Vermyndax vermyndax

It just occurred to me while I was visiting the Thinking Chamber earlier today:

If the big three tech companies were characters in Back to the Future, they would be…

Microsoft == Biff

Apple == Marty McFly

Google == Doc Brown

For some bizarre reason, the thought at the top of my head last night at bedtime was… “I wonder if sometimes… open source developers deliberately code bugs or withhold fixes for financial gain?”

If you don’t follow what I mean, here’s where I was: often times, large corporations or benefactors will offer a code fix bounty or developmental funding for an open source project they have come to rely upon.  What if an open source developer were to deliberately code a bug into an open source project or withhold a fix so they might extract some financial support with this method?

  <dd class="wp-caption-dd zemanta-img-attribution" style="font-size: 0.8em;">
    Image by <a href="http://www.daylife.com/source/Getty_Images">Getty Images</a> via <a href="http://www.daylife.com">Daylife</a>
  </dd>
</dl>

One of the industry buzzwords that needs to go to the grave is the user “experience.”

Don’t quote me here, but I recall this buzzword being developed by Microsoft as part of the marketing campaign behind Windows XP.  XP was supposed to be “experience” or “expert” or “Xtra stuPid marketing,” I’m not sure.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an XP hater.  But I’m definitely a hater of the term “experience.”

  <dd class="wp-caption-dd zemanta-img-attribution" style="font-size: 0.8em;">
    Image via <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com">CrunchBase</a>
  </dd>
</dl>

At WWDC 2009, I stood up in a session on Snow Leopard server and lightly rattled Apple‘s cage about its poor scaling guidance for the product. They were spending a great deal of time talking about the benefits of Wiki Server 2, but there was little to take away from the session on what to tell any prospective customers regarding cost.

  <dd class="wp-caption-dd zemanta-img-attribution" style="font-size: 0.8em;">
    Image via <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com">CrunchBase</a>
  </dd>
</dl>

Paul Thurrott posted a nice attaboy to the MSN folks today for releasing a wallpaper product that will check Microsoft for updates to your operating system.

(note: the following is a stream of consciousness post regarding some software requirements as i dream them up.  if you are a developer and actually take up these requirements as the design for a software project, please let me know.  if you are aware of a software product that accomplishes all of this, please do not bother to let me know about it.  i don’t care.  fact is, nothing on the market today does this well enough to make me care about it the way i want to care about it.)

  <dd class="wp-caption-dd zemanta-img-attribution" style="font-size:0.8em">
    Image via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:User_Account_Control_administrator_dialog.png">Wikipedia</a>
  </dd>
</dl>

So, I don’t mean to continue to rail on Vista like I did about a year ago, but something absolutely ridiculous happened to me today.

I’ve been doing some hard drive recovery for my dad’s old NEC Windows 98 system. (I had to do some recovery on another system as well, but that one didn’t go so well).

I’m all about negativity today. Sorry.

Anyway, I’ve had something nagging at me for a while now and I think I’ve just figured it out. Powershell is Microsoft‘s answer to having a dumb command line through the Win95 – Win2003 years and it’s quite powerful, as the name implies. Microsoft likes it so much that they makes most of the Exchange 2007 administration efforts in the Exchange Management Shell, a derivative of Powershell that contains Exchange-specific cmdlets.

One item you’ve probably learned by now if you’re an Exchange admin working on a 2007 deployment is that Microsoft has changed the behavior of the recipient update policy.  Most of you won’t care about this and that’s just fine.  You shouldn’t.  I would dare say that if your Exchange environment is engineered well and planned out the way Microsoft probably expects it to be, you should have almost no issues whatsoever.

Continuing my recent tradition of expressing what are likely to be fairly unpopular opinions with my peers, tonight I’m going to rag on Google‘s “Chrome” project and tell you why this is a Bad Idea ™.  I’ll try to keep this short (update: I failed).  This is considered to be a discussion starter, not a final statement.  I’ll probably elaborate on these discussion points on the next NO CARRIER, so be sure and give me some feedback here.