Nasty Bite From the Apple

Apple have gone bonkers. They have changed their developers license to make sure that Flash can’t run on iphone, itouch and ipad devices. Do they really have it in for Adobe Flash or are they just trying to hide the possibility that they’re going to launch their own software in competition to Flash, or maybe their devices will run really slowly if they were to support Flash?

Considering that Flash is on 98% of all desktop computers and most of the best or most visited websites use Flash this is very strange behaviour exhibited by Apple.

But you know what, I don’t care! Why? Because I don’t own any Apple kit. I never have done and I’m not sure if I ever will. You see, Apple produce fashionable portable devices and I’m not one to follow fashion, especially if it looks far better than it actually performs as far as features are concerned. (I admit the UI is good but the rest of the world is catching up – seen Windows 7 Mobile?) And denying i(pod|pad|touch) users the ability to tap into Flash is denying them a fair bit of functionality. But do the users really care? Probably not since millions of people have already spoken with their wallets.

Windows 2008 Hyper-V or Volume Shadow Copy Bug Part II

Following on from the problem I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, this is definitely a bug in Windows. From what we’ve been told it’s an inheritary, built-in limitation with VSS that prevents it from cleaning up after itself once 9,999 snapshots have been created. Therefore it only manifests if your server has created that many snapshots, so the explanation goes.

Now, not many people run snapshots frequently enough to encounter the problem but since our servers are running a backup every 30 minutes and there are 14 VHDs connected to Hyper-V we would run into the problem in just 15 days. That’s the explanation we were given but that doesn’t explain why after cleaning up the registry using devnodeclean and chkreg the registry will immediately start to bloat during the next backup. Hmmm. And we encountered symptoms (freezing) only after the first week – that’s less than 9999 snapshots. Hmm.

I’m hoping the engineers investigating this can come up with a permanent fix very soon.