level ID but had UAC enabled and tried various things and then finally just decided to turn UAC off to get it done… No such luck, even with UAC off the HP install would still pop the RUNAS error. I ended up just digging through the folder to find the actual driver files and loaded those through the normal device manager discover process.

I have to say the new Photo Gallery software which I had never seen before was pretty cool. That isn’t an item I would really look at on my own PCs normally but if I am helping someone else out I tend to try out anything I think they might do to see how it shows up. I may actually end up using that myself now that I have seen it.

Well they are getting there…

IT BEGAN as just a wizard idea from a British scientist. Yesterday it became a reality.

And reality began to disappear.

Following in the footsteps of Harry Potter, it was revealed that the world’s first invisibility cloak has been tested in America. So far the device is rather limited — it is 5in (13cm) wide and can hide an object only from microwave beams.

But the principle established by Sir John Pendry, a professor at Imperial College, London, has been proved to work and in the next five years there are hopes that total invisibility may become possible for larger objects. Tanks, for example.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2412995,00.html

Those are the words you utter when you drop your drink or maybe when you spill some chocolate cake on your white shirt…

Steve Wynn uttered those words upon realizing he stuck his elbow through a $139 million painting…

He bought the picture in 1997 from another collector for $48.4 million. Priceless, in fact, is not quite accurate. For Mr Wynn recently agreed to sell it to a Connecticut hedge fund billionaire, Steven Cohen, for $139 million.

Such was his excitement over the sale – the most money ever offered for a single painting – he bubbled forth with the news to some pals who had arrived in town at about the same time.

Disaster was only around the corner when Mr Wynn invited these friends, among them the writer Nora Ephron and broadcaster Barbara Walters, to come by his office to view the Picasso before it left for Connecticut. Of course, they accepted.

They stood politely and gaped as Mr Wynn gushed about the work and its history.

As described this week in an online blog posted by Ms Ephron, it was at this moment that Mr Wynn took a couple of fateful steps back.

He is a man prone to extravagant gesticulations and somehow his elbow made contact with the canvas, specifically with the left forearm of the curvaceous mistress.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=18&objectid=10406619

Outside of the title quote, the best line is

“Thank God it was me”.

No kidding, just think if some lowly millionaire or worse, some normal person like a maid or maintenance work around the Wynn did it… If I ripped a $139 million painting I am not sure if I could even grasp that loss emotionally.

Oi.

   joe

The United States considers space capabilities — including the ground and space segments and supporting links — vital to its national interests. Consistent with this policy, the United States will: preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so; take those actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests;

and

To achieve the goals of this policy, the Secretary of Defense shall:

…

Develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if
directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries;

This is the new USA space policy signed by Bush.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_10_06_usspace.pdf

I want to read through the whole thing and find out what other issues are in there but that deny part I noticed in a summary and scanned through the document and found it…

I don’t know, but maybe we should do this differently… How about instead… we just beat everyone there? Not hold others back? Better yet, maybe we work with others and get there? This is much cheaper per person when spread across more persons. The US has a lot of smart people but not necessarily the smartest nor the largest number of the smart people. Hate to see we rely more on the deny aspect of this than the go do something cool and new aspect.

Something that is really bothersome is there doesn’t seem to be any guidelines concerning implementation of those deny pieces though lots of other stuff on other aspects of implementation. So what does deny mean? We go to war over the fact that someone we don’t like at the moment may be further ahead? We start blasting their stuff to bits that makes it into orbit regardless of purpose? Kill off key technical resources for the “bad” guys? None of those are truly acceptable.

   joe

I just wanted to put a short blog post out there about AdMod.

If you are getting an error using AdMod to make a change and you don’t know what is going on, don’t forget about the VERY USEFUL switch, -exterr. That switch is specifically there to help you find issues. So if you get an error, rerun the command with -exterr if you didn’t specify it initially and look at the extended error displayed. If you have Err from the Exchange downloads you can use that to decode the error to something a little more readable.