Microsoft has wisely extended their warranty for 360s suffering from the E74 error
I’ve know four or five of my friend’s Xboxes (all Falcon chipset) to fail due to this error, so it’s good to see Microsoft addressing some clear design faults. The bad news is that it seems the new Jasper chipsets still suffer from the same E74 problems.
Someone on Zuneboards has found the actual snippet of code that’s causing the recent Zune crashes:
year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */
while (days > 365)
{
if (IsLeapYear(year))
{
if (days > 366)
{
days -= 366;
year += 1;
}
}
else
{
days -= 365;
year += 1;
}
}
The Zune stores the current date by keeping a track of the number of days since ‘ORIGINYEAR’. The loop works out the current year by subtracting 365 or 366 from the days counter and adding one to ORIGINYEAR.
The problem is with the conditional if (days > 366), which means if the current year is a leap year, the loop will never finish as days is always 366 and will never be subtracted. What it’s meant to do is if (days >= 366), although with the conditional above of if (IsLeapYear(year)) it’s not necessary at all.
This means that unless Microsoft fix this bug, it will recur at the last day of every leap year.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols unleashes a scathing attack on Microsoft following the outage suffered by the London Stock Exchange:
It should have been a great day on the London Stock Exchange.
It was, the traders got to watch funny videos on YouTube all day instead of working.
Later the LSE gave the vague explanation, that “It was software-related, a coincidence, due to two processes we couldn’t have foreseen,” and not caused by high-volume. The spokesperson added, “We’ve introduced a fix and we’re confident it will not happen again.”
Somehow “we couldn’t have foreseen” and “we’re confident it will not happen again” don’t fit very well together.
Well, they didn’t foresee it. It happened, and it crashed the system. They now know what happened, and they’ve made a fix that makes sure that bug never strikes again. Comprende?
So what really happened? I doubt we’ll ever get a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation, but I have friends in London and…
None of them talk to me any more so I had to conjure this story out of my rectum.
On top of this runs the TradElec software itself. This is a custom set of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. Its back-end databases, believe it or not, run on Microsoft SQL Server 2000.
Nothing wrong there, at least they aren’t using a database with it’s own host of corruption and performance issues…
The programmers and serious database administrators in the audience can already see where this is going.
Yep, a Linux fanboy with nothing better to write about is going to do another misinformed rant about Microsoft.
Sorry, Microsoft, .NET Framework is simply incapable of performing this kind of work, and SQL Server 2000, or any version of SQL Server really, can’t possibly handle the world’s number three stock exchange’s transaction load on a consistent basis.
Okay, got any evidence to back up those statements?
I’d been hearing from friends who trade on the LSE for ages about how slow the system could get. Now, I know why.
No then.
What I find really amazing is that the LSE’s software stack hadn’t blown its top earlier. Even setting aside my feelings for Linux, there’s simply no way I’d recommend Server 2003, .NET and SQL Server for a job even a tenth this size. If a customer of mine insisted that they didn’t want open source - more fool them – I’d recommended Sun Solaris, JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) and Oracle or IBM AIX or z/OS, WebSphere and DB2.
Yes yes! Anything but Microsoft! Write it in C++, no C, no Haskell, no Smalltalk, no assembly, no in direct machine code! Yes, that’s the best way to do it!
What I’d really prefer to see is RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), JBoss, and MySQL or Oracle or Novell’s SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), JEE, and, again MySQL or Oracle for the DBMS engine.
Ah good old MySQL with it’s corruption and performance issues. Yes, that’s a much better DBMS than SQL Server for crucial financial data. And I’m sure the dog bowl mess that is JBoss and J2EE will be much better to work with than .NET. Like I said, anything but Microsoft!
In any case, though, the real moral of this story is that if you really want HA (high availability) or HPC (high performance computing), Microsoft’s products should be at the bottom of your list. Unix, mainframes, and, yes Linux, are far, far better for companies that need fast and reliable computing.
No, the real moral of the story is that Linux fanboys will latch onto any story where they can falsely discredit Microsoft using lies and spin, and none of them are worth reading. This is one I’m making an example out of.
Vaughan-Nichols fails to mention (or maybe he failed to research) that the outage wasn’t the fault of the .NET application he attacks (TradeElect), but on the “trading gateway between the LSE’s Extranex private network (linking the exchange and clients) and the TradElect electronic trading platform”.
VentureBeat explores what Microsoft did wrong with the 360 in an insightful article:
“Microsoft decided late to add a hard disk drive to most of the machines. It also came up late with a plan to add wireless controllers; all of the previous consoles shipped with wired controllers. The hard drive blocked a lot of the air flow on one side of the machine,” Takahashi wrote. “And the wireless modules had to have enough of their own space to ensure that there was no electrical interference. In the end, the machine was a series of compromises.”
According to the Mac BU, future version of Microsoft Office for Mac will have VBA support added back in:
The Mac BU also announced it is bringing VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac.
[...]
The team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms.
Could this be the first true iPhone killer? Although I’ve had bad experiences with Windows Mobile devices in the past, if Microsoft pulls it’s finger out on this one and creates a competitive operating system to OS X on the iPhone, this could be the one.
Microsoft proposed a hostile take-over of Yahoo! today. At $31 a share, that’s 62% over the closing price of Yahoo! shares on Thursday. It just seems like a very bad way to compete against Google, and they’re paying over the odds for what is a struggling company.
Today Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. My personal favourites are the new language features for C#; automatic properties, extension methods, lambda expressions and anonymous types.
Stephen Fry now has a technology column with The Guardian, following on from the style of his blog which I linked to.
He talks about the value of style and substance in a digital device:
What do I think is the point of a digital device? Is it all about function? Or am I a “style over substance” kind of a guy? Well, that last question will get my hackles up every time. As if style and substance are at war! As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly. Don’t get me started…
This is the exact problem I find with Windows Mobile phones. Functionally, third party applications means you can get GPS navigation, instant messaging, interactive underground maps, and thousands more. But there is one fundamental problem with Windows Mobile, after six versions and seven years of development1 its still not possible to use it without a stylus.
Those of you that haven’t used a smartphone whose interface requires a stylus won’t quite understand, but its infuriating. Its almost impossible to use one accurately when walking, so you have to be either standing still or sitting down. Even then some of the buttons and scroll bars especially are still small enough to make errors fairly common.
This leads me back to the aforelinked Why Enterprise Software Sucks. I’ve yet to come across any enterprise software that manages to blend the right amounts of style and substance. In fact 99% of enterprise software is incredibly poorly designed, and I sometimes wonder how much people get paid to write this appalling rubbish.
Some people will never get it, the kind of people who wonder why the iPhone is such a success when it doesn’t even support MMS. But they’re a dwindling minority, it’s easy to forget that such software only started to become mainstream 10 to 15 years ago, and many people are still not very well educated about it. I’m hoping that as people learn more about software, they will eventually realise that usability and design can be just as important as the functionality.
Microsoft is promoting F# to be a fully supported programming language in Visual Studio.
F# offers developers many valuable and compelling features without sacrificing much runtime efficiency. F# supports type inference, pattern matching, high-order functions, and currying. F# also supports interactive execution, which means that F# programs can be run like scripts or inputted in an interactive top-level environment similar to the Python shell or Ruby’s IRB. F# also has full access to the .NET APIs and components written in other .NET languages.
Its a good day to be a .NET developer.
In a statement Mike Nash, Microsoft’s Windows product manager, said: “…maybe we were a little ambitious to think that we would need to make Windows XP available for only a year after the release of Windows Vista.”
Students will soon be able to buy Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate for £39 or $59 through The Ultimate Steal program. More information from this Microsoft press release.
The new build, dubbed SP2c, includes no fixes or feature changes, but was created simply to address the shrinking pool of product keys. XP Pro SP2c, which has been released to manufacturing, will be made available to resellers and system builders next month, said Microsoft.
Vista is a nice OS, but it really doesn’t have any major advantages over XP Professional, and Microsoft still seems quite committed to XP too.
I think the “performance and reliability” and “compatibility and reliability” updates are a sneak preview into the updates we’re going to see in Vista SP1.
I’ve installed both and so far have found that file copying speeds have indeed increased, as has the general responsiveness of Vista. One of the biggest annoyances for me was the small but significant delay when scrolling through All Programs in the Start Menu, which has thankfully been fixed with this set of updates.
Microsoft has just showcased a “new” incredible user interface that will be launched in just a couple months. If it kicks off, this will be a revolution in how people interact with computers in the future.
It’s strangly similar to a presentation given by Jeff Han a couple months ago.
Rumours are that Microsoft is releasing another edition of the XBOX 360 dubbed the XBOX 360 Elite which will include a 120GB hard drive, a HDMI video out port and will be in black.
Just when I thought I had a nice and clean installation of Windows XP, one that was stable, fast and had everything where I wanted, it starts randomly freezing up. The main problem is that it seems to do it randomly, it can freeze up because I plugged in a USB device, unplugged a USB device, tried to shut down the computer, opened My Documents even start a phone call on Skype for christs sake! I’m not trying to sound big headed, but I do know Windows reasonably well and I like to think I can fix the majority of problems it presents me. But when you get random crashes that don’t BSOD and don’t write to the Event Log, I’m completely stumped for a fix.
However I don’t want to spend several hours reinstalling Windows XP, only to have to do it for Windows Vista less than a month later! Repairing Windows is also a long shot, I’ve tried it before with no avail.
Fortunately, I do have another computer, an Apple Macbook which only ever crashes when I try to run Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a 18MB RAW image from my D80 with just 512MB of RAM, which will do for a month. I’m still to lazy to shell out a couple hundred to upgrade the RAM of the Macbook to 2GB, all I currently use it for is web browsing, e-mail checking and instant messenge sending.
Going from twin 19″ TFTs at work and on my desktop to a rather clostrophobic 13″ TFT on a laptop with as much memory as Saddam Hussein at his trial is going to be a challenge.
Microsoft Windows Vista isn’t even in the stores yet for us normal folk to buy, and they’ve started working on the next release of Windows codenamed Fuji. Mary Jo Foley speculates that this is only going to be an incremental upgrade to Windows Vista (ala Windows 2000 to XP), and possibly just the first service pack…
Fuji is Windows Vista R2, and may eventually be called Windows Vista Plus, or Vista 2009 or some other crap Microsoft will come up with. However, Microsoft learned its lesson from Vista: the code base is a stinking pile of crap. It took five years for Microsoft to make a comparatively minor upgrade to Windows XP. Okay, so there’s the new security model, Aero a.k.a Windows Presentation Foundation and a few interface upgrades, but this is far less than what you’d expect from Microsoft with 10,000 employees, five years and over $20 billion burning a hole in their pocket.
Since development of Longhorn was announced, we’ve lost WinFS (possibly the one thing that got me excited about Longhorn when it was announced) and PC to PC synchronisation of data, and it hasn’t implemented many wanted features, such as better user account control, a better driver management model, enforced driving signing and many more other security related details.
But the post-Vista Microsoft knows the errors of its ways, it knows that implementing a feature in Vista was too difficult, there were too many people involved on each feature, a chance affected too many other features, and so stifled innovation and frustrated developers and designers. Everything took too long, cost too much and wasn’t implemented well enough.
The next major release of Windows needs to be a complete rewrite, it needs to be redesigned with compatibility as a secondary thought, it needs to concentrate on making Vista + 1 the best operating system ever released. Here are a few free tips:
They have five years to do this, if you include the time spent developing Fuji. It’ll be a big shock to everyone, especially for developers who find their applications no-longer work. Not everyone will be happy, and Microsoft will generate a lot of bad press, but they have the money and the monopoly to ride the storm, and its what Windows needs if it wants to have a sustainable future. Its about time the Windows NT 3.1 code base got retired for something a bit more modern.
It’s now official, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 has gone gold. Currently 49% of my visitors are using IE6, while 19% are using some pre-release version of IE7. Once the balance tips into IE7s favour, I’ll be ditching IE6 support on Ejecutive and fully embracing the wonder that is IE7.
So get upgrading!