My company hasn’t embraced Vista. We have been ordering Windows XP “downgrades” for months and staving off the inevitable as long as possible. Today I received in a machine that I needed to set up for engineering, and it came in with Visa Business. A mistake, but I figured as long as I had it here, I might as well mess around with it. So far I am not very impressed. There hasn’t been any crashing to speak of, so that much is good news, but annoyances abound, and many of the things I hated about XP are still there.

In an attempt to make Windows more secure, Microsoft has set Vista to pop up little warning messages that the user is supposed to review and “grant permission” by clicking a button every time they attempt to even review settings of any kind, let alone change them. [update: this is "User Access Control" and can be disabled in Control Panel | Users]. This is such a wrong headed approach to security. Anyone but the most nervous nelly user is quickly going to become so inured to the frequent confirmation dialog boxes that eventually they won’t read them at all and will instead just click OK in reflex every time one pops up, so the effectiveness of an annoyance like this quickly becomes essentially nill.

The machine is a brand new HP workstation 6600 with a (slightly) upgraded video card (nVidia NVS 290). Not the best graphics card around certainly, but it can run two DVI monitors at a decent res. and paints pretty quick. The 2D CAD program this machine will run flys on it. Even after ensuring that I had the correct monitor and video drivers, my “experience index” (a Microsoft hardware benchmark measurement of dubious merit) was only a 3.4. This is *supposed* to be enough to allow the machine to run Aero (the full blown Vista graphical user interface) in a somewhat reduced manner, but apparently isn’t since it doesn’t run it at all. I was looking forward to testing out the Windows Flip 3D. Oh well. [update: once I set a user as an administrator, the 3D flip worked. It's not as slick as the OSX method where (in the older 10.4 which I use) a mouse gesture makes all the windows shrink to tile on the desktop and you can see the whole window, not just the left edge and top edge as in Vista]

I managed to install OrCad (a PC board design / layout program) by tricking the installer into thinking it was running on XP (right click on setup, properties, compatibility mode) otherwise it just barfed that it was the wrong version of windows. This isn’t Microsoft’s fault, but seems silly that there is apparently no way for the OS to figure out what environment the program is looking for and just provide it. A human has to know to try this trick to get around it.

We use an old version of Symantec (Norton) Antivirus (v.8). It still gets virus definitions though, and it works on XP (mostly) and has a central quarantine and control server for the whole network, but it won’t run on Vista at all - you just get an unfriendly message (which seems to repeatedly pop up over and over again even when dismissed) that the driver is blocked due to incompatibility. So Windows knows that the driver will cause problems and has disallowed it, but there’s no solution provided? You would think that the *business* class Vista would have a solution for the most commonly deployed Antivirus program in the *business* world (Norton Corporate) even if it is a little old. It knew enough to know it wouldn’t work right, no?

It’s stupid to bitch about changes in the UI, I expected things would be in all new places. I was eventually able to find most of the things I wanted, but they were always hidden in stupid places where I wouldn’t think to go looking for them. There is no “Menu editor” like in Gnome to keep things organized, and for some reason the “control panel” is now a lot more like a pooly laid out webpage with a lot of lists. Clicking on things keeps opening up new windows (just like the old XP versions of these tools so I assume none of them were actually updated at all) everytime you click on something until you have a bunch of windows open which all look slightly different as you drill down toward what you really want - a simple friggin change in a setting!!! Not to mention the several “grant permissions” dialogs that will inevitably pop up to block your progress as you struggle through the morass of ill-design. The UI changed, but it didn’t get much cleaner or more organized. If anything, it’s even worse than it was! Yes, I can learn where are the old crap is hiding now (most of the dialogs haven’t really changed, just what you need to click on to get to them has), but it really seems like a poorly designed mess. To get the Run command back (which I think I use a zillion times a day), right click on Start and choose properties, then scroll down till you see the Run command and ensure it is checked.

The widgets. A poorly executed copy of Apple widgets. You can’t even put them on the desktop, they have to hang out in a dock? I don’t even use widgets on the Mac because they eat up memory and screen real estate and take time to load and in OSX they’re even easier to dismiss! I haven’t played with Vista’s widgets much yet, but they seemed half baked.

The start menu doesn’t have a pop-out function anymore. As you scroll up through the start menu list, when you get to a folder with links inside, the contents no longer pop out to the right, they load in the menu itself, which means the list you’re looking at changes making it difficult to find stuff at least until you realize what’s happening. The color differences in the default Vista basic theme don’t have enough contrast for me anyway. If you operate with the start menu alphabetized as I do, and you select a directory with a set of program icons within it, those programs suddenly appear in the middle of your nice list injecting a bunch of files right inside your otherwise alphabetized list.

You still have to reboot whenever you install programs or change the name of the PC, or join a domain, etc. Once you play with linux machines enough you begin to realize that rebooting a whole machine just because one service needs to be restarted after an install or a config change is really an annoyance we can all do without. It can take some new PCs a full 10 minutes to cycle off and on again - and some older machines take considerably longer. When you have to make that change or install that program enough times, all that wasted time begins to add up.

I didn’t have time to figure out what was happening yet, but Firefox (which is loaded through Active Directory automatically) can’t be set as the default browser. Everytime I re-opened Firefox I would get the warning that Firefox was no longer the default browser. I’d check the box to make it the default, but the next time I started it - same problem. Either Vista doesn’t allow Firefox to run as the default browser, or I’m missing a setting someplace. [update: that was a bug in Firefox 2.0 - fixed in 2.0.0.2. The one that gets installed over the AD policy was 2.0] I upgraded to 3.0.1.

[Next day]
Trying to install Adobe Pagemaker 6.5 was a nightmare. Yes, it’s an old Windows program with a 16-bit subsystem, but we have thousands of Pagemaker 6.5 docs and we can’t spend the time and effort to port them all to InDesign (the only other program in the world that can read them). Opening up the document in InDesign *will* create problems in the document that need to be resolved because the translation is not perfect - you lose words, things shift around a bit, styles get whacked. The initial error caused a cascade of errors which opened windows that I couldn’t close even in Task manager. Luckily I wasted some time writing this because eventually Vista realized I wasn’t getting anywhere trying to close these processes in task manager and cleaned up by itself. At least thats nice. I was finally able to install by using the same trick I used to get OrCad installed (setting compatibility on the setup.exe file in the _PM65 directory).

Of all things to have problems with, Adobe Acrobat Reader! Kept getting “Error 1406 - Could not write value UI (and value ENU_GUID) to key”. Turns out the installer wants to write a registry key and my domain admin account apparently doesn’t have high enough permissions to do it! I spent at least a half hour trying different versions, setting compatibility, moving the .exe to a TEMP folder to run from there, choosing “run as administrator” (which apparently means nothing since I kept getting the same error) before checking my account in User Accounts and seeing that my username was set as a “debugger user”. I had assumed my domain admin account would be able to do anything, but I guessed being a domain admin just isn’t swank enough for Vista. I set my account to be in the Administrators group and tried again with final (and exasperated) success.

Now struggling with simple things, like how to set a program to run automatically at start-up. I found the Windows Defender dialog window (Control Panel | Programs, but if you don’t click it there and actually click Programs, it’s called something else under another sub-menu called “Default Programs”, and you can only *stop* things from starting up). This is nicer than msconfig, but how to add a startup program? Still looking… OK, you can right click on the “Start Orb” and explore and drag and drop shortcuts into the Startup folder just like old times.

Annoyance: to log off, you can CTRL+ALT+DELETE, ALT+L like in the past, but if you are a mouse user, log off isn’t one of the main choices in the start menu, you have to click the little arrow to open a submenu first.

The real fun was just beginning. We have an Oracle 9i database and our ERP system needs to connect to it using the Oracle client. But the Oracle 9i client doesn’t work on Vista. I find in metalink 415166.1 that the Oracle client 10.0.2.3 should work (with patch 5860454). I grab those (huge) files and attempt to install. I end up having to turn off User Access Control (the only thing I actually think is a good security feature in Vista) so that the client can create directories inside the root C:\. Of course, my procedure for installing all this stuff (and the ERP system) doesn’t cover this client, and all the selections are different, and I can’t find the simplest things. This isn’t Vista’s fault, but I am on the upgrade mill now and it hurts. I ended up installing the whole kit and kaboodle Administration package from the 10g client just to get the net configuration assistant which is what I was looking for. I guess in future it would be easier to just figure out how to do this correctly

The ERP system installed OK. Setting environment variables took a few minutes to find the dialog box, but all the methods I’ve been using to connect this suite of programs through the Oracle client to the database works with the new 10g client fine.

Its been more than a year since I first wrote that Street View had quickly turned Google’s otherwise slick and useful 2D web-based mapping into a 3D street-level peep-show par excellance. Since then I’ve had an image in my mind of a white van with the Google logo on it cruising around imaging all those streets for some reason. I guess if I had been really interested I would have found some stories like this one that revealed early on that they were actually using a VW bug, but I didn’t know that. When I discovered a couple street view images with the car still in the image, I thought I had discovered some big secret…

Normally when you use Street View, if you click and hold the mouse and drag ap ( so that you can look down at the road surface) you’ll just see the road because they stitch the images together and remove the little black Bug photography vehicle from the image, but the other day I found a little section of Rt. 231 in Deer Park, LI which still had the vehicle image in it for some reason. Maybe they just got too busy taking pics of the Tour de France route to notice.

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I’ve been hearing from a guy at work over the years about Bill Gates’ philanthropy and how I shouldn’t be such a Microsoft-hater since he’s obviously such a good guy as a philanthropist. Today when I read that one of my heros Richard Stallman was asked by the BBC to write a column about Bill’s recent step down from M$ and that he was less than generous to old Billy boy, I had to do some investiGate-ing. Stallman’s article is mainly about how…

…the legacy of Microsoft is one of illegal monopoly for which they have been prosecuted and convicted three times (the second of which GW Bush let them off). If you missed the recent OOXML debacle at ISO, Stallman mentions that as well. The thing that got most people’s hackles up though was that Stallman referred to an LA Times investigation which suggests that Bill’s philanthropy is fairly self serving. The article claims that Gates foundation gives away *just enough* to avoid paying taxes, (it’s something more than 5%) in order to give AIDS medicine to people in Africa while investing 90% in oil companies that in some cases directly threaten the African population and pharmaceutical companies that are working (and lobbying) to keep medicine costs as high as possible in Africa. Currently the foundation has more money than the GDP of 70% of the world’s nations.

The article was slashdotted, and the normal back and forth ensued. Stallman was called a communist of course, but the greatest argument to the contrary was made by someone who, in broken English made the case that under the Soviets the people didn’t own the tools to do their work, that the tools were owned by the state - just like how you don’t own Windows or Photoshop, you lease them from the great corporate entity. The point being that Open Source software (which may or may not be free) is the only truly capitalist, free-market type of software. Microsoft is much more like the old Communists than Linux!

I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta on the Thinkpad (the machine running ubuntu) for about a month now, and I like it. It’s a lot faster than Firefox 2, which is certainly welcome since Ff2 isn’t even as fast as IE in my opinion, and since we’ve been standardized on Mozilla for many years at work, its been a common complaint (I really don’t care since we also haven’t had any virus problems in all these years either). Firefox 3 is due to be released in the next couple weeks, and if you’re already using Firefox, you might enjoy taking a look at what’s new in the next version. If you don’t use Firefox already, here’s a good time to try it out. The plugin architecture is fantastic, offering all sorts of neat addons that help you do the jobs you need to do, as well as blocking ads and malicious scripts.

Caveat: I have no hands-on with Microsoft’s Windows Vista as yet so I do not speak from experience really, on this topic. I attended one of those Microsoft Vista launching shin-digs at a swanky hotel before it’s release and was treated to it’s obvious eye-candy, and I’ve read a great deal about it - but have avoided specifying any new machines with Vista for work. I’ve bought at least 7 machines since Vista launched, so I had the opportunity to grab a copy, but really haven’t felt the need to ‘move my own cheese’ so to speak. However, it certainly appears that the anti-Vista sentiment is growing. More evidence of this landed in my inbox yesterday…

from Infoworld. InfoWorld was once a great trade magazine, but has since become online-only and I have to admit I don’t read them much anymore because of that. The upshot is that Microsoft has announced the end of OEM sales of Windows XP as June 30th of this year (some vendors get as long as Dec 31, 2009 to cut over), and InfoWorld is trying to get a petition going to Microsoft to Save XP and extend the product indefinitely, or at least until they have something people want to buy!

My gut reaction to the Microsoft Life Cycle policy for Windows XP is “meh”. When completely free alternatives exist that are just as good, and in many respects far superior to Windows why do we care? Besides who wants to be running an operating system that is no longer supported by updates and fixes?

I understand this is a problem for Microsoft - if no one in business wants to incur the (real) fiscal pain of moving to a new OS (for no good reason), or that new OS is crappy while the old one disappears, what IT guy that can get away with it won’t just load their old copy of XP on every new machine?

But the problems in business are not small - there is no way any of my aging hardware will support Vista in the first place, so Microsoft is telling me that not only do I have to face the real potential problems that there are no drivers for all my special hardware (chip burners, hasps, old ISA board-based telephony) *and* special software that may not run on Vista (if ever) that we use to run our business, but I also have to find enough cash to RE-buy all new PCs just to run this new OS!?

These problems all stem from the fact that Microsoft’s Windows is totally entrenched in business, and basically holds an effective monopoly position. They were already found guilty of this (twice! - once in Europe) and have been able to wiggle out of any serious penalties because of their buddy-buddy relationship with the current administration in the US, and by paying a pittance of a fine in Europe (please correct me here, I’m just going on memory).

I also feel just like a lot of non-Linux people feel when presented with a totally different OS. How do I get my stuff done? Where the hell is everything? Why do I have to completely relearn how to use a computer every 5 years? Linux has improved massively over time too, but with every release, I can still get to a command line and get things done just like I did in 1980 if I want.

I have no comfort level with Vista yet either, and I will have to buy a copy at some point (for work) so I can prepare, unless I can make a good case to swing over the entire company to Linux. With virtualization, I might be able to do just that and there is already some talk about it from one of our major VARs. Just run Linux and double click to run your Windows apps on a virtual machine - one copy of Windows all set up with all your Windows specific apps rolled out to the company.

The trouble with Windows for me is all the licensing bullshit. Coming from a Linux perspective, why do I have to keep paying for something I already bought many times over? I just don’t get it. I can see paying for software updates, or patches but I already bought the OS - can’t I use it how I want? No, they say, I didn’t buy it - I licensed it. Well, I don’t like that model that makes you rich and me unfree to do whatever I want with software I bought, and I will fight the good fight against it.

For years now many of us who regularly buy things online (or at least window shop online if you’ll pardon the pun) have spent some time time poking through websites and forums designed around enduser reviews of the products we’re interested in. For those of us who don’t have a Consumer Reports account, or find their reviews have become less rigorous over the years, there are a multitude of websites that cater to the natural human urge to not be ripped off. Now you’re beginning to see the customer review feedback right on the manufacturer’s own websites!

This would have been considered heresy a few years ago! What manufacturer would allow customers to post whatever they wanted about their products on the manufacturer’s own website? Certainly the only customers that would take time to post anything would be those who are are pissed off enough about something that didn’t work or didn’t live up to their expectations that they needed to vent their dissatisfaction, right? At least that’s what I suspect most manufacturers were (and probably still are) thinking.

Sites like Toms Hardware, CNET, epinions, and Amazon have built business models around regular folks contributing their opinions on the various products they sell. Depending on the number of reviews and how well they are written, you might stand a good chance of identifying a poor product or a good one thanks to the information these contributing users are kind enough to offer up. But the skeptic in me is always suspicious of all reviews and reads every one with a critical eye. At least I could imagine that since these sites often offer competing brands that they wouldn’t censor bad comments about one, since sales would just be slanted to the other brand.

Now the bigger manufacturers (at least in the computer industry) have decided to bring this customer reviewing process in-house, and display customer feedback right on their own webpages. I can only assume these posts are undergoing some form of moderation. I haven’t signed up as a reviewer on any site, so I can’t speak to the process itself. If you shop for a Dell or an Apple product today, you’ll see the stereotyical 5 star rating on the various products, just like Amazon has and be presented with a bevy of reviews by folks we are led to believe are real customers. If the reviewing process is now being hosted by the manufacturer, what assurance do I have that the bad reviews haven’t been suppressed, or that the good ones aren’t really by the manufacturer’s own engineers? We can’t assume a truly ‘independent’ review (like you might find on Consumer Reports) from the sites that sell multiple product lines, how can we assume anything like independence when the reviews are hosted right on the maker’s site?

I’d like to believe this is a great new day where manufacturers are finally realizing they can’t hide their bad products anyway, and want to harness this customer feedback data in order to drive real product improvement, but I’m just way too cynical to really believe that. It’s just a lot easier to data mine if you control the database. In any case, it’s an interesting development that manufacturers are beginning to harness the web technologies that drive successful web marketers like Amazon and other database driven, dynamic content, blog and forum-based sites.

In one of the more embarrassing Microsoft stories I’ve heard in a while, Computerworld is reporting that Microsoft has issued a warning that editing files stored on Microsoft’s Home Server using any of a bevy of Microsoft programs (and potentially many non-Microsoft programs) may corrupt those files! Home Server was Microsoft’s (inept, we find) response for the home and small business market to the growing popularity of NAS (network attached storage) for backing up the huge amount of digital detritus we are all accumulating.