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Robert McLaws: Windows Vista Edition

I'm just an online pundit who's barely old enough to legally buy alcohol

Looks Like The Pentagon Should Have Been Running Windows VistaNovember 22

The US government has been leery of upgrading to Windows Vista. Looks like it should have done so a lot sooner:

The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD's, FOX News has learned.

The attack came in the form of a global virus or worm that is spreading rapidly throughout a number of military networks.

"We have detected a global virus for which there has been alerts, and we have seen some of this on our networks," a Pentagon official told FOX News. "We are now taking steps to mitigate the virus."

…

FOX News obtained a copy of one memo sent out last week to an Army division within the Pentagon warning of the cyber attack.

"Due to the presence of commercial malware, CDR USSTRATCOM has banned the use of removable media (thumb drives, CDRs/DVDRs, floppy disks) on all DoD networks and computers effective immediately."

Had they been using Windows Vista, they could have deployed BitLocker, as well as the Group Policy controls that disable USB removable media in Vista RTM and later. Oh well. We’re only at war right now and everything… it’s only our national

My Take on the Vista Capable FiascoNovember 19

I haven’t said anything about this yet, because I’ve been watching things unfold. I don’t necessarily want to say anything that has an affect on the outcome one way or another, and I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. But after the e-mails that were released last week, some of the rumors were confirmed, and some things I had heard rumblings about started to make sense.

Let me start off by saying that I think it is total BS that any Windows executive had anything to do with the nitty-gritty on whether one particular feature made it into Vista vs. another. It should not have been Will Poole’s call by any means that the WDDM requirement was dropped. I’m also very glad that Jim Allchin had nothing to do with it. He stayed true to the product no matter what.

Midmorning on the 30th, Mike Ybarra, a product manager, sent a message marked "urgent due to customer satisfaction escalation" to then-Windows boss Jim Allchin and Will Poole, then in charge of the Windows Client Business.

Poole was the one who ultimately made the decision to drop the WDDM requirement.

In an August 2005 meeting, "you both committed to HP that we would not move off the WDDM requirement and HP made significant product roadmap changes to support graphics for the full experience," Ybarra wrote, adding that an HP executive committed to investing in gr

Microsoft To Replace OneCare With New Free Solution… And a Win7 Hint?November 18

Microsoft just sucker-punched McAfee and Symantec right in the stones today with a carefully-worded press release about the future of Windows Security. In a move I’ve been anticipating since the inclusion of Windows Defender into Windows Vista, Microsoft has made it clear, on no uncertain terms, that it is taking full responsibility for the security of the operating system. There are currently few solutions that offer affordable solutions for PCs in emerging markets, where bandwidth may be low, or the PCs may be closer to Netbooks in power. When you only have a GB or less of RAM, every megabyte counts.

So Microsoft basically just told the major players in the antivirus industry to eff-off, and will be offering a new security product, codename “Morro”, on or near June 30, 2009. This product is apparently based off of Microsoft’s ForeFront offering. Now, that date is interesting for a couple reasons. One is because it is the last day of Microsoft’s fiscal year, and it’s also the beginning of the second half of 2009, which is around the time when Microsoft is supposedly shipping Windows 7. Could Microsoft be looking to launch Windows 7 on June 30th? IMHO it’s starting to look that way.

Now, I’m not a betting man. But if I were a betting man, I would bet on the following things happening:

• “Morro” will be released in conjunction with Win

Windows Mobile ConfusionNovember 11

First, we were told that Windows Mobile 7 would succeed Windows Mobile 6. Then, Ballmer talked last week about Windows Mobile 6.5. Then today, at TechEd EMEA, Microsoft announced Internet Explorer Mobile 6, and released emulator images for Windows Mobile 6.1.4.

Someone on the Windows Moblie team want to apply some friggin clarity here? What gives?

Movies on YouTube? Terrible IdeaNovember 6

CNET just posted a story claiming that Google will start dumping feature-length movies on YouTube. IMHO, this is a terrible idea. As Dan Rayburn pointed out just two days ago, Google has not been able to improve the basic underlying infrastructure of the service since they acquired the company two years ago.

Just yesterday I was watching a History Channel documentary that someone uploaded to YouTube, and I constantly had to wait for the thing to buffer. It was driving me crazy. That’s because YouTube is not a streaming service, it’s a progressive file download. They don’t use Flash Media Server, they don’t use a CDN, and apparently they don’t care about the user experience, either.

So why would Google want to exponentially exacerbate the situation by adding content that’s 10x as long to their network?

And how would Google prevent the underlying Flash video from being saved and used for other purposes? I know there are several browser add-ons that can save Flash video, and specifically YouTube videos, so how would Google get around this?

In the end, it just seems pointless, because without an infrastructure update, there is no way Google can out-Hulu Hulu… they just have a better experience.