On Friday, Microsoft announced that Longhorn would be titled short video that highlighted some of the great new features of this operating system (no new features listed in video). heh..
Apparently VISTA is an acronym for the top five features: Virses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans and Adware. 
heh.. Perhaps Microsoft felt it would put Windows on the level of the very stylish Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser.
Kidding aside, what does this new version of Windows provide over the 5 year old Windows XP? Basically it comes down to just a few items:
- Security Enhancements
- New Searching mechanism
- New laptop features (apparently for playing DVDs)
- Parental Controls
- Better Home Networking (they castrated home networking with the release of Windows XP Home)
- Eye Candy
Since this is my blog, I get to rant about each of these “features”..
security enhancements
A feature?!?! How about they setup the DEFAULT installation secure? Ie don’t make everyone an administrator. If they did this, then it would make developers really think about doing stupid stuff like writing to protected areas w/o checking (both file system and registry). Microsoft’s problem is not that they don’t have the security features built in, its just they elect not to use it and add a lot of cruft on top which is (from a IT standpoint) plain stupid.
New Searching mechanism
*cough* spotlight (mac os x) *cough* locate (linux/bsd) *cough* .. welcome to the party Microsoft. Innovation at its finest.
New laptop features
I don’t quite understand this entire set of features. It sounds like if you want to watch a movie, you can boot into a “Windows Lite!” version that doesn’t boot the entire OS. The only thing that sounds remotely useful is centralizing settings and having profiles to quickly toggle how the laptop operates in certain environments though as a key feature, thats quite depressing.
Parental Controls
hmm .. yah. Lets see .. give kids a regular user account to login with, setup some group/computer policies to restrict access (a la active directory) .. oh wait, they axed that from the home edition (see below). Guess they are kluding something else together. Of course, if someone has physical access to a computer, all bets are off.. boot from a CD, wipe the admin password and in no time you own the system. 
yup — kiddies can google for this quite easily.
Better Home Networking
Lets see .. they screwed it up with XP Home (it was fine with Win2000) so time to adjust and make it as easy as XP Pro but without the fear of losing $$$ from people buying the cheaper version. Boy do I _LOVE_ software that is unnecessarily limited.. poorly.
Eye Candy
Is this really a feature? After 5 years, I’d kinda expect they would refresh the display a bit. OS X has pulled far away from the XP interface and even Linux with the KDE/QT interface is significantly more modern than the XP interface (and will have one MAJOR jump to KDE 4.0 before Windows Vista is released).
conclusion..
I’d gauge the significance of Windows Vista on par with the Win95 to Win98 transition. It falls well behind Win98 to Win2k or even Win3.11 to Win95. Needless to say, this is in stark contrast to the “betting the company” “most significant update ever” and other vaporware promotion Microsoft touted only a few years ago..
To me, it just doesnt’ seem like Vista offers enough. With Apple’s transition to the Intel processor (read: ability to agressively price their entire product line .. if they desire) and the FOSS communities major focus on the desktop (For the two years it has been my primary desktop, I have seen a LOT of significant improvements) including major support from Novell, IBM and other major players .. perhaps the Windows stranglehold will finally break and software development practices will start prioritizing cross platform programming methods.
The fight against spam .. greylisting update.
Its been several days since I deployed my first greylisting mail server. Even though I have the greylist setup to deny acceptance of the first email from a sender for 300 seconds, it appears, on average the delay for the first message is between 15 to 30 minutes. This is completely up to the original sender’s mail server configuration to how often it will retry.
One thing I noticed was a lack of spam in my mailbox as well as others utilizing that mail server. Even with the amount of filtering I had setup, I was still getting a few spam messages per day across all the user accounts. Since greylisting was installed, I have not had a spam message report. Very nice.
The timeframe is still quite short (only a few days) but it does look very promising. So promising that I have since deployed the greylisting filter to another mail server and will continue to expand the use of this technique (assuming that the results continue to be positive!).
Hardware deals
Hardware prices are simply amazing.. check out these for size..
- 200GB Retail-Boxed Seagate Hard Drive (5yr warranty (I think)) for $48.88 after MIR (24.4 cents/GB)
- 1/2GB (512MB) PC3200 DDR Memory - $19.99 after MIR (3.9 cents per MB)
- 1GB (2×512MB) PC3200 DDR Memory - $54.99 after MIR
- 54mbps wireless router (with onboard 5 port switch, firewall, nat, port forwarding, logging, etc..) - $39.99 after MIR
- 4 port KVM switch (PS/2, includes cables) - $29.99
- 17PPM Laser Printer, small form factor - $49.99 after MIR
- 1GB Flash MP3 player w/line-in recording, FM Radio and USB 2.0 interface - $109
- AMD Athlon 64 3000+ & Abit KV8 Pro Motherboard - $199.99
So whats the big deal? Check it out:
- Motherboard + CPU - $199.99
- 2GB RAM - $108.98
- 1TB Hard Disk Space (5×200GB) - $244.40
- Antec Sonata Quiet ATX Case - $69.99
- Radeon X600 Pro Video - $99.99
- DVD+-R/RW Drive - $49.99
- Total Price: $773.34
Just think about that for a second .. 3,000Mhz 64bit processor, 1,000,000MB hard disk space, 2,000MB high-speed, dual channel memory, insanely fast 3d video chip, DVD creation capabilities, 1,000Mbps network connection, optical/6.1 sound system and MORE for under $800?? The fact that I’m sure some of you reading this are thinking “so what?” or “I could do better” further proves my point — its simply amazing how much power you can purchase nowadays.
83,431 Recited Digits of Pi
59-year-old Akira Haraguchi recited 83,431 digits of Pi in a period of 13 hours. I *think* this can be labeled as the most pointless activity… ever. Honestly .. why would anyone ever want to memorize that many digits of an irrational constant? Hmm.. congrats Akira. Here’s to reciting 100,000! *cling!*
Fun with Firewalls
I setup some new Dell computers for a family this past week. They wanted to share a printer — so I went through the steps to setup the printer .. got it working then shared it. It took me through a wizard to make sure I wanted to allow people to share my printer. This told me it would make an exception in the firewall. Great — except for the fact it didn’t work. Apparently Dell feel’s that one firewall is simply not enough. In addition to the Windows XP SP2 firewall that was enabled, Dell also installed a trial version of McAfee security suite that had its own firewall (that didn’t acknowledge my requests to permit printer sharing). Great. So after spending lots of time trying to figure this out, I finally realized Dell enabled two pieces of software that DO THE SAME THING. The kicker? The McAfee program came up on first boot and presented me with a EULA .. I declined the EULA which should have disabled the software (I didn’t accept the terms of usage).
The two month followup — Windows 2003 Server deployment
Its been almost two months since I did the Windows 2003 server deployment with Windows XP desktops. My thoughts at this time:
- Restricted users in Windows XP is a freaking joke. Compared to UNIX systems, it is absolutely horrible. I have had to do so many work arounds for shortsighted implimentations that it just blows my mind. I have written a lot of login scripts and group policies that force the systems to act “correctly” — things that I don’t think I should have to do. Augh.
- Software installation still sucks. I just got done redoing my Norton Antivirus setup (manually installing on all the client systems) because it doesn’t support the MSI installation method. stupid stupid stupid. Though I suppose if Microsoft doesn’t fully support it, its no surprise that others don’t feel the urge to support it. While people might gripe about package management on UNIX, I think even the worse (RPM) is still much better than the mixture of installers that you have to deal with on Windows (sure one or two systems is not too bad, but when you want centralized deployment, it becomes a HUGE issue very fast..)
- 3rd party support for Firefox integration is quite good. They provide up-to-date MSI builds that deploy very smoothly via group policies and have a rich set of group policies that allow me to centrally control Firefox. Very nice to work with. It does require me to utilize a login/logoff script as Firefox does not use the Windows registry but with minimal setup, I have lots of control over my browser of preference. Hopefully corporations will take notice and deploy Firefox at an even faster pace!
- Windows software developers really need to learn about security in a huge way .. things that the community would rip a developer a “new one” on the *nix side are present and shipping in commercial apps on the Windows side. If developers paid more attention to security and proper software development, companies might be spending billions less in “firefighting” when viruses and malware outbreaks occur.
For what it is, it works. There are a LOT more opensource, cross platform software titles on the desktop .. Firefox, Sunbird, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org to name a few .. This should make a switch from Windows to another platform a viable option when this organization decides its time to upgrade in a few years.
