Rants Tagged with “Windows”
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I am copying a video file across my wireless network (though this particular machine is kinda flaky, so it might not be Vista's fault) but I thought this was funny:
This blog post may seem to be a clever way of increasing my web traffic but the fact is that I am growing frustrated with the adoption of Vista and Microsoft's general under-delivering on Vista.
The big caveat is this: I use Vista and really like it. I don't have any real problems (no driver issues) and I find that gaming performance close enough to XP that I can't tell the difference. In addition, I like the new UX sheen of Vista...so why do I ask if its the new Windows ME?
Vista has a bad name in the community. Some is perception (bad press==bad experience), some of it is real (driver issues for machines not pre-installed are bad....often really bad), and the 64-bit story is just painful. UAC is similar to how Ubuntu implemented root protection, but bothers people more than most Linux distributions (with my limited experience).
In addition, Microsoft seems to be ignoring much of the bad user experience. Trying to pretend a SP1 wasn't coming out just didn't make any sense to me. The "Vista Ultimate Extras" premium and non-delivery of anything interesting (bit-locker is of interest mostly to corporate environments but was touted as an "Ultimate", and Dreamscene is a cool trick for demo's but isn't interesting for everyday use). After being caught not delivering anything new in 'Ultimate Extras', Microsoft promised to deliver something by the end of summer (2 days and counting) and nothing is to be seen.
So while I think Vista is a good OS, it seems an abject failure from the perspective of users. Will it become the punch-line to jokes that Windows ME is? I don't know. Maybe SP1 will do to Vista what SP2 did to XP (make it a grown-up OS), or will downgrades that Microsoft is supplying to people that buy machines with Vista be its death knell?
I don't know, but I am watching closely to find out...
What do you think?
I wasn't surprised to see thsi story on CNet as I wondered whether this would be the case as far back as 2003:
http://wildermuth.com/2003/10/29/Been_a_busy_couple_of_days.aspx
and again in 2006:
http://wildermuth.com/2006/06/05/Vista_Beta_and_Battery_Life.aspx
I hate to say I told you so...but...
I am in between meetings near the Microsoft Campus today and wanted a coffee so I headed to a nearby Starbucks. I wanted to check my e-mail, ut I had given up my T-Mobile account (at $40/month) because there is so much free wireless in my neighborhood. I wrestled with spending $10 for a day pass just to check e-mail when I noticed that Vista users would get a free trial to T-Mobile hotspots.
I took the trial and I got a free month of access. No credit card required (so no nasty...trial, but we'll bill you if you forget to cancel nonsense). I did have to install an ActiveX component to check to see if IE7/Vista was in use. Voila...free e-mail checking...
I was setting up my new laptop with Vista today and it looks like everything is finally installed, except my fonts. So I opened the Font folder and picked, "Add New Font". This is what I saw:
While it is certainly skinned with Vista, this is the same font dialog that i've been using since '95 or perhaps 3.1. I love the Drives dropdown and the Network button. I wonder how much ancient code is still in Vista? Anyone notice others?
In response to a question on MSDN, I crufted up a really simple SideBar gadget for Vista using WPF/E as the user interface. (It just shows a simple animation when first added to the bar). SideBar (and perhaps Live) Gadgets are likely to be a fun place to use WPF/E. You can download and install it here (assuming you already have WPF/E runtime installed:
WPFE Sample Gadget
As reported on
Ian Griffith's Blog, Kenny Kerr has released an excellent program to take screenshots on Vista. The problem has been with Aero Glass and not wanting to take a picture of the window underneath, but retaining the Aero look and feel. It allows you to take a clean screenshot of a window (and its parent) including the shadow effect. Just wonderful...
In this blog entry by James Kyton, he talks about the next versions of Windows (Fiji and Vienna...in that order). Fuji seems to be Vista 1.1 as it is adding features that were dropped. Of most interest to me is the fact that the WinFS name is rearing is head again. The article states that for Fiji:
"WinFS will be applied over NTFS to give us Virtual Folders (or maybe just Saved Searches)"
And for Vienna:
"WinFS (or its sucessor) will replace NTFS. No more drives, or files/folders location to worry about. File Management will be done through applications, which will automaticlly index and sort the files they support."
No timeframes were mentioned, but I've been waiting for WinFS since Cairo was announced so I am not holding my breath. It still seems to me that creating WinFS by using SQL Server technology makes sense, but until row-level security in the SQL Server engine is supported I don't see how that will happen.
What do you think?
UPDATE: Fixed mispelling of Fiji. Thanks whoever pointed it out.
I thought I'd mention a problem I had with my new Vista installation.
I have a separate partion for my data, so when I upgrade to Vista I didn't do a clean format of the entire drive, but just did a clean install of Vista. Works great!
The only exception was that I did not have permission to access, modify or delete some files on my data drive. I am an administrator, what do you mean I don't have permission? After googling the problem, I discovered that the owner of these few wierd files was an unknown entity. To fix it, I used the Advanced button the security tab of the file/folder properties to change the owner to my admin account. Once I had the ownership, it was as simple as adding the appropriate permissions.
Works great now.
Interestingly Windows Media Player 11's visualizations in Vista don't seem to be Video Hardware accellerated. While I understand that Windows Media Player 11 needs to be backwards compatible, it does make the visualizations looks ugly compared with the rest of the OS. Hopefully they'll change that for Vista RTM, but for now that are just plain ugly (and CPU hogs).
