What’s different with Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 is that Microsoft chooses to deflect the blame from itself, and pin it instead on the unfortunate owners of the website that the user had last visited. In the following screenshot, Internet Explorer 10 has crashed after being unable to handle some of the web scripting on our website. Except instead of the error dialog you would expect (something to the effect of “Internet Explorer has stopped responding,” an error caption which we are all familiar with and of which the web is full), the error dialog instead reads:

neosmart.net is not responding.

Come again? Really? To us, this seems like a rather mean and dishonest approach to dealing with the shortcomings of the web browser. While it is true that at this moment in time, Internet Explorer is more prone to crashes and hangs than it would be in the final (RTM) release of Windows 8, this does not in any way give Microsoft the right to assume that in the future any hangs or crashes in IE are to be blamed on the designers/coders of the website being visited.

In fact, no code even if purposely meant to crash the browser should succeed in doing so, and certainly should not be held to blame. If Microsoft cannot make a crash-proof browser, that does not mean that they should dishonestly deflect and redirect the blame towards and innocent third party.

I’ve bought my fair share of domains via 1and1, and to be honest, on the few times in the past when I’ve needed the domain name ASAP, generally got the domain I bought within 24 hours. But now it’s been 4 days and 1and1 still hasn’t handed over the domain name that I bought and paid for. Instead, the domain shows up in the list of purchases with the status “The domain has been requested” – as if I care! I just want my domain name, and I want it now! The clients are waiting!

Just for the record, we’re not the only ones with this problem. If you’re looking for a good site to buy domains from, I can’t recommend LunarPages enough for their quality service and excellent turn-around times. 1and1, never again!

Update (March 29th, 7:45 PM UTC):

A quick call to the sales department gave me a most-helpful young man from the States who confirmed what I knew “the domain name *is* registered, but something’s clearly wrong with our system! Let me transfer you to support…” in India. The Indian support was far less than helpful “yeahhhhhhh… there’s something wrong.” When I expressed my, ahem, displeasure, he went further “yeaaaaaah…. 1and1 has a problem with our system holding up all domain name registrations. Aha.. Yeah, a problem”

Great!

Update (March 31st, 2:44 PM UTC):

Just received an email from 1and1 letting me know that the problem has been resolved and the domain name is finally functional. All’s well that ends well?

Treyarch released last month Call of Duty: Black Ops, the latest in the much-hyped “Call of Duty” game lineup. Black Ops made headlines when, within 24 hours of going on sale, it managed to sell some 7 million copies in the US and the UK. However, all is not well in the land of Call of Duty, while this game has received rave reviews from a number of gaming sites, including Game Spot and Metacritic. But reviewers at Amazon seem to get it right, with a thus-far average rating of only 1.8/5 stars. The reasons? Many.

I’ve personally been a fan of the Call of Duty series for quite some time, as the games tend to be well-developed and well-written on both the technical and storyline aspects. But Black Ops falls far, far short of the mark and in many ways is a step back from what we’ve come to expect of its predecessors. On many different fronts, Black Ops fails to deliver — consistently failing to impress and, perhaps most disturbingly, almost as if it was intentionally made this way.

Problems with the Plot and Design

The very first question you find yourself asking when you start playing Black Ops is “What the hell is going on?” While this works well for many other games where you learn as you go along, and the thrill is in discovering the game and its universe, this is not the case with Black Ops. Instead, a number of factors collude to make it near impossible to actually feel like you are in the game, constantly being reminded that you’re playing a PC game, reminded of the device(s) between you and the storyline, and the limitations of the hardware you’re using to play the role of the gung-ho warrior on his journeys.

To start with, the audio quality during all the cut-scenes is, for lack of a better word, crap. While your character is strapped down to a chair, a distant and unclear voice begins interrogating. Unfortunately, Treyarch thought it would be nice to add severe static and garble effects to the interrogators voice. The words are unclear, the ideas are lost, and the general effect is nothing short of confusion and active bewilderment. Most ridiculously of all, no one at Treyarch bothered to add subtitles — something so basic, simple, and effective that you have to wonder whose bright idea it was to not put them, and what where they thinking at the time. Sure, it’s a neat effect to make the interrogator all the more mysterious… but if it means the player will end up frustrated and angry at the game, well, let’s just say that’s not a good idea.

Black Ops is, by design, disjointed. It’s based around the flashbacks of the main character as he recalls past missions and adventures across the world. Unfortunately, Treyarch could not and did not pull this off with the same finesse that others *cough* Ubisoft *cough* have in the past. Mission transitions are abrupt and sudden, the gamer is not given a chance to be sufficiently immersed in the gameplay and storyline before being roughly and crudely jerked out of the flashback, back to the garbled voice, dimly-lit scenes, and confusing activities. Disjointed isn’t necessarily bad; assuming it’s done right, it can probably make for an interesting game. But “done right” and “Black Ops” do not go too well together in a sentence, and the disjointed plot winds up leaving the game with an unfinished, amateurish feel instead.

Aaaand now to discuss the actual gameplay and missions. You’d think that, with the Call of Duty series’ impressive performances and showings in the past, the actual gameplay might paint a prettier scene. But, of course, you would be quite wrong. It could not be more obvious that Black Ops is just an attempt to milk the Call of Duty cash cow for all its worth, without even the slightest attempts to hide it under the guise of an interesting story or well-designed missions/levels. While previous CoD offerings were enjoyable and interesting to play with spacious and well-made maps, Black Ops is nothing of that sort:

Imagine a long, dark corridor. Good guys on one end, bad guys on the other. Along the corridor are desks/junk/debrise/cover arranged in a pattern – first one on the right, and a few feet down, another on the left. Got that picture in your head? That’s pretty much every level of CoD Black Ops right there. Extremely redundant. Very boring. And very badly designed. Your job is to simply start off at one end of the long, rectangular map and make your way to the other side. Every few feet there’s something you can use to take cover, and you just need to clear the way through.

Perhaps most insultingly of all though is the game’s AI engine, which feels like something out of the 90s. I’m used to playing all FPS games on the “Legendary” setting. The good ones truly evolve into something interesting, difficult, and intellectually challenging where you need to use strategy and reflexes to best a quicker, smarter, more powerful, and more resilient enemy; all the while balancing your own set of handicaps to speed, accuracy, and health regeneration. On the other hand, Black Ops feels like a cheat – the already badly designed maps and checkpoints (a checkpoint at the end of every corridor) become even more blindingly obvious, as the games incredibly dumb AI kicks in…

Unlike most FPS games, Black Ops does not have a finite number of “baddies” whose asses need kicking. Instead, so long as you are barricaded behind any particular cover along the corridor in any of the levels, the bad guys will keep coming. Sort of like “Space Invaders,” if you get the drift. It doesn’t matter how many of them you shoot, so long as you don’t cover more ground and push forward, the enemy will keep coming. The fact that your teammates are useless aside, the game quickly gets incredibly tedious and boring as you realize that no thought went into to the design of the levels. Play it on the hardest difficulty and try to use strategy — you’ll realize the futility of it all soon enough. If you want to play by strategy instead of luck and are prepared to take your time advancing in order to do the job right, think again. Black Ops does not give you this option, forcing you to push forward in order to end the level. You cannot, I repeat, you cannot use strategy to kill the enemy from afar, because unless you push forward, the enemy will keep re-spawning right where you killed them.

Technical Issues

As if CoD Black Ops was not already a world of hurt due to the painfully stupid gameplay problems described above, the game is also plagued with a number of technical issues that make it impossible to even pretend to enjoy it:

• No multitasking support. If you get bored of the silly levels and badly designed gameplay and want to alt-tab to your web browser or music player, the game will hang, HANG, HANG when you go back. Apparently someone at Treyarch forgot that the PC version means there will be other programs running in the background, unlike on an XBOX or PS3.
• (Comparatively) bad graphics. It’s 2011 and we’ve come to expect more than what Black Ops is giving. The graphics on Black Ops are not noticeably better than what we had back in ’07, except that for some reason you get worse frame rates for equal graphics. Other games over the past 3 years have shown much better rendering and performance – I guess the recycling of the CoD engine over all these years without any real improvements is at last showing.
• No support for DVORAK. Even the simplest and silliest of full-screen games recognize and support the DVORAK keymap these days, but again, looks like Treyarch forgot that the PC is not an XBOX.
• Terribly designed and misthought-out UI for the main software. The initial menus were designed to be “cute” in that they appear from a first-person POV: you “look” at what you want and “click” to choose. Except Treyarch completely blew this one, even disregarding the fact that it’s hard to use and unintuitive, Treyarch gets a complete “fail” here when selecting certain menu options takes you back to a normal (read: sane) menu; flipping between menu entries requires you to repeatedly switch between FPS and normal mouse modes. Quite stupid, really.

All things considered, this game is definitely one of the worst that I have played in recent memory. Perhaps the fact that it was so heavily hyped beforehand is to blame, maybe if it came from an indie developer I’d have been more accepting of its shortcomings. But for a sequel to such an excellent series, one had higher expectations than what was delivered.

Final score: 4/10

We’ve compiled a list of our top highly-anticipated games for OS X, most of which are actually geared for simultaneous release on Windows and Mac, making it clear that Mac gamers will take a backseat no more. Honestly, we’re not going to bother ranking them or making this a “Top 10 Games for OS X this year” kind of article. This is just a geeky gamers’ list of games to look out for, on a Mac, soon. We’re not including games that were previously available on other platforms, because that’s just sad.

And, without further ado, here’s NeoSmart Technologies’ exclusive list of upcoming Mac OS X games, sorted by expected release date from the ones you can soonest get your grubby paws on to those you’ll have to not-so-patiently wait and pray for:

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Release Date: July 27, 2010
Platforms: Mac OS X and Windows

Set in the 26th century in a distant part of the Milky Way galaxy, the game is built around three species: the Terrans, human exiles from Earth; the Zerg, a race of insectoid genetic assimilators; and the Protoss, a species with vast psionic power. Wings of Liberty will focus on the Terrans specifically, while the expansions Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void will focus on the Zerg and Protoss, respectively. The game is expected to be set four years after the events of StarCraft: Brood War, and follow the exploits of Jim Raynor as he leads an insurgent group against the autocratic Terran Dominion. The game will include old characters from the original game, as well as introduce new characters and locations to the franchise.

Source: Wikipedia

You can watch trailers of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty on the Blizzard site here.

Pre-order Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty from Amazon for $59.99 with a lowest-price pre-order guarantee.

Civilization V
Developer: Firaxis Games
Release Date: September 2010
Platforms: Windows then OS X

Civilization V will feature an entirely new game engine scripted in Lua, as well as a hexagonal map instead of the square tiles of earlier games in the series. The combat system will also be overhauled, including allowing only one unit per tile and giving cities the ability to defend themselves. Many elements new to Civilization IV and its expansion packs will be removed or changed in the game, such as religion and espionage. In addition, the maps will contain a number of computer controlled city states as non-player characters that are available for trade, diplomacy and conquest. A civilization’s borders will also expand more realistically, favoring more productive terrain, and the concept of roads will be changed.

Source: Wikipedia

You can watch trailers of Civilization V here.

Pre-order Civilization V from Amazon for $49.99 with a lowest-price pre-order guarantee.

Nuclear Dawn
Developer: Firaxis Games
Release Date: October 2010
Platforms: Windows then OS X

Nuclear Dawn is an upcoming post-apocalyptic video game that blends the FPS and RTS genres. It was originally announced in February 2006 as an amateur mod for the Source engine, but in April 2009 was revealed to have become a commercial project, still using Source, aimed at Windows PCs and the Xbox 360. It is unclear whether a retail release is planned.
Nuclear Dawn joins Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Natural Selection, The Ship, They Hunger: Lost Souls and Garry’s Mod as former mods of Valve products that have become commercial projects.

Source: Wikipedia

You can watch trailers of Nuclear Dawn on YouTube here.

RAGE
Developer: id Software
Release Date: Jan 4, 2011
Platforms: Mac OS X and Windows

RAGE is an upcoming first-person shooter and racing video game in development by id Software. It will use the company’s new id Tech 5 engine. The game was announced on August 2, 2007 at QuakeCon. On the same day, a trailer for the game was released by Gametrailers.com.

Information available so far indicates that the game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world similar to that of films such as Mad Max 2. In an interview with GameSpot, designer Tim Willits revealed that the game is set in the near future following the impact of 99942 Apophis. Matthew J. Costello, who worked on the plot of Doom 3, is also working on the Rage plot. Influences on the driving and racing gameplay include games such as MotorStorm and Burnout, according to another Willits interview by Shacknews. Players will be able to upgrade their cars with money won from races.

Source: Wikipedia

You can watch trailers of RAGE on YouTube here.

Pre-order RAGE from Amazon for $59.99 with a lowest-price pre-order guarantee.

Portal 2
Developer: Valve Corporation
Release Date: TBA 2011
Platforms: Mac OS X and Windows

Portal 2 will continue to challenge the player by solving puzzles in test chambers within the Aperture Science Enrichment Center using the portal gun (the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device), a device that can create two portals connecting two surfaces across space. Players solve puzzles by using these portals to move unconventionally between rooms or to use the ability to fling objects or themselves across a distance. The functionality of the gun has not changed between the games, but within Portal 2, players can take advantage of the bleeding of other physical effects through the portals.

Game Informer identified two examples of this: one was the ability to use air currents created by a series of transport pneumatic tubes through a set of portal openings to push a turret over or to draw objects into the suction. The second example was to use the power of tractor beams through portals to bring Chell or other objects to otherwise inaccessible areas. The game also introduces special paint that can be used to impart certain physical effects to a surface (for example, one identified by Game Informer is an orange paint that when stepped on will impart high speed to the player). The player will be required to determine how to transport that paint to appropriate surfaces using portals in order to progress. This paint can also be applied to objects, such as the Weighted Storage Cube crates that affect their own physical nature. In addition to the Storage Cube, there are new types of portable objects that assist the player, including Redirection Cubes with mirrored, reflective surfaces, Aerial Faith Plates that can launch objects placed on them, and spherical Weighted Storage Balls, which made a brief appearance in the original game in one of the advanced chambers.

Source: Wikipedia

Diablo III
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Release Date: TBA
Platforms: Mac OS X and Windows

The game takes place in Sanctuary, the dark fantasy world of the Diablo series. This world was saved twenty years prior by a handful of unnamed heroes in Diablo II. Warriors that survived the onslaught of the armies of the Burning Hells have gone mad from their ordeals and it is up to a new generation of heroes to face the forces of evil threatening the world of Sanctuary. Players will have the opportunity to explore familiar settings such as Tristram.

The only confirmed NPC is Deckard Cain, who has appeared in both of the previous games. Cain’s journal on the official site brings the player up to speed on the events of the first two games. Diablo’s world map is composed primarily of two main continents with several small islands in the Northwest region.

Source: Wikipedia

You can watch trailers of Diablo III on YouTube here.

Pre-order Diablo III from Amazon for $59.99 with a lowest-price pre-order guarantee.

A November 2009 post on the Visual C++ Team Blog by Raman Sharma delved into the improvements Visual Studio 2010 was purported to have made to the “Find All References” feature of Visual Studio. This feature is a must-have for any developer in almost any language. As a project grows in size and complexity, it becomes a real chore to remember and locate exactly where a particular variable was defined – which is something that’s quite useful to know.

According to the VC++ blog post, VS2010 now uses a “speed-mode” by default to locate these references. It’s a bit less accurate in that it generates a lot of false positives, searching by name rather than by usage, but that this reduced accuracy comes with greater speed. And the option remains to further filter out results by having the compiler and the intellisense databases resolve the actual results and determine whether or not they indeed reference the search term.

Except that’s the way it’s supposed to work. In truth, that’s not what happens:

1) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” of Find All References is slower than it was in Visual Studio 2005.

2) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” not only generates extraneous false positives, it also fails to show items that do match the search term.

On any project of considerable size, “Find All References” will cause a hang of the Visual Studio 2010 user interface for up to a minute as it does nothing more than plain-text search for the selected variable or function. It blocks the main user thread, it hangs the UI, and it takes forever. Much longer than Visual Studio 2005/2008 did with its more accurate compiler-based variable references search.

And as for point 2, the time-lapse screenshot below (to show both the selection, the menu, and the resulting dialog) should speak louder and clearer than a thousand words.

(Click the image for a full-size screenshot)

Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2010 seems to be exemplifying the ongoing trend at Microsoft of slowly giving less and less attention to C++ developers as they continue to push .NET (now at version 4.0 and growing strongly) at the cost of everything else… while still refusing to embrace the .NET platform for their own technologies, leaving their once-content developer-base fighting against their own IDEs for life.

This is the first of several posts about Visual Studio 2010, it’s advantages, and its shortcomings. We love Visual Studio and despite everything else, its still the best IDE out there and a damn good one at that. But some things just need to be said in hopes that they will be addressed at some point in the future.

For the past year, Genie-Soft (my current employer) has been working on a revolutionary new — and free — backup program. Anyone that has ever searched for a professional backup solution has probably experienced firsthand just how difficult it can be to find something fast, powerful, and easy to use… and forget about being free, too.

Timeline 2 pushes the idea of “constant data protection” with real-time monitoring of changes to your data and intelligently scheduled backups of your files. You don’t schedule backups, they just happen in response to the modifications you make. You just run Timeline in the background, and you’re instantly protected. Files are versioned, clustered, and indexed then intelligently purged as needed to save space.

In geek terms, Timeline most-closely resembles a hybrid between version control systems and backup software. Like any good version control system, GTL keeps versions of all your old files, uses block-level differential backup for larger files such as PSTs, and tracks changes on the individual file level. But the entire process is automated and the all the capabilities and features are hidden behind an ostensibly simple GUI, with a web interface that lets you search all backed up data instantly.

Of course, this isn’t an unbiased recommendation: I’ve been part of the Timeline development team from and am responsible for some of the lower-level components. Over the past year, I’ve learned a lot designing and implementing some really incredible features in Timeline. Don’t let the simple interface fool you, there’s a lot of technology and sheer power under the hood… and this is what’s been keeping me busy.

Timeline 2.0 is available 100% for free, making it a must-have for any Windows users out there looking to protect their data. With the price of external disks at an all-time low and the value of digital data skyrocketing upwards, there’s no excuse to not have backups of your software. Especially now that it won’t even cost you a dime.

Download Genie Timeline 2.0 Free

Everyone at Genie-Soft has worked endlessly to make the Timeline experience as smooth and delightfully easy as possible. Of course, no software is perfect and while Genie Timeline may look deceivingly simple, it is incredibly complex under the hood. Please let us know what you think and share how your Timeline experience goes.

I have free licenses of Genie Timeline Pro to give away to feedback and comments on the software – but you need to install it and comment below to qualify. If you liked or didn’t like Timeline, share your notes here, tell us what you’d do with your copy of Pro, and get a free upgrade. Free licenses also available for incoming links. Genie Timeline Pro adds Disaster Recovery, advanced filters, encryption, purging, and advanced restore to an already powerful product.

Update (4/12/10):

The initial wave of free licenses is over. I still have several more licenses to give, but no guarantees…

Chrome 4.0 now shows the status of file uploads as a percentage, making it very clear just how quickly (or not) your uploads are progressing – and it’s something that all browsers should add ASAP. Many social websites rely heavily on uploads of photos, videos, music, and other files and are forced to implement nasty workarounds (such as using Flash upload forms) to present a more user-friendly upload system.

A screenshot of Chrome 4.0′s new upload progress indicator:

Chrome has quickly become our favorite browser at NST: it’s fast, light, and doesn’t get in the way.

The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.

Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:

You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.

We’re taking hundreds of screenshots of Windows 7 and its new features & components even as we’re posting this – keep your eyes peeled, they’ll be joining our extensive collection of Operating System screenshots in the same fashion as the Windows Vista screenshots were added: build-by-build with all the little details covered in true geek fashion.

Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.

We’re sorry to have to break it to you, but if you thought it was too good to be true you were right. Firefox still uses a lot of memory – way too much memory for a web browser.

We haven’t seen it reach 1GiB+ like we have with previous versions, but it’s quite normal for Firefox 3 to be sucking up ~300MiB of memory right off the bat, without a memory leak (the difference between memory leaks and normal memory abusage is that in a memory leak you’ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the browser is open/in-use).

This is a screenshot of Firefox’s memory usage after just a half hour or so with only a couple of HTML-only tabs open. This particular screenshot was taken on Linux where Firefox is using the shared GTK libraries – on our Windows PCs, it’s normal to find Firefox 3 taking up ~350MiB or so on both XP and Vista.

The sad thing is that isn’t caused by one of the memory leaks that plagued previous versions of Firefox. It’s Firefox 3 is supposed to take up that much memory – at least, that’s our assumption given how we’ve never seen it take up less.

Firefox 3 has a number of memory-hogging features added to the mix that are probably at least partially responsible for the absolutely gargantuan memory footprint. For example, Firefox now uses an SQL engine to keep track of your history and bookmarks, amongst other things. While that particular feature is powered by SQL-lite, which should – in theory – not take up too much memory, we’re at a loss to explain what else is wasting memory left, right, and center in the world’s most-popular open source web browser.

Things like full-text on-the-fly searching of the web cache for when you type text in the address bar certainly have an impact as well – that’s a lot of stuff to keep in memory at one time. But Opera 9.5 does the same with a lot less memory, so obviously Firefox 3 is doing something wrong.

It’s a shame that Firefox 3 is on the verge of a release and is so terribly unfit to run on any machine – Windows, Linux, or OS X – with less than at least a couple of gigabytes of memory.

We’ve long felt that Gmail’s approach was not befitting of the Web 2.0 service with all its sky-blue shades and flashy appearance – and now it seems that Google’s felt that way too.

Here’s the new loading interface… Subtle, simple, and effective:

(Click image to see more changes)
  

After all, first impressions are everything!

New Coverage

We’re pleased to welcome Kristan M. Kenney to the NeoSmart blogging team – most of our readers are probably already familiar with his previous contributions to the online community. Kristan will be providing a “different” perspective on tech happenings and further insight into certain aspects of the computer industry that we haven’t “delved deeply enough into,” for lack of a better expression.

New Content

It’s taken us a while, but both the Guides section and the Reviews section of NST are finally up and running. At the moment, the reviews is pretty empty (read: void of any and all content); but we’ve been working hard (thanks to our contributors) on some all-new guides:

• Installing Windows Vista
• Installing Windows XP
• Burning ISO Images
• Web Browser Guides for Beginners

The guides are intended to cover as wide a range of content and readers as possible – from the beginner to the expert. Where possible, each guide will have dedicated sections for the varying levels of involvement and/or difficulty (for instance, tweaking Firefox’s options via the available settings’ dialogs verses making advanced changes in about:config)

New Programs

At the end of the day, it seems that its our software that brings in the biggest share of attention, and here’s what we’re currently working on:

• Vista Hide ‘n Seek, a (free, of course) application that protects your Windows Vista System Restore points from corruption by Windows XP. Obligatory links: Screenshots, Beta download links.
• iReboot 1.1: an update to iReboot that works around Windows Vista’s non-negotiable blocking of all apps that require UAC elevation from running at startup. Download the beta.
• EasyBCD 2.0: it’s been a long time in the works, but rest assured, it’s coming along. No download links or screenshots for now…

Facebook

Last but not least, you’re all invited to join us on Facebook: NeoSmart Technologies Facebook Group.

Flickr is for photos. Scribd is for documents. Period… Or at least that’s the way it should be – theoretically.

So why is that so hard for people to get? Something about Scribd’s ease-of-use and flexibility has made people forget – and it looks like the people up top don’t seem to mind much, either. For instance, “i LOVE Milla Jovovich,” a group with over 1500 photos pretending to be documents was one of today’s “Featured Groups” on the Scribd homepage.

But the thing is, Scribd isn’t only not intended for photos, it’s not optimized for photos either. Users are uploading photos as PDF documents – unnecessarily increasing their size and limiting the photos’ usages. It has limited tagging options, doesn’t support any form of EXIF implementations, and offers all the wrong tools.

What Scribd is good for is full-text searching of documents and essays, downloading a file uploaded in multiple formats – regardless of the initial implementation, playing back text as audio, and more. It makes it easy to view documents quickly and easily with their Flash-based reader instead of forcing the users to double-check that they have Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat installed on the PC they’re currently using. In short, it web-enables content that isn’t already natively supported by browsers – and that’s not something that photos need.

Photos are already natively supported by just about every browser on the planet. You embed them, you play them, you save them, and you share them. You don’t need a special program to view them, nor do you need to worry about different proprietary formats and codecs. They just work.

So what is it about Scribd that makes people flock to it instead of Flicrk, even when the latter is so much more enticing when it comes to photo-based options and features? Well, it’s not too difficult to find out.

• Scribd is 100% free. No limits on file size and no “Pro” accounts.
• Scribd doesn’t require you to register. This may sound stupid since it’s just a click away and doesn’t cost a thing, but a lot of people hate to have to go through the whole process of signing up for an @yahoo.com email just to get access to Flickr. Scribd doesn’t even block you from doing things just because you’re not registered – you can do anything real users can!
• Scribd has the sexiest uploader(s) on the planet. With a Flash, Java, HTML, and ActiveX interfaces to make uploading multiple files simultaneously straight-forward and oh so easy, that’s another reason to snub Flickr and its primitive upload interfaces.
• Scribd has great SEO and SEO tracking. Just click in the sidebar to see a map of user visits to your site, search result rankings, and indexing activity.

So what’s a site to do when it’s too popular for its own good? Not that the Scribd admins seem to mind, of course, but seriously?

When Scribd first kicked off, pretty much no one realized what a gold mine sharing text could be. A lot of people wrote it off as something only academics and geeks would use – and they turned out to be quite wrong. People love to read, and they love to share. Combine that with an incredibly flexible system, and you’ve got a killer service.

Our opinion? Give it six months or so, and Scribd will give in to popular demand and provide a more comprehensive & full-range of media options that will do away with all pretense and fully support both text and photos.

The symptoms include incredibly-slow internet access, inability to access certain domains, slow logon times, slow application launch times (under GNOME), and so on and so forth. There hasn’t been any official acknowledgement, but the consensus is that it’s a bug that’s re-surfaced from Ubuntu Edgy Eft (version 6.10).

In short, internet on Ubuntu is useless. There are multiple guides across the net with the solution along with an “explanation” we find to be inadequate and fundamentally flawed. The solution is to disable anything that even smells remotely of IPv6. Remove it from the network settings, remove the definitions from the hosts file, configure your favorite web browser to pretend it doesn’t exist, and you’ll get your internet back.

The explanation, that some will give you, is that Ubuntu 7.10 is configured with IPv6 as the default interface, and if you’re on an IPv4-only network (like 99% of the world’s population) Ubuntu will waste time trying the IPv6 network connection before using the internet-enabled IPv4 connection.

But this is nonsense, because it simply doesn’t explain why it takes so long for Ubuntu to make the switch (from 10 seconds to infinity) and absolutely ignores the fact that Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn worked just fine with IPv6 enabled – as does Windows Vista for that matter.

The problem is that Ubuntu thinks IPv6 has a proper, working internet connection and attempts to use it, even if you’re on an IPv4 network.

If the routing rules were correctly done, Ubuntu shouldn’t have a problem sending IPv4 packets over the IPv4 network, and IPv6 packets over an IPv6 connection. But obviously that is not the case. It shouldn’t matter what is set as the “default” (there is no such thing, really) network connection, Ubuntu should connect ASAP and without all this nonsense.

The bottom line is, Gutsy Gibbon’s TCP-stack is broken and we have yet to see a real fix. Disabling IPv6 is nothing more than a stop-gap solution, and is the completely wrong way to go about doing it. If anything, it makes the general techie wary of IPv6… and that’s not something you want to do, when IPv6 adoption rates are already so absolutely dismal.

All this raises a really important question: what is it with modern operating system releases being RTM’d before they’re really ready? From Vista to Gutsy Gibbon to Leopard, something is definitely wrong. If you haven’t already made the switch to Gutsy Gibbon, stay with Feisty until the next version comes out.

So what’s going on? We’ve downloaded the current release (which, by the way, is not compatible with the old one, you must uninstall then install the new version) and checked the version number on \Windows\System32\inetsrv\fcgiext.dll – it came out to be 6.1.36.1.

By contrast, the version we downloaded and installed a month ago (which seems to have been dubbed the Go Live release) was checked and found to be 7.0.6001.16606.

Obviously the Go Live release was using the numbering from the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 releases, but it’s got us confused.

You can find a timeline of the FastCGI module’s development and milestone cycle  Mike Volodarsky (Microsoft IIS developer)’s blog – but it makes no mention whatsoever of the October 10th 2007 release.

What has most perplexed isn’t the lack of a complete release schedule nor the conflicting version numbers – those are easy. As with most other applications, the latest is greatest – end of story. For us, the problem is that the RTM FastCGI module is less stable than the Go Live release from last month. This is real bad new, because the FastCGI module has been awesome and most invaluable tool when it comes to deploying certain buggy open-source modules on Windows.

Our experience with the RTM FastCGI module has not been all bad – performance has been slightly (as in < 1 req/seq) improved. But upgrading is a PITA and the RTM module wouldn’t abide by the configuration file the first time we installed it – to the extent that it served our PHP files as plain-text, a HUGE security no-no. But then we deleted the configuration file and started from scratch and everything was OK…

But then the FastCGI processes started to balk and quit, requests were timing out too fast (despite using the same configuration file directives), and rapid-fail protection was being engaged far too often.

It seems that the timeout syntax has reverted to the original semantics of the earlier releases prior to the Tech Previews, where the ActivityTimeout will kick in even the RequestTimeout hasn’t yet been reached…. But we’re not certain.

At the moment our problems seem to have been sorted out (by raising all the limits in our configuration file by a lot) but, of course, everything has its price. We’re hoping that raising the timeouts won’t induce and instability or end up with FastCGI module unable to detect a hanged process – but only time will tell.

In the meantime, if you’re running the October 2007 release (which, by the way, we cannot seem to locate any more) you should probably hold off upgrading for a week or two until things get sorted out.

The Microsoft [[MSFT]] FastCGI module for IIS 5.1, 6, and 7 (with Windows Vista and Server 2008) have been in the works for quite a while now, and we’ve been using them since the first beta release – they’re good. While the biggest benefit will be seen in using FastCGI w/ IIS7 to take advantage of the new kernel-mode caching, it’s still a huge improvement over the old way of running scripting engines for languages like PHP on Windows.

The Problem: Most open-source scripting engines like PHP and Ruby on Rails were initially developed on/for the *nix world. On Unix-based platforms, the easiest way of creating multi-threaded applications is just to run the same app twice or more (The CGI model). On Windows, that doesn’t work out so well, because it takes a lot more resources to create another process. So these engines released Windows-specific single-process multi-threaded engines; the only problem was, they weren’t stable. Too many race conditions in some very non-thread-safe code wreaked havoc on many Windows systems, with the PHP developers themselves giving “Stability on IIS” the lowest level of concern.

The Solution: Enter Microsoft’s FastCGI module. It’s a multi-threaded service that creates several processes of the scripting engine and keeps them running thereby eliminating the overhead of creating new processes and also letting you use non-thread-safe binaries without a fear in the world.

Despite all the bad press Microsoft seems to be getting these days from the open source community, even when they do things right, the IIS team has really outdone itself with this project. The benchmarks are quite amazing, and the team seems to genuinely care about pleasing open-source users on the Windows world. While PHP/Zend has released supposedly thread-safe PHP binaries, we’ve been using them here on NeoSmart Technologies for a while, and though they are much better, we’ve still had the occasional access violation error w/ a exit code indicating it was caused by non-thread-safe code.

While most servers running PHP are also running a Unix-based operating system, it’s always good to have a choice. After all, there are quite a few projects out there that require Windows-based servers, have some PHP scripts they’d like to run (the fact that it’s the most popular language for all those highly-used packages should be a clue), and can’t afford another to shell out the cost of another *nix machine. And, as the open-source community would say, it’s all about having as many choices as possible.

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