Skype Sucks

Net­Meet­ing video is still unbeaten. Try­ing to video con­fer­ence with a guy in Mel­bourne today, MSN was on the cards but sucked even in a LAN envi­ron­ment, Skype was tried and looked awe­some fullscreen and in a LAN envi­ron­ment, but bombed out pretty badly for web-cam sup­port at the Mel­bourne end and in terms of band­width — you can’t even scale the video! — and Net­Meet­ing was great in terms of reli­a­bil­ity and decent qual­ity over both LAN and Inter­net con­nec­tions (and yes, it let you scale. Last update, 1996. Or when­ver. A while ago!).

Unfor­tu­nately, Net­Meet­ing is too dif­fi­cult to use, and one end (or both ends… our end I’m 99% sure is work­ing fine as I write this) had rout­ing dif­fi­cul­ties because, obvi­ously, Net­Meet­ing doesn’t use some crappy cen­tral direc­tory server unless you select the “Microsoft, please steal my infor­ma­tion” check­box. Which, unlike the lat­est MSN Mes­sen­ger install, isn’t ticked by default.

PC soft­ware mak­ers suck. Ear­lier this week I… had an encounter with Tori’s lap­top, fea­tur­ing no less than 188 indi­vid­ual spec­imins of spy­ware: A new record for me. I started try­ing to dis-infect but even­tu­ally pro­nounced it vaguely beyond repair. The spy­ware was such that it was block­ing sock­ets for all appli­ca­tions EXCEPT I.E. (pre­sum­ably because it can con­trol Inter­net Explorer infi­nitely bet­ter than it can any­thing else – more than a cou­ple of sites were blocked, too), so I couldn’t even update the anti-spyware def­i­n­i­tions. It’d also bro­ken Win­dows Update. Yar, this be re-install ter­ri­tory. Caused, prob­a­bly in no small part, by “ticked by default” junk.

# by Josh Street on January 28th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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WSUS: Windows updates with no activation required

A lit­tle birdy told me that using WSUS means you don’t need to have acti­vated (i.e. legit) ver­sions of Win­dows or other Microsoft prod­ucts. I’ve had instances where, on rein­stalling Win­dows XP (slip­streamed SP2), over-the-net acti­va­tion wouldn’t work at all and I didn’t get a chance to phone acti­vate for about three weeks. Wasn’t a huge prob­lem because of course IE wasn’t the default browser and I refuse to let peo­ple install MSN Mes­sen­ger (if they’re using Win­dows, they have to use the no-frills, rel­a­tively secure and quick Win­dows Mes­sen­ger!), and there was anti-virus stuff installed, but that’s a while to be run­ning unpatched Windows.

In a small bus envi­ron­ment, WSUS means you can avoid poten­tial headaches like that. In a para­noid reluctant-MS-user envi­ron­ment, it means you can (ille­gally) crack your (legally pur­chased) oper­at­ing sys­tem, and enjoy updates with­out hav­ing to hand out your details on a plat­ter. Or, alter­na­tively, if you’re a com­pre­hen­sive Microsoft pirate from the server to the desk­top, you can take fur­ther advan­tage of their hos­pi­tal­ity by enjoy­ing the fine update ser­vices they have to offer. ;-)

Hey, if you’re going to steal soft­ware at least do it well!

More gen­er­ally speak­ing, WSUS just looks like a cool tool. You down­load once, apply many, and man­age what patches do/don’t get installed from a cen­tral location.

Dis­claimer: I haven’t tried WSUS, this is just second-hand. We only use appro­pri­ately licensed Microsoft prod­ucts here. I’m pub­lish­ing this because being sub­ver­sive is fun, if a lit­tle child­ish, and this could con­ceiv­ably (legit­i­mately or oth­er­wise) be of use to someone.

# by Josh Street on November 4th, 2005 Tags: , , , , ,
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