thegeekchannel.com

I should have known it would never last, but I was very optimistic when I purchased an HD-DVD player from Wal-Mart last year for the outstanding price of $99.99.  I justified it by saying “Microsoft is behind this,” and thinking that worst case I could play regular DVDs on it, too.  Unfortunately, I believe that the final nail has been placed against the pine top of HD-DVD’s coffin.

Wal-Mart has officially announced that they will no longer stock or sell HD-DVD media by June.  Their HD offering will continue to support the increasingly popular Blu-Ray, and they’re not alone.  Netflix and Best Buy are also pulling HD-DVD from their offering, effectively ending any chance the format had of success.  So, if the consumer hasn’t spoken, the retailers have.  They’ve picked their format and like it or not the consumer is going to have to suffer the consequences.

As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

~geek

For those of you that haven’t heard the news, or braved the beta program, Microsoft’s Live OneCare beta 2 program is about done.  After a variety of different frustrations - even when wanting Microsoft to have the single solution of OS and security - I have removed OneCare and resolved to go back to a combination of security tools that are less integrated and, in my opinion, work better.  Whether they protect my system better or not is almost irrelevant - it’s making sure that my system feel buggy that is most important to me.  OneCare didn’t offer that; with all the alerts I felt as though it was doing too little and I was doing too much.

One of the problems that I encountered during the removal had to do with the OneCare backup files.  I couldn’t, by default in Windows Vista, remove them.  I tried a variety of different things before stumbling on Laurent Duveau’s very elegant fix.  Needless to say, it worked first time for me.

Problem: You reinstalled Live OneCare, or you start using v2 beta, and want to delete your old backup folder, but you can’t.

This is a permission problem, that maybe you can solve with cacls with command line:

cacls “<drive letter>:\<path>” /t /g administrators:F 

Sample:
cacls “F:\Windows OneCare Backup\YourComputerName” /t /g administrators:F
Do NOT put a \ at the end of the path.

You’ll get a message “Are you sure(Y/N)?”

This will strip the permissions from the folder and you should be able to delete it.

In what may prove to be one of the biggest snafus in recent years, ComputerWorld is reporting and TheGeekChannel.com has confirmed that Microsoft is warning Windows Home Server users that the new idiot-proof software that Microsoft marketed to be the answer for people wanting to easily share their files is now corrupting those same files. 

I’m sure that this proved to be a very exciting Christmas bonus for the early adopters, with the only good news being that you might not know what you spent because Quicken, Money and Outlook are on the list of products likely to experience corruption when edited on the Microsoft Home Server share.

~geek

I don’t know that I should be excited about it, because I do realize that the point of the internet and blogging as a whole is to allow researchers to easily quote and reference other works, but I am very excited that I was recently quoted in It World Canada. Apparently Briony Smith liked what I had to say about Microsoft’s sacking of CIO Stuart Scott, and I’m glad for it! Thanks for the mention, guys.

Michael

I’ve been readng with some interest all the rumors coming out about Stuart Scott, Microsoft’s former CIO.  For those of you that have been living in the dark, Scott was recently released by Microsoft only two years after hiring him in 2005.  What’s unique about this situation is that Microsoft has publicly said:

“We can confirm that Stuart Scott was terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies, and have no further information to share.”

Of course, the rumor mill is churning about the myriad of different reasons that could have triggered this and the one with the most sticking power seems to be that Scott was having an affair with one of his subordinates, and perhaps that woman received positive reviews and/or a promotion because of her relationship with Scott.  Definitely possible, although it seems somewhat unlikely to me that it would have been handled like this and not as a structured settlement with Scott’s resignation.  Leads me to wonder if it’s not an issue business ethics, such as accepting bribes, favors, or something outside the norm.

What seems weird to me is how many people have come out suggesting that “we” the public deserve to know the whole story, and I’m not sure that I agree with that.  What’s happened, especially if it’s of a personal nature, is between Microsoft and Scott - what gives “us” the right to know anything more than he’s left Microsoft under unfavorable circumstances?  Even that means that his business life is fractured and the chance of him getting another opportunity like this is likely gone.  With a wife and seven kids - whose right is it to know anything more?  My thought - give the man some space, save him whatever small amount of dignity he has left.

~geek