On Knowing

As we know
there are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say, we know there are some things
we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns
the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

On Thinking

Well, um, you know
something’s neither good nor bad
but thinking makes it so,
I suppose,
as Shakespeare said.

On Certainty

We do know
of certain knowledge
that he is either
in Afghanistan,
or in some other country,
or dead.

On Accuracy

If I said yes, that would then suggest that
that might
be the only place where it might be done
which would not be accurate,
necessarily accurate.
It might also not be inaccurate,
but I’m disinclined
to mislead anyone.

On Agreement

Secretary Powell and I agree
on every single issue that has ever been before this administration
except for those instances where
Colin’s still learning.

Thanks Donald, I feel much safer now.

This was inspired by All Things Considered, June 29, 2003; interview with Hart Seely about his book, Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.

Get ready to reboot all your XP, 2003 and 2000 systems.

Surprised? Ah, remember the lavish Windows 2000 launch parties when we were all told “rebooting will be a thing of the past” and “only six (kinds) of reboots will be necessary, down from six-hundred in NT4”.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but my point is that this is a major inconvenience in order to fix a minor convenience that most people aren’t even aware of in a large enterprise. It just gets uglier since we are looking at a reboot of critical services when they are supposed to be up all the time and generating revenue — who wants to tell management “we had to have a maintenance window this weekend because of some picture rendering code on the console”. Well, it has to be done.

So far we believe the update changes the following registry keys:

HKLM,”SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Hotfix\KB912919″
HKLM,”SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows XP\SP3\KB912919″

And the following files get touched:

Windows Server 2003 will replace Gdi32.dll
Windows XP will replace Gdi32.dll and Wgdi32.dll
Windows 2000 will replace Gdi32.dll and Mf3216.dll

Which makes me say…

Patch released early
safer code rolls out to disk-
  why must I reboot?

Note: Never rely on the registry keys alone for proof of a patch since someone could obviously stuff the registry…