The rain is gone and the hot, humid weather is back in force in the New York Metro area. Not only is it hot today but tomorrow and Sunday are set to be even warmer. All week is going to be pretty rough. Autumn can’t come too quickly for me.

We are still pretty excited this morning about the prospects of our new home (pending) in Peekskill, New York.  We are trying to get the engineering inspection done as quickly as possible and then it is time to get the lawyer involved to check over the contracts.  October 15th will come much more quickly that it seems that it would.

One of the big challenges that we are going to have is the issue of moving one large load of stuff from the apartment in Newark as well as moving the huge load of stuff from dad’s house in Pavilion.  The new house is going to be completely filled with stuff for us to sort and find homes for as soon as we move in.  The entire basement will be just stacked from floor to ceiling with stuff until we figure out what to do with it all.

The new house is actually smaller than the house in Geneseo when all of the space is considered together.  The new house in Peekskill is listed at 2,000 square feet – which is large and luxurious when compared to our itsy, bitsy apartment in Newark.  Peekskill has that 2,000 sq. ft. split between three levels (that means two sets of stairs taking up space) and has two bedrooms and two and a half baths.  But the Geneseo townhouse was 1182 sq. ft. for both the main living level and the basement for a total of 2,364 sq. ft. of usable space with only two bathrooms.  So Geneseo had more space with which we could work by one stairway, one powder room and 364 sq. ft.  None of this takes into consideration the two car garage that we had in Geneseo as well in which we stored quite a bit of stuff.  So we are still being forced to squeeze down quite a bit.

Geneseo was also set up with one third of the basement being used for nothing but storage and my office area was lined with heavy-duty shelves that were used for storage as well.  So the percentage of the house used for pure storage was very high.  We are going to have to do some serious “compression” to make everything fit.  It is going to be pretty tough.  Dominica reminds me that there is a pull-down attic but I wonder how much storage that is going to provide.

I was doing some research on my commute from Peekskill to Wall Street today as well.  I have three stations to choose from when leaving Westchester – Peekskill, Cortlandt and Croton-Harmon.  There is a different monthly ticket cost from each station which are, in order, $261, $261 and $221.  The extra drive time to Croton-Harmon may be worthwhile for the cheaper monthly train pass and for the lesser time spent on the train each day.  We will see.  Cortlandt does not have the cost advantage that one would hope that it did.  Travel times are 56 minutes, 51 minutes and 42 minutes – Croton-Harmon also has a non-express line that would take 62 minutes or a semi-express that would be 53 minutes and a few random schedules that fall within that range.

Once reaching Grand Central Station in Manhattan I will need to take the 4/5 Metro line from there down to the head of Wall Street and then walk the length of Wall Street to get to the office.  All in all, the trip is going to take a really long time in each direction.  It is going to make my days really long.

Travel to the Peekskill station is just 1.8 miles from the house.  Croton-Harmon is 9.3 miles.  The Peekskill station could be walkable on nice days – but not very often.  If I am really lucky they will have some parking available for scooters and I will just get myself a Vespa that gets 73mpg and only costs $1,800 and I will use that to zip to and from the train station.  That would work out just fine for most days, I think.

I got a chance to have a nice lunch today.  Ronak and I managed to escape the office around one and went out to Mad Dog and Beans on Stone in downtown Manhattan for some serious American-Mexican fare and mojitos.  The food there was excellent.  The guacamole was by far the best that I have ever had and the grilled corn was amazing too.  The main meal was huge and way too filling and quite good and the mojitos were the best that we had ever had as well.  I am sure that we will be going back to Mad Dog and Beans again.

After eating at Mad Dog we stopped in to the Financier Patisserie to pick up iced coffee to get us through the afternoon.  We both wanted regular coffee but it is just too warm for that today.

In addition to the normal Friday evening work, today there was house-buying work to be done as well.  We found an inspector to look at the house for us.  We are, of course, getting radon and termite inspections done as well.  I called about an attorney as well but the attorney that we are trying to reach was out today so hopefully we will have something more solid come Monday.  I spoke to the bank as well.  It’s been a busy day.

Dominica and I managed to get scheduled for a house inspection for Tuesday evening at three thirty.  It will be tough for us to make, but both of us have already taken the evening off so that we can go so it will only be so bad.

I have been really busy the last several days listening to the latest batch of material from IT Conversations but today I got completely caught up and have decided to move onto a book so I am now “reading” Bill Bryson’s “Shakespeare: The World As Stage“.  Of course, you can get this book via Audible which is now a division of Amazon.

In tech news today, Microsoft did a bold experiment – setting up users in San Francisco who did not like Vista to try out Microsoft’s secret new “Mojave” operating system to see if they liked it better than Vista.  The response was overwhelmingly positive.  Mojave is, not perfect, but very close to what users would prefer as the successor to Vista.  Just one hitch – Mojave IS Vista.  Just like Pepsi is preferred over Coke as long as the consumer isn’t seeing the label, users don’t like Vista unless they can’t see the label.  The marketing and hype has created public sentiment that is based on the marketing and not on the product.  Once the public thinks that Vista is bad there isn’t much Microsoft can do.  Rational product choices are not the hallmark of the American public.  (Not that Vista is faultless, but overall it is a pretty good product and not the garbage that it has been made out to be, by and large.)

The main part of the day was pretty slow today.  I was busy but not backed up.  Five o’clock came and I got pretty busy.  I was in the office until well after seven.  And today is even SysAdmin Appreciation Day!  At least a couple of people in the office remembered and sent me nice emails.

Friday nights wouldn’t be so bad if Saturday mornings weren’t part of the normal work week.  We are not traveling at all this weekend which is great and my work tomorrow is not “scheduled” work meaning that I can do it at my leisure.

It was just a few minutes before eight when I was finally able to leave the office on Wall Street.  Quite a long day for me.  Since it is so late I am going to go ahead and post today’s daily!  Have a good weekend everyone.

(Warning, what is about to follow is anecdotal evidence as to the state of Vista from my own, limited first hand observations. But it could be worse, it could be second hand and out of context.)

My first attempt to work with Vista was on a dual-core AMD Turion X2 laptop. My hope was that with Vista it would finally make sense to run the operating system in 64-bit mode as Windows XP Pro 64-bit was a bit lack-luster. In Windows XP driver support had been extremely poor and I was unable to get much of anything to work. So all of my Windows XP machines ended up staying as 32-bit while my Linux machines moved back and forth. On Linux almost everything worked great as 64-bit. Only rarely would I get a driver issue or compatibility problem.

For the first week or so Windows Vista was incredibly slow. I decided that trying the 32-bit version of Vista (both had shipped with the laptop, thankfully) might be a good idea. So I performed a clean re-installation of Vista and started again.

Under Vista32 I noticed a significant increase in the overall speed and stability. The whole system seemed to hum right along now without the apparent slowness that I had had in 64-bit mode. Vista32 seems to work exceedingly well and starts and stops more reliably than my Windows XP machines have done in the past. The reliability of the shutdown process has been a major concern of mine from past Windows editions.

Because of the types of applications that I generally use on Windows (e.g. not video games, not entertainment applications, mostly serious business and management applications, only current versions, etc.) there were no compatibility issues in moving to Vista. Not a single application has failed to run and, I am told, that the only game that I actually would care about (Age of Empires 2 circa 1998) will run beautifully in Vista. I have a friend who has tested this on three separate Vista machines.

Few applications that are programmed “correctly” using Microsoft’s published standards and industry best practices have any issues moving to the Vista platform, in my experience. All of the complaints that I have heard about applications not working are either video games – which seldom follow platform guidelines, ancient legacy applications or small independent vendor applications that always fail to work between platforms because there are no updates, standards aren’t followed, etc. It happens. Every new operating system breaks a certain amount of old applications but in many cases, most cases, this is simply a separating of the wheat from the chaff. It is good to shake up the market and point out the weaklings in the herd and thin it out a bit for everyone’s long term health. Think of it as software genetics in action.

For contextual reasons I should point out that I have been using client side “firewalls” – a term that I am loathe to use but has become somewhat of the norm – for a long time, first with Symantec and more recently with Microsoft’s Live OneCare – and am quite familiar and comfortable with the concept of unblocking ports for every new application that is installed or any changes that are made. I am also used to this through the use of AppArmor on SUSE Linux and SELinux on Red Hat Linux.

Already being used to this as a matter of course makes the transition to Vista’s security system almost transparent. I have heard numerous complaints about the barrage of security notifications popping up and asking it “this software should be allowed to install” or if “such and such a port should be allowed to open” but if people were diligent about using past operating systems this would neither be new nor a surprise. This type of checking is wonderful in the computer security nightmare world in which we live. Many people want this “feature” suppressed but these are often the same people asking for continuous help to fix their virus and Trojan horse riddled computers caused, not by malicious external attacks, but by bad computer management habits and behaviours.

Even as a technology professional who is constantly installing and uninstalling applications, doing testing, making changes, fiddling with the network, etc. the number of these security alerts is not quite annoying enough to push me past the point of appreciating the protection which it provides. A normal user, who should not be installing new software or making network changes on a daily basis, should see these messages mostly only during the initial setup of the workstation and then somewhat rarely when new software or updates are applied. If this security feature is becoming annoying due to its regularity one must carefully ask oneself if there isn’t a behavioural issue that should be addressed. It is true, some users need to do “dangerous” things on a regular basis to use their computer the way that they need to use it. But these people are extremely rare and can almost always manage these issues on their own (turning off the feature, for example.)

Some people have had issues with the speed of their Vista machines. All of the complaints that I have heard to date, however, come from people who have moved from Windows XP to Windows Vista on the same hardware. This is not a move that I would suggest. Yes, Vista is slower than XP and noticably so. Just as XP was somewhat slower than Windows 2000 (although not very dramatically as 2000 was so slow. XP may not actually even be slower than 2000!) Windows 2000 was dramatically slower than Windows NT 4 and requires many times more system resources. The jump from the NT4 to the NT5 family was, by far, the biggest loss of performance that I have witnessed on these platforms. The move to Vista is minor.

The fact is that moving to newer, more feature rich, operating systems almost necessitates that the new operating systems will be slower. Each new generation is larger than the generation before. Each new version is more graphics intense (not true with Windows 2008 Core – yay!) and has power-hungry “eye candy” that demands faster processors, more memory and now graphics offload engines. Users clamour for features and then complain when those features cause their operating systems to be larger and more bloated. You can’t have both. If you want a car with one hundred cubic feet of hauling capacity the car absolutely must be larger than one hundred and four square feet in surface area. Period. It’s math. End of discussion. This isn’t Doctor Who – the inside can’t be larger than the outside. And your operating system can’t have less code than the sum of its components.

If I have one major complaint about Windows Vista it is the extreme difficulty with which one must search for standard management tools within the operating system. Under previous editions of Windows one could go to the Control Panel and find commonly used management tools in one convenient place. Now simply modifying a network setting – a fairly common task and impossible to research online when one needs it most – is nearly impossible to find even for full time Windows desktop support professionals. The interface for this portion of the system is cryptic at best and nothing is named in such a manner as to denote what task could possibly be performed with it.

Altogether I am very pleased with Vista and the progress that has been made with it and I am looking forward to seeing the improvements that are expected to come with the first Service Pack that should be released very soon. Vista is a solid product and Microsoft should be proud of the work that they have done. The security has been much improved and I hope that Vista proliferates in the wild rapidly as this is likely to have a positive effect on the virus levels that we are currently seeing.

Caveat: Moreso than previous versions of Microsoft Windows, Vista is designed to be managed by a support professional and used by a “user”. Vista is somewhat less friendly, out of necessity, and the average user would be better serviced to simply allow a knowledgeable professional handle settings and changes. Vista pushes people towards a “managed home” environment that would be more akin to a business environment.

This change, however, is not necessarily bad. As we have been seeing for many years, the security threats that exist with regular access to the Internet are simply far too complex for the average computer user to understand and with the number of computers in the hands of increasingly less sophisticated computer users the ability for viruses and other forms of malware to propagate has increased many fold. A computer user who does not properly protect his or herself from threats is not only a threat to themselves but to the entire Internet community.

In a business we do not expect non-technology professionals to regularly management their own desktops and perhaps we should not expect this of home users. Computers are far more complex than a car, for example, and only advanced hobbyist or amateur mechanics would venture to do much more than change their own oil. Why then, when a computer can be managed and maintained completely remotely, would we not use the same model for our most complex of needs?

With some basic remote support to handle the occasional software install or configuration change, automated system updates, pre-installed client side “firewall” all that is truly needed is a good anti-virus package and a normal home user could use their Windows Vista machine in a non-administrative mode for a long time with little need from the outside while enjoying an extreme level of protection. The loss of some flexibility would be minor compared to the great degree of safety and reliability that would be possible.

In a recent New York Times article “They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know” author Randall Stross, professor at San Jose State University, uses skewed anecdotal evidence and out-of-context examples in a blatant attempt to bias the reader against Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista. Whether this has occurred simply because the author does not understand the material, because the New York Times has its own political agenda or because they have been paid to reverse-advertise by the competition I cannot say. But for some reason the “illustrious” New York Times is using its position as a media outlet to serve to the detriment of honesty and to mislead the readers who have been mislead into paying for what proves to be little more than a tabloid.

Mr. Stross begins his article by presenting the issue of Vista’s slow adoption rate. He acts as though its adoption rate is unexpected or not appropriate for a new operating system. However, given Windows XP’s presence in business, longevity, stability and feature set it is not surprising or unexpected, in the least, that Vista – not having yet reached Service Pack 1 – would have a very slow adoption rate. Each new operating system generation has to contend with a lesser and lesser value proposition to people updating and it has been seven years since the last major round of Microsoft operating systems – almost an eternity in the IT industry.

Vista also has a new kernel architecture (the first of the Windows NT 6 family as opposed to the NT 5 family that we are used to with Windows 2000 – NT5, Windows XP – NT5.1 and Windows 2003 – NT5.2) and therefore has many hurdles to cross that have not been seen since the migration from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000. Additionally, this is the first major NT to NT family kernel update to hit the consumer market. Earlier NT family updates happened almost entirely within businesses where these processes are better understood and preparations happen much, much earlier. This is the first major consumer level change since users were slowly migrated from the Windows 9x family (95, 98 and ME) to the NT family (2000, XP) which happened over a very long time period. Users should recall the large number of headaches that occurred during that transition as few applications were compatible across the chasm created by the new security paradigm.

Mr. Stross takes the approach that Microsoft needs to answer for the natural slow adoption of a new, somewhat disruptive technology, but this is ridiculous. Vista market penetration is expected to be slow within the industry and no one is wondering why it hasn’t appeared on everyone’s desktops or laptops yet. Vista technicians are still being trained, bugs are still being found, issues still being fixed, applications are still being tested and Service Pack 1 is still being readied. I have Vista at home but I am an early adopter. I don’t expect “normal” (read: non-IT professionals) to be seriously considering Vista updates themselves until later this year.

Our author then asks the question “Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an ‘upgrade’?” Actually, Mr. Stross, in the IT world this is what is known as an “update”, not an “upgrade”. An update occurs when you move from an older version to a newer version of the same product. An upgrade occurs when you move to a higher level product.

Windows XP Home to Windows Vista Home Basic is an update. Windows Vista Home Basic to Windows Vista Home Premium is an upgrade. Windows XP Home to Windows Vista Home Premium is, in theory, both. Please do not mislead consumers by claiming that Windows Vista is an upgrade. It is not. Windows Vista is simply the latest Windows family product for consumer use.

If you have Windows XP and it is meeting your current needs why would you go the route of updating? I have no idea. I think that people need to answer that question before having unreasonable expectations of any new software product. Windows XP is still supported by Microsoft and will be for a very long time.

If I may make a quick comparison, moving from Windows XP Home to Windows Vista Home Basic is like moving from a 2002 BMW 325i to a 2007 BMW 325i. This is not an upgrade. It is simply an update. Just a newer version of the same thing. Sure, some things change between the versions but no one would consider this to be a higher class of car. If you want a higher class get yourself a 760i.

Mr. Stross goes on to regale us with horror stories of Vista updates gone wrong. In each of the cases what we see is a confused consumer who felt that, contrary to Microsoft’s recommendations and contrary to any industry practice, they could simply purchase any edition of Vista and expect any and every piece of software that they owned to work. This is not how Windows, or any other operating system, functions.

In the first example, Jon A. Shirley – former Chief Operating Officer, President and current board member at Microsoft – updates two home computers and then discovers that the peripherals that he already owned did not yet have Vista drivers. Our author does not mention whether or not Mr. Shirley checked on the status of these drivers before purchasing Windows Vista nor does he complain about these unknown third party vendors not providing Vista drivers. It is implied in the article that it is Microsoft’s responsibility to provide third party drivers. It is not. Drivers are the responsibility of the hardware manufactures. Hardware compatibility is the responsibility of the consumer. In neither case is Microsoft responsible for third party drivers. It may be in their best interest to encourage their development but they are not Microsoft’s responsibility.

In the next example we see Mike Nash – Vice President of Windows Product Management – who buys a Vista-capable laptop. This laptop would have been loaded with Windows XP but capable, as stated, of running at least Windows Vista Home Basic when it would become available. It is absolutely critical to keep in mind that Windows XP Home’s direct update (not upgrade) path is to Windows Vista Home Basic.

When Mr. Nash attempted to update his laptop to Vista we are told that he was only able to run a “hobbled” version. What does “hobbled” imply? We can only assume that it means that he can run Windows Vista Home Basic as we would expect. What has handily been done here is that one version of Windows Vista has been considered “hobbled” and another is considered “not-hobbled” even though consumers must pay for the features between the versions – an upgrade. It a BMW 325i hobbled because the BMW 335i has a bigger engine but requires more fuel?

It is also mentioned that Mr. Nash is unable to run his favourite video editing software – Movie Maker. It is true that the edition of Movie Maker that comes with Windows Vista has some high requirements that may have kept Mr. Nash from being able to run the version of Movie Maker included in the Windows Vista box. But Microsoft makes a freely downloadable version of Movie Maker for Windows Vista specifically for customers who have run into this limitation. So this is not even a valid argument.

It is implied that Microsoft mislead consumers by stating that the laptop was Vista-capable, but we are not told that Windows Vista did not install successfully nor work properly. What is being done here is the application of unreasonable expectations on Microsoft. Microsoft has stated extremely clearly since long before Windows Vista was released to the public that there would be different versions and that many of the features had specific hardware requirements beyond the base requirements. The features in these higher-end editions were upgrade features not included in the basic Windows Vista distribution.

This begs the questions “Could Microsoft have done more to inform their customers of the Windows Vista requirements?” Perhaps. But the answer is not as easy as it seems. As it was, these requirements were incredibly well known and publicized. The issue that we are dealing with is consumers, including some inside of Microsoft, who did not check the well publicized details and had unreasonable expectations in this situation. Much like the often heard story of the purchase of a video game that requires an expensive high end graphics card that the purchases does not posses. That application has higher requirements than Windows Vista Home Basic so why shouldn’t Windows Vista Ultimate Edition not have higher requirements too?

It is unfortunate that so many consumers have difficulty understanding computers enough to be able to purchase them effectively. It is also unfortunately that many choose to ignore requirements that are clearly stated because it is too much effort. But in neither case can Microsoft be held to a higher level of expectation than any other company in the same position. If a Linux based desktop operating system was being purchased the same problems would have applied. Some features would require a more powerful machine and some are very complicated.

A key issue here is that because these two pieces of anecdotal evidence come from high-ranking Microsoft insiders we treat them as if they are more important than normal consumer issues. The fact is that these two Microsoft employees did not do the same level of consumer diligence that I would expect of anyone buying something so expensive and complex as a new computer. Computers are complex and desiring to “future proof” your purchase requires some careful forethought and planning.
We are also not seeing the whole picture. Perhaps Mr. Nash and Mr. Shirley were purchasing Vista intentionally without putting in any forethought to see what problems the least diligent segment of customers were likely to run into and were using this information to allow Microsoft to attempt to fix their problems even though it was not Microsoft’s responsibility to do so. In this case Microsoft should be being praised for being willing to put so much effort into fixing things that are not their problem just because it makes for happier customers.

I am most unhappy that this article’s use of two pieces of out-of-context anecdotal evidence and using them as a basis for the implication that Vista is not yet finished – by calling it “supposedly finished” without any justification whatsoever. This is called “leading”. Clearly Windows Vista was finished, shipped and is used by many people. But now the reader is lead to believe that it is not finished even though it is not actually stated by the author. This is not the job of journalism – to decide on a verdict and indicate to the reader the way in which they should think. While not strictly lying the intent is to mislead ergo making the intent – to lie.

Even worse is the blatant falsification that “PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not” which is completely and utterly untrue and clearly intentional defamation and libel. It is never said that Windows Vista did not run on any machine stated here as being capable of running Windows Vista. It is simply implied that some upgrades to higher editions of Windows Vista were not possible.

The article wraps up with a look at the timeline of the decision process in the labeling of machines as being Vista-capable. We can see that internally Microsoft was torn as to which direction to go but chose, in the end, to label all machine capable of running Windows Vista as being Vista-capable.

I understand that there are many reasons why Microsoft may have wanted to mislead consumers (for the consumer’s own good) into buying overpowered new hardware just to feed the coffers of their hardware partners by only labeling a machine Vista-capable if they were able to run the high-end, expensive upgraded versions that would only be of interest to more affluent or intensive users.

Nevertheless, Microsoft resisted misleading consumers and labeled the computers accurately and did not use the Vista release as an opportunity to push hardware prices higher. They labeled their computers honestly and accurately. Labeling them in any other way would actually have been misleading and would have been of questionable intent.

At least poor consumers were not told to buy expensive computers just to find out that a much less expensive model would have sufficed to run Windows Vista! Microsoft would most definitely have been accused to misleading customers in that case. Those customers for whom the price of the computer was most difficult to manage were the ones protected the most.

The article ends asking “where does Microsoft go to buy back its lost credibility?” But the real question is after so blatantly attacking Microsoft without merit, where does the New York Times and San Jose State University professor Randall Stross go to buy back their credibility?