The Internet Home of Kevin L. Collins
Posts tagged microsoft
Yet another rant: Power Managment
0First, I understand the need for a computer to conserve power – especially laptops. When they’re sitting there doing nothing overnight or while a user is down the hall talking with co-worker, etc., there’s really no need for the screen to churning away at full brightness and wasting the electricty to do so. I completely understand that.
But what I don’t understand is when a compter is told scan for viruses and the CPU and hard drive are going nuts fulfilling that task that power management would kick in and put the machine in sleep mode. This is stupid!
I don’t know if this the fault of the anti-virus program developer, the computer manufacturer, or Microsoft, but it shouldn’t be allowed to happen. I can understand and will live with the screen dimming/blanking, but not the whole machine going to sleep.
Come on guys (and gals), let’s talk about what should and shouldn’t happen and prevent sleep mode when the disk is under heavy IO or the CPU is above 1% of usage. It can’t be that hard!
Email Usage Down
0According to this article on TechCrunch, the overal usage of email is falling – especialling with teens and young adults. They go on to explain that email’s popularity is falling as SMS‘s popularity is rising. To which I say: DOH!
Two reasons: 1). Kids love to text – it’s a fact. They would rather text you than talk to you. Trust me on this, I have two kids of my own. This sad fact doesn’t bode well for us as they get older and start running our country in my opinion. 2). SPAM. No one likes SPAM and if you’re like me, more than 80% of the e-mail I get is SPAM in varying degrees of useLESSness. Why spend the time to sift through the garbage when you get straight to your message?
Does this mean email is dead? No, not by a long shot. My company couldn’t survive without email. So as long as businesses are still in business, Microsoft will still be able to sell Exchange Server and Outlook clients.
Microsoft’s Command Line Syntax SUX!!!
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- Image via CrunchBase
So when Windows XP SP2 came out, it included the “Windows Firewall”. In most cases, I would say this was a good thing. This was most true for home users where even a little security is a good thing. For the corporate user (or more specifically, the domain administrator), this was really more of a pain than anything – especially when it came to nag screens that scream you were unprotected if the firewall wasn’t turned on. In most cases the corporate user is protected by more means than they are aware of and the Windows firewall is not really affording them any additional protection. (And yes I know about internal threats, etc. In most cases, internal threats use the very same mechanism that everyone needs to have access to anyway – File and Printer sharing – so again the firewall provided by Microsoft in the corporate environment is a joke.)
At any rate, either at the same time that the Windows firewall came out or shortly thereafter came the ability to control that firewall from the command line. This was a good thing – especially for the Domain Administrator that need to punch holes in the firewall or even temporarily disable it for application installation.
The syntax wasn’t really all that hard – but being Microsoft, it had its own…what’s the right word…flair. For example:
netsh firewall add portopening TCP 80 "Open Port 80"
That command would create a rule opening, as you can guess, port 80.
Sometime between then and now Microsoft decided to change that. They’ve updated the “netsh” command to make it better. Let’s take a look – we’re going to duplicate the same process – opening port 80 with the new “advaced” and “better” netsh:
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Open Port 80" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=80
See! Isn’t that better!
Now you have to type about twice as much and enter the word “firewall” twice! I think it’s the same mentality that brought us the ten thousand “Are you sure?” dialog boxes. Yes, I’m really sure I want to mess with the firewall! GEEEZ!
Here is once case where I REALLY do want Microsoft to copy from Linux. It just seems to me that the Linux command line is so much simpler that the Windows command line. But that’s just me.
