Just remembered to disable Adobe’s updater on my new-ish Windows install.

The PC functions through a set of complex interactions between hardware and software. It may be surprising to learn that the operating system is often incapable of controlling the computer’s hardware by itself. In a sense, the operating system needs an interpreter to talk to the hardware. The interpreter that the operating system uses to talk to a specific piece of hardware is called a driver. Manufacturers often release newer versions of drivers in order to leverage their hardware more efficiently, fix bugs, or to improve performance.

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When Windows XP was released in 2001, it was not foreseen that specialized hard drive controllers for a new generation of hard drives would become the norm. As IDE died its slow death, the rise of SATA prevented the venerable floppy drive from going with it. While Vista accepts CDs and flash drives containing SATA drivers, XP recognizes only the dreaded floppy. Adding insult to injury, those lucky few who have a drive and the appropriate disk are met with scores of updates once Windows is installed. Pleasantly, there is a solution to these common irritations known as “slipstreaming.”

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Yesterday we reported (with a dash of meme and a bucket of hyperbole) on Opera’s new anti-trust suit against Microsoft, which seeks to have alternative browsers (like Opera) bundled with Windows instead of just Internet Explorer. At issue is not just market share, but also whether IE’s rendering of web pages is deficient.

It also seems to have made the W3G’s CSS working group explode, and it renewed fundamental questions about the future of the Internet. Everyone grab a flashlight; this rabbit hole goes deep. If you already understand the browser wars, WaSP, and the W3C (does anyone?), you can skip the next two paragraphs of background.

The Netscape vs. Microsoft browser war in the mid-’90s drove many web developers to the end of their wits. Each browser adopted its own way of rendering web pages and each used special code that the other didn’t. The result was a lot of “This page best viewed in…” cop-outs and bad user experiences. This frustration culminated in the Web Standards Project, which sought to wrangle all browsers to agree upon a standard.

The W3C (led by Tim Berners-Lee) is the international vanguard of World Wide Web standards (like HTML, which tells a browser the structure of a web page’s content, and CSS, which tells it how to style the content). Its working groups update and improve the standards, and the idea is that they will decide how to advance the standards in a way that lets all browsers maintain equivalent support for them.

Of particular interest today is the CSS working group (WG), which consists of corporate representatives and operates privately. After Opera’s announcement, a member of the CSS WG let fly a blog post naming it the CSS Unworking Group and calling on the W3C to dissolve the current group and reform it openly with additional non-corporate members. He says this of Opera’s latest action:

It calls into question whether or not their representatives can, or are allowed by their employers to work together with their competitors in a spirit of cooperation. It calls into question the fundamental basis on which the CSS Working Group has operated up until this point. I suggest that Opera’s action now makes the CSS Working Group unworkable and that immediate and sweeping changes are necessary.

The day after that, Mozilla’s representative to the CSS WG publicly declared that he would no longer participate in closed sessions of the group.

Some have gone beyond calling for a reform of the working group. Alex Russell posted a message titled “the W3C can’t save us,” in which he says the standards process is fundamentally broken. In fact, his position is that we aren’t much better off than before the Standards movement:

Try teaching a good programmer without a web background to build anything reasonably sophisticated with web technologies today. Doing so will teach you painfully, embarrassingly that there are huge tracts of the HTML, CSS, and DOM specs that you simply can’t use. IE’s bugs combined with its market share conspire to ensure that’s true, and we wouldn’t get off the hook should IE 8 magically transform into a perfect reference implementation. Mozilla, Opera, and Safari all have their own warts as we get to the edges of what’s theoretically possible with current specs. And that’s not even taking into account how utterly wrong, broken, and silent the specs are in several key areas. Even if the specs were great, we’d still be gated by the adoption of new renderers.

What he seeks instead is for a return to browser war-style competition for new features, with the W3C cleaning up behind everyone and rounding off the specs after they are created. His view of the working group is that it is a forum for Adobe and Microsoft (among others) to stall the standards until the browsers have surpassed them, pointing out Adobe’s Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight as jockeying to supplant HTML with their proprietary format (though each company denies it).

The dustup has only escalated from there, as noted in the update at the end of Alex’s piece.

The CSS WG was already buzzing with tension, and Opera’s action seems to have kicked it hard enough that it can no longer be contained.

Thanks to Daring Fireball, where I picked up the trail.

I shouldn’t be so cynical, but I haven’t had my morning coffee yet. Service Packs actually are a big deal, and many people use Office 2007 (or various components thereof) for their daily bread. One important thing that got fixed was problems with large PSTs in Outlook 2007. Of course there is the whole slew of bug fixes, performance updates, security updates, and other arcana, which you can read about in the SP1 white paper (.docx format only). Happy downloading!

The BioShock v1.1 patch hit the webternets today. Check it out here.

Google has updated the popular Java Gmail Mobile application, adding support for mail searching along with a new data usage method that speeds up transfer.

LifeHacker provides the details.

New Zunes are hitting the market.

http://www.mozilla.org

Time to update again.

Coming six weeks after the last update, Mozilla has released the newest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.7. This update does not add any additional functions or features. It does fix a critical flaw found by Petko D. Petkov. This flaw exploits a Code Execution via Apple’s Quick-Time media links. The flaw could, theoretically, be used to install malicious code, steal data, or corrupt system files.

If you are bored, you can read Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2007-28 for more details.

Minor firmware update quietly makes its way to PS3 fixing things only Sony Knows about.

Reports of a malicious spam email purportedly coming from update@microsoft.com with “MS07-0065 – Critical Update” in the subject line have surfaced today. According to The Inquirer, it’s a nasty trojan that should be avoided. You have been warned.

Substantial PS3 update enables 1080p upscaling of games and movies.