November 2006

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.

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.

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.