Ah, BitLocker. Also known as ‘The President’s new laptop isn’t backing up his files anymore. How the hell did he turn that on? I thought we disabled that!’
And I remember how Office 2k7 came out just a few months after our theoretical free upgrades ran out. Lovely pain in the ass that was.
Sorry to be a bit snarky, but is there a question in there?
Bitlocker does exactly what it says on the tin - it encrypts entire hard drives end to end, and prevents either man-in-the-middle, bootable cd/usb/floppy, or ‘lost laptop’ / lost hard drive security breach scenarios. Doesn’t mean it’s a silver bullet, and it doesn’t mean you won’t need to change or re-engineer other solutions around it like backup and restore, as well as some user training of when to use it, what the risks are, and what they need to do differently to realize the benefits. It’s new; it will take some changes in business-as-usual to adapt / adopt anything new.
How long, exactly, do you expect Microsoft to keep giving out free software upgrades? 2 years? 5 years? 10? At what point can we say ‘this is no longer an upgrade, but a new product’? After 3 years of development? 5? 10? It’s not like your old Office install suddenly stopped working the minute Office 2007 came out. It’s not like you won’t still be getting free patches for supported OSs and applications years after they release. I don’t see why this is such a ‘microsoft bad’ thing.
I’m not trying to start something, Gomi. Just a bit worn out and tired.
“Buy our Software Assurance. Free upgrades to the software released within the next three years.” Hm. Office '97. Office 2K. Office XP. Office 2K3.
Office 2K7, and lo, all that money for Software Assurance? Worth nothing. Software Assurance wasn’t free to start with.
Yes, there were other features, but they weren’t the core issue. Bit of a pain in the neck.
As far as BitLocker, I’m a sysadmin, and I tend to remember the horrible disasters more than the successes. Sorry about that, but it has made disaster recovery a bit more interesting. Especially on my mom’s friend’s computers I get pressured to fix in my theoretical free time. “What do you mean, my files are gone? You fixed this the last time!”
I’m trying not to whine, mind you. Just, well… I’m mildly annoyed at Vista being a huge pain in the ass in a multimedia situation I’ve had to deal with, and wasn’t being paid to fix. Every single possible DRM issue popped up, including a downsampled video glitch from a HD camera.
2K3 server was very nice…
I really like Microsoft keyboards and mice… and I’m still using a Sidewinder Strategic Commander. Microsoft makes great hardware.
No worries, and I didn’t take it as such…
All I can say is ‘I feel your pain’ and sympathize; I don’t know why Office 2007 wasn’t within the 3-year window for SA. but keep this in mind as well - the licensing cost is probably less than buying each new iteration over the 3 years, for businesses. It’s just on a subscription basis, rather than a pay once basis. And a lot of businesses would rather amortize the cost of software over time, rather than pay one big-hit cost, especially large enterprises. I don’t believe it was a malicious choice to ‘screw’ SA customers, as that would be both stupid and short-sighted as well as ethically dubious, but I can’t comment.
You bloody sysadmins, always glass half empty types 
I understand your pain, and we’ve put a lot of work into solving it, especially with tools like System Centre, but I fully admit we’ve some way to go, especially regarding small and mid-size businesses.
Still is. Lots and lots of my customers are using the heck out of it and like it a lot.
Sometimes (see earlier comments (NOT MINE!) about Zune). I love my media centre PC, although at 4 years old it’s getting a bit clunky and doesn’t run perfectly anymore… and some of our hardware is absolutely killer.
Apologies.
I was experiencing great board slowdown yesterday and life was to short to go back a page and confirm the correctness (or lack thereof) of my memory of this post regarding Vista:
(emphasis mine)
I clearly added the “half” part myself.
And no, my demo did not include any under the hood features, which I am interested to read about. I got to see how flashy and quick everything was, and had a chance to check that the demo computer was running 2Gigs of memory, rather than the .5-1 Gig recommended in MS’s Vista promotional material, and that was about all she wrote.
As far as I can tell, the hardware in the Zune is very nice. It’s just firmware lockdown that’s effing it. Er, and the related software.
Accepted; no biggie. I think it was about 95% complete before we even thought of releasing it; the extra time IMO could have been well used to get more vendors, especially video card driver devs and BIOS writers, fully up to speed, and we would have had fewer ‘bedding in’ problems in the first 3 months. By now problems of that nature have largely been fixed, so I think I might be right in this, but I also think it’s quite likely that if we had waited so would they and the same situation would have happened.
I sometimes question the marketing material - it always refers to minimum spec, not recommended spec. Minimum is 512m of RAM, but it runs pretty sweet with 2g and I wouldn’t recommend much less if you want more than a vanilla experience.
Sorry, no comment. That way leads madness.
If I was in your shoes I would be proud to work for a man like Bill Gates. I don’t think it matters so much how he got there, but now that he is, he’s making an effort to help others. Not many can afford to help others like he does.
THank you, I am very much proud to work for someone who does what he does, no matter the justification.
I try to emulate him in my own small way as well; I don’t give nearly the amount of time or percentage of money as he does, but I do give far more than at any other time in my life.