Ray writes:
> While I mean no disrespect towards Wirt, I couldn't help but recall his
> quote: "On the whole, I'm very impressed with the design of Microsoft's
> OS. I am certainly impressed with the amount of documentation available
> for Windows, and I am deeply impressed with Microsoft's committment to
> backwards compatibility."
You misquote me, sir, by the act of quoting me out of context. I did say
that "On the whole, I'm very impressed with the design of Microsoft's OS. I am
certainly impressed with the amount of documentation available for Windows,
and I am deeply impressed with Microsoft's committment to backwards
compatibility."
But I also said that Vista is not ready for prime time and that I'm
recommending to our customers that they stay on XP. But that's just my
public statements on the subject. My wife knows that my private comments
regarding Vista would make John McCain blush.
As I mentioned to Rene Woc a few weeks ago, the Mac ads tend to be
generally quite funny but often grossly exaggerated, but I believe that the
most recent Mac ads in the NY Times, which appeared as animated banners on
the front page of the on-line edition, quoting reviews saying that Vista is
a "technological blunder" and "requires a complete redo" are quite accurate.
Without wanting to sound like an apologist for Microsoft, Vista however is
what everyone was wishing for (or demanding): a secure version of the
Microsoft OS. Indeed, Vista could be described as "paranoia on steroids."
Jim Brust was writing earlier about how slow data transfers are from his USB
drive to the PC, but now every orifice into the machine is intensively for all
data injected into the machine to be sure that it doesn't carry worms, viruses,
adware or malware of any sort, and this inherently makes it slow. It also kills a
lot of processes that worked before.
I also agree with Roy Brown, having changed my mind, when he earlier said
that he didn't see the situation changing with subsequent updates. This
intense level of paranoia is part and parcel of the philosophical core of Vista,
and the only way to make this level of security checking work on a practical
basis is to wait until the 30 GHz PCs are available before installing the Vista OS
or one of its progeny.
Coincidentally, at the same time as the initiation of this discussion, I had just
begun writing autoupdate routines for our newest product, QCReports. After a
week of discovering the rules of Vista, primarily by (highly irritating) trial and
error, I've determined that our basic technique for automatically keeping our
customers' machines up-to-date works exceptionally well for Windows 95, 98,
Me, NT, and XP, but Vista blocks every attempt to allow an easy, invisible self-
install.
On one plane of existence, that's perfectly reasonable. Who knows what evil
lurks in the mind of men and the software that they write?
On another, it's a pain, thus we now measure the operating system version
we're running on. If it's below Vista, we perform our updates quickly, easily
and silently. On Vista, we simply put up an announcement saying that a new
version is available and bring a webpage to the fore, requesting the user
manually de-install and re-install their copy of QCReports, just as they did on
the initial install.
If Microsoft was truly serious about security however, they wouldn't even let
us do this. Rather, what they should have done is require us to go through an
extensive (and expensive) certification program where not only we as an
organization are intensively investigated as to our reliability and credibility, but
one where our software is extensively scrubbed of all known threats and only
allowed to be downloaded from one of Microsoft's own highly-secure corporate
servers.
There is no such thing as too much security, and this last paragraph may
unfortunately be the wave of the future. It's certainly in keeping with many of
Microsoft's other recent initiatives.
Wirt Atmar
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