Last night I attended the MacBU WWDC 2007 reception. It was quite the party. I met the new GM of MacBU, Craig Eisler. He’s a very energetic fellow. One fo the MacBU devs described him as “kinetic.” That’s probably accurate.
We spoke a little bit about issues with Entourage that plague our mail system, but I turned the conversation to something a little more positive. He was one of the first DirectX developers back in the Windows 95 days. That made him a hero for me. It was great to meet him.
Paul Thurrott has said numerous times in his blog and on the Windows Weekly podcast that he feels that Linux does not innovate.
This is a pretty broad statement and I find myself in violent disagreement.
Whenever I install a Linux distribution to play with… which is usually how it always ends up, since I run into issues… I find myself installing and using software that I wish would be running on Windows or the Mac. I often find myself saying… “Self… why doesn’t the (such and such) platform have an app like this?”
Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus – A technology blog
On this post, Paul Thurrott points out the install base of Windows Vista is 40 million strong… so sayeth Bill Gates. Despite all of the negative press, Vista has a strong presence in the industry and is already installed on more machines than non-Microsoft products.
I echo Paul… “I get it.” However, what no one is able to measure unfortunately, is how many people are uninstalling Vista to roll back to XP or another operating system. Reporting that sales of Vista is 40 million strong does not mean that there are 40 million PCs using it. Every day, I read posts about people trying to weather Vista and failing.
There’s a monster post on the Exchange blog about problems with assigning delegates and/or updating distribution list memberships from the Outlook client.
I can say that we’ve definitely suffered from some of the goofy issues in this article. One item they do not cover is that as a general rule, you should not be assigning more than 4 delegates to your mailbox if you can help it. All too often, people use the delegation feature to work through a business process that can be solved with simple sharing permissions.
The hot post today that has the blogosphere churning is this essay by Paul Graham entitled “Microsoft is Dead.”
I like the way the author of this post has just suddenly realized that Microsoft’s business model is in trouble. I had an epiphany much like this while I was in the very den of the mothership itself. While standing on the third floor of building 25 in Microsoft’s Redmond campus… fighting with their products to get some test data put through on our… unusual deployment of their products… came the word that Apple went Intel. That’s when I had the epiphany: Microsoft is toast. Thus begins their slow, painful demise as people wake up to the innovations happening elsewhere. Microsoft’s lack of supporting standards and their blind eye toward security… combined with failing in just about every endeavour except Windows and Office… was finally starting to do them in.
There’s an enlightening and interesting article up on InformationWeek discussing the Leopard server product. It’s basically a guy who headed out to the sites covering public information on Leopard server and summarized it. It’s still a good read. My favorite piece? Clustering for email and iCal servers!
One thing the author did mention is that while it’s compelling for SMB, Leopard server isn’t shaping up to be an enterprise-bound powerhouse. I would agree in that respect, but I diverge away from this when he declares that Apple just clearly isn’t aiming for this market.
My motivational transportation has sprung a leak and suffered a flat. I’m at work, but could give a damn if I get anything done. The weather is too nice outside. I’ve not been able to shake the sleepy haze this morning and I have a tinge of a headache. It’s one of those headaches that you get when your assbone digs into the fluff of your chair so much that it starts to harm your circulation and you feel minor little spasms in the back of your head. Top that off with being quite hungry and knowing that you have several meetings to attend in the afternoon, it makes for a flat tire.
It’s pretty sad when you title a blog post just so you can jog your memory about what you’re going to say, just in case you go onto a long-winded schpeal (sp).
Okie, if you’re an Exchange admin – particularly an Exchange admin – even more particular an Exchange admin of a large enterprise – if you’ve not been paying attention to the disaster that Satan doth bring upon you known as Daylight Saving Time 2007, you should be fired from your job. You should be setting expectations of your users right now. Their calendars are toast, friends. Toast. Those three weeks during the delta period, they are toast.
I’ve already been asked my opinion 3 times on Vista – once by a power user and twice by “typical home users” who are eying some low-cost computer out there with Vista running on 512mb of RAM.
No, that’s not a typo.
I’m going to start pointing people to this URL, where I heartily recommend they run screaming from Vista and get a Mac.
I will also note that since I will not be going Vista and I’m getting off the Windows bus, I will not be supporting friends and family who get Vista, then expect my help when it screws up. Sorry.
So the negative spin last night and this morning on Vista is Microsoft’s decision to enforce the notion of the “upgrade version.” You cannot install Windows Vista without Windows 2000 or XP already installed on the system. This bucks the previous process of installing Windows from scratch, but proving you own the prior version by inserting the disc for verification.
I’m going to go on record as saying I don’t like this – not one damn bit, but I saw it coming. Given the “smackdown” mentality Microsoft has gotten themselves into, this was just a natural evolution. They’re merely enforcing what the license terms say should happen. One item you might want to be aware of though – when reading the Vista EULA… once you install the Vista upgrade, the Vista rights/EULA completely supersedes all licensing agreements for the previous version. This means you essentially lose your rights to even install the prior version of Windows ever again.
