How the mighty have fallen.

There was a day when Kazaa was the must-have file-sharing program for anyone interested in digital music. It helped launch the file-sharing and digital music revolution. It forever changed the way that people treated their music.

Then recently, it was named the leading pest on the Internet by Computer Associates, who own Pest Patrol anti-spyware software. Computer Associates call Kazaa the leading pest not only because the software is bundled with spyware, but because of its high “clot factor” — in the words of Computer Associates “how much a pest ‘gums up’ a machine by adding registry entries, files, and directories,” and so slows a PC down.

How bad is Kazaa? How does about 70 unnecessary Registry entries sound to you? You can get more details in the Kazaa entry on the Computer Associates Spyware Information Center.

The truth is, Kazaa was always a pest, even while it let you share files with others. It always installed spyware on your system, but because it also offered benefits, people were willing to overlook that it. So Kazaa was a pioneer in both spyware and file-sharing. In fact, it was many people’s first brush with spyware.

All in all, I think computing history will treat Kazaa badly. It wasn’t the first file-sharing application, and not even the first big one, because Napster came before it, and had a larger influence than it ever did. But because of the massive number of people who have Kazaa on their computers, and the big spyware payload it carries, it will probably have done more than any other program to spread spyware and pests.

And all for the sake of sharing music. There must be a better way.

What do you think of Kazaa? Let me know.

Hello! This is my first weblog entry for O’Reilly. I am going to be posting items regarding Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 and general observations about Operations Management. I am particularly interested in watching the development of the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) over the next 18 months. I expect large changes in the managability of MS server platforms as a whole.

I am authoring a book on MOM 2005 now for O’Reilly and am having a blast. I look forward to conversations with readers of my blog on the topic of MOM, System Center and DSI.

Thanks O’Reilly for this opportunity!

Chris

Every once in a while, you read a news story about the tech world that stops you cold.

Here’s one that hit me this week: “Air Force turns to Microsoft for network security.”

The CNet news story noted that Microsoft has signed a five-year, $500 million deal with the Air Force for 525,000 licenses to Windows and Office, and, in the words of the article, to also “work with the Air Force to define security configurations for the agency’s desktop and servers.”

Let me get this straight - the company that can’t plug holes in its browser, or stop worms from crawling through Outlook, is going to provide security for the U.S. Air Force? The same U.S. Air Force that has all those bombs and missiles and nuclear weapons, and that has enough firepower to destroy the world over who knows how many times?

I recently rented the Cold War classic black comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” and I have to admit that the idea of Microsoft providing security for the Air Force is as frightening that movie’s Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, ranting about the Commies desire to taint our “precious bodily fluids,” and then sending dozens of bombers on a nuclear strike of Russia.

Let’s update the movie with today’s news. Imagine this: A technician notices a blip on a Windows-based radar screen that may be an incoming missile heading straight for Washington, D.C.. Where’s it coming from? Who fired it? Is it a missile or a flock of geese? He clicks with his mouse to try get more information. Windows freezes.

He has to reboot. So he waits…and…waits…and waits.

I can see the headline now: “System Freeze Leads to Nuclear War.”

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase “Blue Screen of Death,” doesn’t it?

Does the idea of Microsoft providing security for the U.S. Air Force make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Let me know.

Firefox will always be a superior to Internet Explorer, even if Microsoft eventually decides to modernize its browser with features like tabbed browsing.

That’s because Firefox opens up the browser to the collective intelligence of the entire Internet, something that Microsoft will never do. And the collective intelligence of the Internet trumps Microsoft programmers every time.

Let me be specific. One of Firefox’s niftiest little features is its built-in Google search box in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Type in a search term, press Enter, and you do a Google search.

Even better, you can add any search engine or site to the box - Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, encyclopedias…pretty much any site or search engine on the Internet.

Firefox comes with a few of these search engines built in, but you can add more by clicking the down arrow to the left of the search box, choosing Add Engines, and you’ll come to a site that will let you add any of hundreds of search engines via search plug-ins.

Here’s what’s best about those plug-ins: Anyone can write one, and then have it posted on the search engine plug-in site. It doesn’t take programming experience. Public documentation provides a quick start.

Using it, my 14-year-old son Gabe wrote a search plug-in that lets you search WindowsDevCenter from inside Firefox. Download this Zip file, unzip it and put it into the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins folder. (That’s assuming that you used the default folder for Firefox installation.) Then restart Firefox, and you’ll be able to choose the WindowsDevCenter search engine from the drop-down list to the left of the search box.

Firefox extensions are another example of collective intelligence applied to the browser. It’s tougher to write an extension than a search plug-in, but it’s not killer programming, and so people have written dozens or hundreds of these useful extensions. And more keep coming all the time. (For more information about extensions, see Using Extensions in Firefox .)

Firefox builds on the collective creativity of the Internet, and it’s very unlikely that Microsoft will ever open up its browser in the same way that Firefox has. And because of that, Firefox will always be at least a step ahead of IE.

What do you think of Firefox search plug-ins and extensions? Let us know.

The official 1.0 release of Firefox is finally here, and it holds no surprises. It remains the best browser out there.

But here’s hoping that the release is a beginning, not an end. Firefox is still a work in progress, and there’s a lot that needs to be done if it is ever to gain serious market share from Internet Explorer.

The biggest issue is beyond Firefox’s direct control: integration with other software. An entire industry has sprung up around writing programs that work directly with Internet Explorer, and if they don’t work with Firefox, the game’s over.

To take the most obvious and recent example, Google Desktop will only search through pages you visit with Internet Explorer, not Firefox or any other browser. And other software, like the superb Web research tool Onfolio, integrate directly with Internet Explorer, but not Firefox or other browsers.

People simply won’t give up their browser if it won’t work with other software they use all day.

There are signs, though, that fixes to the problem may be on the way. The next version of Onfolio, for example, is slated to work from directly within Firefox. And the Mozilla Foundation has said it is exploring ways to make sure that Firefox integrates with Google Desktop, and a host of other similar desktop search tools coming to a PC near you.

But there are things that need to be fixed in Firefox as well. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the browser is that when a new version is released, even a minor upgrade, your existing extensions won’t work. They all need to be rewritten. I regularly use more than half-a-dozen extensions, and not a single one of them works after the upgrade to Firefox 1.0. And none of them have yet been updated.

It can also use a better cookie manager, which is rather rudimentary, and not as good as Internet Explorer’s. And its download manager is also anemic.

So let’s hope that Firefox 1.0 is just the beginning. Microsoft has apparently given up on browser technology, and so the for the future of the browser, turn to Firefox .

What do you think needs to be done to Firefox to improve it? Let me know.

Related link: http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2004/11/08/liberty.html

In ASP.NET 2.0, a great deal of the ADO.NET object model has been incorporated into controls that let you interact with data declaratively, and that spare you from writing boilerplate code to create data sets, extract tables, bind tables or views to controls, and so forth. In this article, you’ll create a simple Windows form that lets you page through the details of the Orders table from the Northwind database and then create Master/Detail pages without writing a single line of code!

Microsoft continues to take its browser dominance for granted, and it’s starting to get spanked as a result.

The market share of Internet Explorer has been slipping since June, and the latest figures show that the decline continues. According to the firm WebSideStory, IE was used by 95.5 percent of all users in June, 93.7 percent of all users in September, and 92.9 percent in October.

Mozilla and Firefox have been taking away Microsoft’s market share. Their use grew to 6 percent in October, up from 5.2 percent in September and 3.5 percent in June. October’s six percent was split evenly between Mozilla and Firefox.

Expect Firefox’s numbers to go up even more, as the final official release hits on November 9. The Mozilla Foundation has also raised over $250,000 in donations, which it will use to promote use of Firefox. Firefox has already been downloaded over 7 million times.

It’s true that Internet Explorer still dominates the Web, but years ago, Netscape similarly dominated, until it was flattened by Internet Explorer. IE beat out Netscape not because of Microsoft’s marketing muscle (although that certainly helped), but because it was simply a better browser.

But Firefox is a far superior browser to Explorer - it’s safer, faster, smaller, and includes modern features like tabbed browsing, as well as extensions.

It’s hard to know why Microsoft has allowed IE to stagnate. And it’s good to see that users are getting the message that there’s a better browser out there, and are turning to Firefox.

If you haven’t tried Firefox yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. Because of Microsoft’s laziness, it’s the best browser out there.

What do you think about IE? What about Firefox? Let me know.