Everything that’s wrong with Windows Server 2008

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Trundle over to the Microsoft Download Center and download the Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster.

Now I have the rather lovely Epson 4880 A2 printer. And I really don’t think it’s big enough for this monster.

And if you ever wanted a clearer demonstration of what’s broken with the Microsoft server model for businesses, one glance at this will tell you all you need to know.

Just ask yourself this question – who actually understands this stuff? All of it?

Microsoft makes good on OneCare subscriptions

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Kudos to Microsoft. A year ago, I was very critical of the software giant for shutting down its rather good pay-for security product called OneCare and replacing it with a free service codenamed Morro.

This has now launched as Microsoft Security Essentials, and whilst it is a very cut-down version of OneCare, it clearly works well. My annoyance was not that Microsoft was launching a free service – cheaper is better and free is best – but I was worried about what would happen to those who had paid the annual subscription to OneCare?

Would they get dumped down onto MSE, or would work on OneCare stop? At the time, Microsoft said that OneCare customers would be looked after fully through the term of their subscription. I was sceptical, based on previous performance from software companies, including Microsoft, who have taken the easy and cheap solution of quietly dropping the product. (more…)

Office 2010 launch date

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

So the word doing the rounds is that Office 2010 will launch in June 2010. There are two immediate observations that can be made about this. Either Microsoft expects to be finished early, and June is a convenient marker for all the marketing activity to start. Or it will ship in June almost irrespective of the quality of the code.

Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place on this. So many thousands of people inside the company are working towards this launch, and it’s not only the desktop application coders and testers – Office 2010 reaches into all areas of Microsoft’s server and cloud technology.

(more…)

Microsoft’s XPS missing in action?

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Somebody reminded me about the XPS format from Microsoft. This is the XML Paper Specification thing which Microsoft released to be a spoiler to PDF.

Now, I must confess I find Adobe’s pricing model evil. And the PDF format can operate in weird and wonderful ways. But for most people, most of the time, PDF works very well indeed. There was no need for XPS, when Microsoft announced it. There’s still no need for XPS, and I doubt there ever will be a need for XPS.

It has been around for a while now, so you would think it would have gained traction? Out of sheer naughtiness, I visited Microsoft’s homepage and searched for “XPS”, returning 154,000 hits. Search for PDF: 582,000 hits.

(more…)

Your iPhone has a virus? Well it’s your fault

Monday, November 9th, 2009

So anyone who has hacked their iPhone now finds it open to attack. There is one word to describe this – “excellent”. I am extremely pleased that this has come about. I am delighted that people who have hacked their iPhone are now under attack. (more…)

No Windows 7 drivers turn Dell M1330 into a doorstop

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

At last year’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference), Microsoft handed out shiny new laptops preloaded with the then-new build of Windows 7 to the press corps. It ensured that no-one would get hung-up on installation issues, because each machine was ready to go. Plus it gave the press a machine each to try the various beta builds as it progressed.

I confess that mine stayed in its bag, because I preferred to test both in virtual machines and on my own known hardware. But over the weekend, I was tempted to unpack the laptop and try it with final Windows 7 code.

The laptop is pretty decent — a Dell XPS M1330 with a big battery, 4GB of ram and a decent hard disk. Quite a good workhorse, I think you would agree.

So this morning, in went the Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit DVD. Naturally, I decided to wipe the hard disk and start again from scratch. Once the install was done, there was a bunch of things to download from the Microsoft website via the Windows Update service.

(more…)

Windows 7: the licensing mess continues

Monday, October 19th, 2009

There’s a fabulous new document on Microsoft TechNet entitled “The 10 Things to Do First for Windows 7″, which is an excellent checklist on what you need to think about doing in your organisation before you move to Windows 7.

I was particularly thrilled to read “Section 3: Plow through licensing”.

Now maybe I am just being a stick-in-the-mud, and I accept it is a Monday morning and I have a headache, but my headache is made worse by reading this:

(more…)

The perils of auto-patching

Friday, October 16th, 2009

I have a rackmounted server in a data center some 50 miles away from me in Huntingdon. It’s a lights-out operation, and I can’t remember the last time I visited the server in person. Everything just works through Terminal Services.

The server has been humming along quite happily for a number of years, which is why it’s running Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, sez I.

With such a remote server, you have a hard choice to make – do you set it to auto-update when Microsoft issues new patches, or do you bring them down to a local machine, check them out and then apply them yourself, preferably waiting a few days to see if others have problems?

Well, I would always advocate a managed patch implementation for a local network – it can dramatically reduce the download of updates to multiple identical machines, and gives you, the sysadmin, control over when updates are applied. This can be critically important to the business workflow, of course.
(more…)

The shame of Microsoft’s Media Center EULA

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

For reasons too boring to relate, I just had to fire up a Windows Media Center installation on an HP touchscreen device – the one that comes with every bell and whistle, and is actually quite a nice box.

In going through the TV setup for a DVB-T TV tuner which is built into the device, you get to this glorious licence screen. There are a half-dozen lines of text in that box, and then sixty-nine, yes SIXTY-NINE pages to scroll through. It’s 67 pages if you maximise the window to full screen on this large, high-res display. (more…)

Making sense of Microsoft’s downgrade rights

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Trying to work out Microsoft’s licensing policies is enough to make a grown man (or woman) cry. You always seem to be in a maze of twisty passages, all alike, and it’s hard to know whether what you are doing is actually legally correct.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Microsoft will not understand the pain and cost it imposes on its customers until it actually has to run software licensing internally. I accept that the development groups can be let off, because they are constantly installing and uninstalling beta versions of their software. Or running up the Serbo Croation version to check a typo. But the marketing arms of Microsoft have absolutely no excuses - they should run licensing and pay internally in exactly the same way that we do. If that happened, then I predict there would be massive simplication within months.

(more…)