Preview pane ...
... hasn't the standard advice for that last thousand years been to turn OFF the preview pane?
December's Patch Tuesday brought seven bulletins from Microsoft, five of which cover critical security vulnerabilities. A critical update for MS Word (MS12-079) is rated by security watchers as the most important of the batch. A flaw in Rich Text Format (RTF) processing poses a severe risk because Microsoft Outlook …
This post has been deleted by its author
In many cases, this is not advice, but company policy. It seems that as this feature has been exploited many times in many ways that it should have been more a focus for hardening than it seems to have been over the years. Making the preview pane use plain text by default would be a good start.
Together with the patches they also rolled out their Windows Management Framework, also known as PowerShell 3.0, for Windows 7.
That by itself is of course good news; a new version of PowerShell can be quite useful since it introduces several new features and makes other aspects easier to use, also for new users.
UNFORTUNATELY.... PowerShell is like Unix in some way; you really need the manual or help section around to use as quick reference. 2.0 did a pretty good job IMO because a default help screen gives you a good information overview while commandline parameters allow you to get everything (-Detailed) or simply a bunch of examples (-Examples).
PowerShell 3 otoh now introduces localized help screens. So; say you're on a Dutch version of Windows, then your "UICulture" will be set to "nl-NL", thus making PowerShell look for the help section in the "nl-NL" directory (found in the PowerShell system directory).
Just too bad there there currently is no such thing as a localized Dutch help section. And to make matters worse; PowerShell also does not provide any features what so ever to tell its help system (the "Get-Help" cmdlet) not to look in "nl-NL" but use the default (and in my case preferred) en-US instead.
So the only way to overcome this is either manually copying your help stuff from one locale directory into the other, or device a work around (script) which temporarily hacks your UICulture settings (which is kinda flakey).
Everything seems to be going to pieces with Windows as of late, totally unsatisfying. And PowerShell used to be so good.... :-(
I tried the latest patches on one of my PC's to see if a reboot is required. And, it is. Another weekend of updates and reboots to waste my time.
When U$oft marketing departments compare the TCO of Microsoft against alternative systems this is one metric they leave out.
My Linux platforms seldom need a reboot and, even if they do, they don't put an in-your-face dialogue box in the middle of the screen every 10 minutes. Why don't Microsoft realise that in a busy company later means much later.
This anger is compounded if Adobe decides to offer it's fixes at the same time. Not only do their patches usually need a reboot but you have to watch out for pre-ticked boxes offering to install software from a company currently run by a desperado and which you do not want or need. Ditto Oracle/Java but at least you never need a reboot...
Arrggggggh!
New Kernel? You need to reboot. It may not tell you to do so, but you still need to.
As for rebooting a Windows box, if you don't rollout your updates via a push mechanism and then automatically reboot, while monitoring that the machines come back up, you're doing it wrong. The level of effort in rolling out an update which requires reboot should be select the group to update, send the update, make sure that they all come back, all while sitting in the same chair.
"Another critical update (MS12-077) tackles security bugs in Internet Explorer 9 and 10, and creates a risk of drive-by download attacks involving tricking users into visiting websites contaminated with malicious code."
Isn't there something wrong with that paragraph? The bugs, not the update, create the risk of drive-by download attacks.
By the way, Opera 12.11 has a bad bug that wants fixing. 12.12 is out very soon - release candidate is out now.