OT: XP SP2 Security Hole

[Bill Vermillion]

Transpower at aol.com, the prominent pundit, on Sat, Oct 02 11:19  while half 
mumbling half-witicized: 

> One positive thing about XP SP2:? I installed it several days
> ago and I must say that my computer (specifically disk reads
> and writes) appears to be much faster than with SP1.

Appearances can be deceiving.  In other words, do you have any
benchmarks you ran before and after.  I do that on disk systems
and save the results in the Unix servers.

I also learned when working in audio that you have to be very very
exacting when doing testing, and then perform A/B/X testing when
you are comparing new equipment or making modifications to existing
equipment.

Failure to do so can lead you >think< the modifications made
and improvement when in reality they may have made no imprrovement
at all.

We actually got good enough and objective enough to be able to
tell without the X and just doing A/B.  [That was another engineer
and myself].

When demonstrating this to others [manager and owner] they could
not always hear what we were talking about, but when we were 
in doubt A/B/X showed that our impressions were correct.

When you are making changes to the monitoring systems in a
recording studio you must be sure that you almost follow the
hippocratic oath and 'Do no harm'.

In short - oftentimes when you expect things to be better they seem
to be better - while in many cases they aren't.

I'll reserve judgement until after I install XP2. I figure in
another month or so most of the big gotcha's will be found.

The plus side of XP2 is that it is supposed to be completely
reversible, which are far more than some of the patches that MS
had put out in the past - pariticularly in regard to hard disk
drivers.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com