LscTecForum

Just when you thought it was safe to catch your breath, they send another ton of super-hyped information technology down the pipe. 

I followed the launch of vista and office 2007 through the beta, release candidate, pre-release, post release, etc.  I went to the launch (wasn’t a launch actually).  I downloaded and installed vista and I am using it as my main office desktop.

 Why?  Not because I love or even am fond of Micro$oft.  I actually hate the company and just about everything they stand for.  I do it because I am sure to have to support this wreck of an os, so I had better get cracking.

What do I think of it?  Well, for starters, it is not exactly what you would call a racehorse.  Those of you that know anything about horses will probably know what I mean by “glue-grade”.  Copying files from a network drive used to be quick, but now it is completely confused.  Remote Desktop client has some weird ideas about authentication (enhanced security?  I don’t think so.)  Device drivers for the sound card on my hand-me-down pc were available in beta form.  Had to download the beta then there was a time ‘bomb’ on the driver (creative labs, what were you thinking???).  Thirty days later, skype can’t open because the sound card driver is no longer permitted to run.  I go to the site and download it again.  This time it says that I don’t have a sound card.  what a step up.

Out of the box with no third party software I can’t burn an ISO file to a disk using the built in dvd burning software.  I can only do it from a command prompt.  I should have stayed in the DOS world!

I can’t run my vmware virtualization software on this operating system.  Only Microsoft’s Virtual PC works (they are busy trying to put vmware out of business, just like they killed Novell, Netscape, Apple, WordPerfect, Borland, etc.)  It looks to me like one of the primary reasons they create anything “new” (I use the word loosely), is to kill any competing product. 

 Here are the plusses: you get a cool looking interface stolen from Macintosh, the Operating system (finally) protects itself better from sentient torpid universally pedantic IT destructive users.

They get an email from their buddy with a link to go to dancinghamsters.com “I want to see the cute dancing hamster on my desktop…”  They get a warning telling them that “www.dancinghamsters.com is attempting to install “cutespyware.exe” on their computer.  Do wish to continue? Yes…No….Cancel….Of course, I want to see the dancing hamsters! So I will install “cutespware.exe”.   Plus, I forward the message on to all of my best buddies so that they, too, can have a dancing hamster.

Not too much later, you get a phone call (”my browser works really slow”.  “I can’t get the web page to load that I need for my job.” “I was just working along and then everything just froze up….”) 

From the standpoint of the operating system, you have to re-learn how to do all the stuff you knew how to do in the last operating system again.  how to find files (at least they took the “cute” puppy that was going to help you out.  How many of us really enjoyed “Clippy”, the paper-clip assistant?)

Instead of the above scenario, with vista you can’t install the software unless you are an administrator.  Everytime something like this happens, the screen goes dark, then there is a flash and a warning the user that something is up.  click OK to continue…..

This is more or less stolen directly from unix/linux, but with more bells and whistles.  So while you are initially setting up the OS and installing software, it looks as though there is a bit of a thunderstorm happening on your PC as it flashes the warnings.

 So now we are getting calls from people to try out office 2007 and windows vista.  The way we are going to do it is by creating a virtual pc’s with vista, office 2007, all the browser plugins for IE7 (another enhanced menu-less product.  Go and relearn what you already knew.  A giant leap forward!  (where is chairman mao when we need him?), antivirus, etc.  The great thing about virtualization is that before, you only had one Operating system running at a time.  Now you can support two or more operating systems on one computer.  Double the support calls, double the work, double the fun!!!

Microsoft has decided that the menu system that has worked so well for the last 20 years with CUA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access

is no good.  Now we are going to have to use the “ribbon” to access various features.  The funny thing about this is that at the product “pre-launch”, they mentioned that the ‘ribbon’ would not be used in Outlook 2007, since that product received some good reviews regarding its useability.  So they decided to take a good thing and make it better by eliminating it. Am I the only one that is saying “DUH?”

We have a number of locally developed apps here, one called ***** (I don’t dare name it for fear of reprisal) that is kind of an abomination with strange menus, weird convoluted data screens, totally strange and unique keyboard “shortcuts”.  When I gave it a whirl on VISTA, it croaked rather quietly.

Turns out vista can fool it into thinking that it is running on windows 2000, but only if you run it entirely from a local drive.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that windows still uses drive letters, unlike other systems that let you have more than 26 places to store your files.  I heard they were trying really hard at MS to re-do the file system but ran out of time.  Maybe they need some help with stealing that system from another operating system?  Netware did not need drive letters, linux/unix does not need drive letters, mac’s do not need drive letters… Anyway, it is a comfort to see that Microsoft remembered to keep that ‘feature’

Oh, did I also mention that microsoft still uses file extensions to identify the type of file? So if you don’t add an extension to the file name the operating system can’t simply look at the contents and launch the appropriate application.

But (thanks at least in part to Microsoft’s Marketing department) we do have ribbons.