From tjlau's blog:

• http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=261186 - SATAN Causes High Memory Utilization...
• http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=178748 - Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music
• http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=276304 - Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters...
• http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=145675 - Pregnancy: Who Can I Send Suggestions To?
• http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=303969 - How to Work with More Than 64,000 Children Per Parent
• http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=145673 - How Much Does Pregnancy and Child Care Cost?

VB 2005 Express setup gave me a little cause for concern today:

Wow, the setup routine needed 36,468 files in order to begin the installation. I'm now a little bit afraid of running this thing on my home PC...

Marion Jones and her boyfriend, Tim Montgomery, both failed to qualify for the 2004 Summer Olympics in the 100 meter event. Both are suspected of using banned drugs to enhance their performance in the past.

All of the stories I have read about the qualifying competition this weekend (Sports Illustrated and New York Times, for instance) seem to imply that the “stress of the investigation” and the “intense media spotlight” have hampered their performance. I wonder why none of the papers say that she's stopped taking her steroids due to the intense media and investigative spotlight. So her poor performance is because she is running clean for the first time in years.

I guess they're afraid of getting sued. But that's probably the truth.

This is probably the best thing that could have happened for the sport. They would have had to drop her from the team, which would have caused her to sue, which would have been a distraction and/or controversey for the Olympics.

I've written before about my experience with PureTracks.com, how music labels have basically blown the opportunity to make a ton of money by giving consumers what they want.

But, like the modern man that I am, I bought into the hype over downloadable music and have been investing some of my hard-earned money into some songs. (I have also been slowly converting my CD collection to MP3.)

This speech by Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) makes a convincing case that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology wrapped around purchased music tracks (and other licensed content) is a bad, bad idea. He gave several reasons:

1. It's fundamentally flawed. So, you encrypt the music with cryptography. But then you have to give the users a music player that can play it - a decryption device. So if I have both the encrypted file and a device to decrypt it, what's the point of encryption? That is, DVD encryption can easily be broken by anyone with a camcorder, and audio encryption can be broken by anyone with a microphone.

2. It allows copyright holders to invent new restrictions on their content that isn't allowed under law - for instance, the region coding on DVDs. Why is it that, when someone moves from Europe to the United States, all of their DVD's suddenly become unplayable? Is this legal?

3. It gives content producers control over the design of the hardware. Where would we be if music publishers had full control over the design of CD players? Would we have CD-ROMS in our computers? No, we would still be using diskettes. Would the CD-R ever have been released? No, instead of costing $40 they would still cost $6,000. Sometimes the best innovation changes the game. Of course, the existing winners of the game do not like the game changing, so innovation is stifled with DRM.

4. The argument music and movie producers make about how bad computers and the Internet is matches the same arguments made during other inventions through history. The invention of the paper-roll piano, the radio, the newspaper, the TV, the VCR... all were greeted by scorn and lawsuits by the old guard. But look at 2004. Entertainment has adapted to these new technologies. It will adapt again.

All in all, worth a read. What am I going to do with all these WMA's though?

Saw this cool code sample on MSDN today.

Managing a Music Collection Using Visual Basic Express and SQL Server Express

By Brian A. Randell, MCW Technologies LLC

I've always wondered about this. When you go into Add/Remove Programs in Windows, it displays a list of installed programs, their size and when they were last used. This is often completely wrong. For instance, a program I use every day may be listed as “Never Used”.

Raymond Chen tells us why that is. Very interesting Windows trivia. 

There has been some talk about the death of Windows as a programming platform, since any application that can be developed for Windows can also be developed for the Web. Developing for the web frees you from Microsoft's grasp and frequent changes to the API... ie: Win32 begot Windows Forms begot Avalon...

Of course, the entire premise of the argument is hogwash. There are plenty of reasons to develop directly for Windows. Windows apps can do many, many things better than Web apps. And true cross-platform-ness is largely a myth.

This blog entry sums it up nicely:

It's the platform, Silly!

For open source applications, the cost of testing and support is pushed from the developer of the package to the end-user.  It’s no longer the responsibility of the author of the software to guarantee that their software works on a given customer’s machine, since the customer has the source, they can fix the problem themselves.

In my honest opinion, platform stability is the single thing that Microsoft’s monoculture has brought to the PC industry.  Sure, there’s a monoculture, but that means that developers only have to write to a single API.  They only have to test on a single platform.  The code that works on a Dell works on a Compaq, works on a Sue’s Hardware Special.  If an application runs on Windows NT 3.1, it’ll continue to run on Windows XP.

...

Having a software monoculture is NOT necessarily an evil.