Why can't there be a simple patch which enables the XP firewall for all connections ??

MartinSp — Tue, 04 May 2004 20:01:00 GMT

Now that XP SP2 has been pushed back. Why can't there be a simple patch which enables the XP firewall for all connections ?? Make sure all the media knows that the patch is there and get people protected. That should help all the home users who seem to vunerable to all the viruses.

Just a thought, as I amazed that worms like this are still able to cause so much havoc over 3 weeks after the patch has been released.

Just for clarity, I always run winupdate, and keep my system up to date. The firewall issue I am talking about is merely, that it is ridiculous that XP has a tool to stop a lot these attacks but by default is not enabled.

I installed Suse 9 under VMWARE, check for updates resulted in 55mb of downloads !!

Nature of blogging, community and dotNetWeblogs

MartinSp — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 11:03:00 GMT

I was reading the posts from Eli Robillard, Randy Holloway and the reference Randy gave to Cameron Purdy . This made me think about the meaning of teams, community and the purpose of blogging. I find dotNetWeblogs a community and not a set of yes men or robots who follow a party line. You do find critcal comments here. You do see people wanting changes to products. It is a group people who have varying interest in .Net but also have lives outside IT, which they also reflect in their blogs.

I find it interesting that there is now a longhorn bloggers site. If I am not mistaken the goal is that the blog entry are to be stored on the site and all blog entries must be directly related to Longhorn. The PDCBloggers.Net web site takes a different approach and simply creates a main feed based on the different blog entries on registered blog feeds. If you take the longhornbloggers approach to it's logical conclusion then I should have different blogs for each of my different interests. I assumed that was why we had categories. That is why I much prefer the PDCBloggers approach.

I know that there have been many blog entries about the "noise to signel" ratio on the dotnetweblogs feed. But I think the beauty of blogs is the totally unpredictable nature of their content. Ok, it is a bit of a Pandora's box but that is freedom of expression. Sometimes an entry is highly technical and sometimes it is simply a personal opinion. I subscribe to the blog entries from all around the web. I use them as an indicator of what people are thinking about at present and what is important. Using them as a technical resource is something that I view very much as an added bonus. Naturally I often learn some very interesting important technical tidbits that I would otherwise never find. For me this is a concern as there are many people who have never heard of blogging and aggregators simply have no idea of this information even exists.

As for the comment from Cameron Purdy that a large number of the .Net blogs are from Microsoft people who are trying to given illusion of a .Net community. Which seems to imply there is no .Net community. There were .Net blogs before anyone from Microsoft started and the dotnetweblogs blogger community was not started by Microsoft. I think it is great to have Microsoft people blogging, you can put names to the PM's in different groups, you can contact them or add comments to their blog. This possiblility simpley did not exist earlier. The same with the BEA, IBM or Sun/Java blogs. Some of them may be marketing and some have deep technical content but you soon decide which blogs are worth reading and which ones are not.

OTT:Dr Who to return to tv

MartinSp — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 10:36:00 GMT

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/26/doctor.who.reut/index.html

I know this is off topic and I am sure to non english readers this means nothing. But I grew up watching Dr Who, even though like many people I often had to watch from behind the sofa,

So this is big news, if you grew up during the 70's in England.

Martin Spedding's Blog : Non Dotnet

Why can't there be a simple patch which enables the XP firewall for all connections ??

Nature of blogging, community and dotNetWeblogs

OTT:Dr Who to return to tv