Oops -- our bad

So we kidnapped and tortured you because we mistook you for someone else.



No harm no foul right? Right?





The funny thing is that this sort of behavior by the USA would provoke such a shitstorm if say China/Russia did it to one of our citizens.

The madness of crowds

So over the past few years, there has been various stories involving some form of public shaming on the internet -- from dog poop girl, to that chix who stole someone's sidekick, people all throughout the tubes have gotten on their high horses and felt comfortable issuing death threats, harassing phones calls while others have abetted the process by posting personal information about the "target du jour".



This particular case that the Consumerist is covering is a sample troubling example.



Its all fun and games until someone gets beaten up/killed from one of these posts. I think Consumerist is well, well, well within their rights for their comments so far -- but people who have followed up on their postings and made death threats should be prosecuted. That sort of behavior deserves to be chilled with a few prosecutions.

Vista fallout begins

Looks like I'm not the only one who had graphics problems with Vista. News sites are beginning to pick up the fact that certain graphics cards simply lack vista drivers />



I think the larger problem will lack of support for the Nforce3 chipset, Nvidia already announced that they would not be supporting Nforce2 but the fact is that Nforce3 drivers still are missing as well.



Here is the thing: Even this plays out with Nvidia (eventually) releasing drivers/fixes, its a huge black eye on them and will steer their most profitable customers (people who build their own rigs and buy their high end cards) to AMD/ATI.



I think the fact that a lot of AGP stuff is broken under Vista will come as a rude surprise to many people -- there is a huge installed base out there (myself included) which see no reason as yet to switch to PCI.

Vista Bugs and Solutions I've discovered

Even although Vista is now officially released, there are still a variety of critical bugs I've noted in Microsoft's new pretty OS.

The main one which affects me is the error code 43 bug which prevents AGP graphics cards from working properly on dual core machines. You could run dual core without the benefits of your graphics card, or you could turn off one core and have pretty graphics but slow programs. It took 3 months of investigation but I finally figured out that what was necessary was to update the AGP system device -- if you have SiS, or Uli chipset (I have Uli) you are in luck. Otherwise if you are rocking with Nvidia's Nforce3, (or worse 2)...so very sorry.

Install the AGP Patch, reboot and your windows experience index should go from a 1 rating to something far more reasonable.


The second big bug comes on installation -- even when doing a clean install, Vista has a tendency to use drives OTHER than the boot/OS drive to store system files (such as ntldr). To avoid this you need to make sure that you are loading all your drivers from a USB key/CD and NOT from a separate hard drive in the system. Failure to do this will result in your system relying on two separate drives to get started. If anyone can tell me a shortcut to moving the system files over to the boot drive/partition I'd much appreciate it.


The third problem (and its something I'm still troubleshooting) is integration with firefox. If you set firefox as the main URL handler for Vista, many of the core OS referral functions breaks. For example typing an url in the Address links on the taskbar does not pull the page in firefox...rather the request goes nowhere. No solution for this other than using IE as the default browser for link handling.

Speaking of IE (and this is not strictly a vista problem), IE7 does not seem to work with Citrix. Anyone have any solutions for this?