Vista Vista, how do we count the ways?

OK, so now that Vista is released to the world, licensing apparently has reached a whole new level of pain-in-the-assness.

As a software developer, we use lots of different flavors of Microsoft OS’s and we’re given our development licensing through MSDN subscriptions.

Each and every PC that we’ve purchased has an XP license, albeit of the retail flavor.

We don’t use the retail license we have, it’s too big a pain in the butt every time a developer pooches a machine. So we install the volume license flavor because activation isn’t an issue.

The reality is, we have more licenses. More actual licenses than we use. If you count a retail license for every machine, plus all the MSDN subscriptions, plus our participation in the MS Certified partner program. You could audit us any day of the week and we have fewer licenses ‘IN USE’ than we actually have.

We do turn and burn machines on a fairly frequent basis, not to mention the all of the virtual PC’s our developers use. If we didn’t use the VL flavor, and had to jump through activation/deactivation hoops every time we installed we’d probably all be using Macs by now.

This has got to get better. If the OS is too cumbersome to install, activate, deactivate and manage, then we’re hosed.

The article below talks about a potential solution, but still I don’t want be ‘limited’ in the number of times I can do this and I shouldn’t be.

Consumer Vista licensing confusing? Check out the biz licensing by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley — If you think the consumer Windows Vista licensing terms are confusing, the business licensing ones are even more complicated.

Written by datapoohbah on November 29th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Commentary and IT and The Truth Hurts.

Office 2007 is a sloth.

A big fat harry sloth.

After playing with the Beta’s I was somewhat excited. Somewhat…

It seems they took a reasonable interface and made it something that is simply cumbersome, and as confusing as hell to use when it comes to things like Word 2007.

Excel isn’t so bad.

But Outlook 2007? It’s the pits, not the interface, that’s mostly unchanged, but damn is it slow.

During the beta’s I just kept telling myself; “Hey, it’s beta, it’s bloated with debug code and what not, it has to get better”. Boy was I wrong.

I have a pretty snazzy Dell D820 running XP with 2 gigs of RAM, a 7200 rpm hard drive and Outlook 2007 simply sucks.

I’ve done some digging on the web and tried a few tips and tricks to speed it up, all to no avail.

Words to describe Outlook: slow, apathetic, dilatory, heavy, fat, snaillike, dallying, laggard, and sluggish. I’m going to hang with it for a bit, but if something doesn’t break soon, I will have to roll back.

Perhaps it’s Windows search which is killing my whole machine, even though I’ve pretty much suspended indexing until I’m nowhere near it.

If you know what I’m talking about and have a fix, please comment.

Written by datapoohbah on November 28th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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Kuler [ adobe Labs ] Wow

Wow,

Not sure when this was released or how I missed it. But this is pretty much the ultimate color/theme tool.

FREE at http://kuler.adobe.com/

Simply wow.

Written by datapoohbah on November 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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Truer words were never spoke. [PS3 | Wii]

VGCats hit the nail on the head here.

I simply don’t understand all of the hubbub.

The Christmas selling season, aka Black Friday, the day after thanksgiving, isn’t a secret. It hasn’t been a secret as long as I’ve been alive.

There are a couple of issues, people seemed hell bent to compare the two systems and they cater to completely different markets. Certainly if you can’t get one you’d probably take the other.

In fact I will probably own both in due time, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay over inflated prices simply because the manufacture can’t deliver the quantity.

Obviously I’m part of the minority as there were 300+ people outside our closest BestBuy to try and get a handful of each. Prices on ebay are also amazing.

But neither Sony, nor Nintendo earns any points from me for not having enough of these in the channel.

It’s simply ridiculous.

Written by datapoohbah on November 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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Vista released into the Wild.

Umpteen flavors of Microsoft Vista were released to manufacturing. So it won’t be long before you’ll be begging for new and faster hardware.

The Office family of products is also out and about. I already feel for all of you that were running the beta. Uninstalling and reinstalling Office 2007 was (and still is) unbearable.

Written by datapoohbah on November 17th, 2006 with no comments.
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Microsoft, IE7, via Windows Update [TODAY] Gee, thanks.

OK, so everyone was well aware of the impending doom.

Microsoft is going to distribute Internet Explorer version 7 via windows update. If you haven’t had your head in the sand you knew Microsoft had told us to have your blocking measures in place by November 1st.

Now typically Microsoft releases patches and updates on ‘Patch Tuesday’ and the bulk on the second Tuesday of the month. In this case that would be November 14th.

As much as I tried to confirm with anyone and everyone at Microsoft that Nov 14th was the day, I couldn’t. All said, “That’s what we’re led to believe”.
Well guess what? Today, November 2nd is the day. IE 7 is a HIGH PRIORITY UPDATE.

What the hell? There is nothing HIGH PRIORITY about this.

Given some recent internet statistics on IE7 adoption vs FireFox 2.0 adoption, maybe this is the only way they can play catch up.

While I haven’t found IE7 to be too hateful, it does break a few things around here and we’ve made some adjustments to accommodate for that.

I simply do not understand the need to release this today, on a non regular schedule patch day as a HIGH PRIORITY release.

It’s a damn good thing we have this blocked or all hell would be breaking loose.

Written by datapoohbah on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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