Gates on Parade
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Gates were one of the big stories in the world this week.
No not the ones in Central Park visited by delegates from around the world, but rather the keynote speech at the RSA Conference. Bill Gates wasn't too arrogant at this one. I'm sure security isn't an area that he feels completely confident in Microsoft's talents. Not that they won't get it, but there's a long way to go.
At last year's conference, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would end SPAM within a year. As we're all aware that hasn't happened and he acknowledged that today. He did have a number of things that were announced however, one of which was IE 7.
Given the growing popularity of Firefox, which I use, I'm not surprised that Microsoft is back to devoting resources to this product. I've always like IE and I applauded the advances it made from v2 to v3, and then to v4. In my humble opinion, those tremendous advances, while Netscape was languishing, were one reason for the explosion of the World Wide Web. I can't say that I liked their deviations from standards and the pain that web coding endured, but from a user's standpoint, it was great.
I'm not thrilled, however, with the announcement that IE 7 will only run on XP and Longhorn. That's not good with so many Windows 2000 systems out there. I can certainly understand that with W2K 2003 server and Longhorn on the horizon, albeit a long way out on the horizon, that W2K has to slowly die away. It's that I think Microsoft is wasting yet another great opportunity to shine. Releasing a stronger, more secure, more feature packed, but less bloated version would really show that they are a great software company that cares about customers. Instead, they'll be leaning on more and more people to upgrade from W2K without any great reason and we'll see more sites fragmented as some things specific to IE 7 won't run on those W2K desktops.
I was also thrilled to see that all patches will come from a central location. It certainly will make life a little easier for those sysadmins that have to deal with Exchange, SQL, and other products. It also will make it easier for DBAs since they can know that the sysadmins will make a note of patches that are required for SQL. I wish that Microsoft would also enable some third party patches through the Windows Update as well. Not sure how this would work economically and who would share liability, but it certainly would be nice for all patches to major software to come from one place.
On the downside, this also means that DBAs will have to be careful that the sys admins don't update our servers without letting us know.
Steve Jones
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Yeah!
Great! 
Catch is Ryan Naraine at eWeek (ref article) is that you need Windows XP SP2 to use it.
I don't know about anybody else but 75% of our software is not compatible with XP SP2. The few users who accidentally had it loaded bombed horribly. In fact the latest patch Tuesday caused us to have messages pop up all over about incompatible versions and left us scrambling to reset them. We had to disable our WUS/SUS servers for a few days.
When is MS going to get that not everybody buys into the MS ways of doing things. I'm personally tired of trying to fix everything their upgrades break.
Just my $0.02.
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Jim P.A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.
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