Microsoft Vista and Microsoft

This afternoon I went to a meeting of the techie minds here on campus to discuss the implementation of Vista. There were quite a few people that acted like the implementation of Vista was a terrible, but necessary evil. A lot of the discussion focused around the new Office 2007 suite. From a support standpoint I can see how this upgrade could be a nightmare. The changes in Office navigation are quite significant, especially for long time users of the suite, with little apparent added functionality.

On the other hand, I have been using Vista and the Office Suite for several months as my primary machine and have not had any significant problems. I left the meeting trying to reconcile my experience with what I had just witnessed. I decided I was going to look for what was different/good about the upgrade.

All I.T. people tell you Vista is more secure, and it does have a multitude of security features that make it more safe, but an every day educator cares more about it working and functioning that how safe it is. I decided to look at specifically at how the upgrade to Vista helps us out as educators? What specific traits does it have that would be make it advantageous for us to upgrade to Vista? What added functionality will help me educate better? Here is my list:

Much ink has been spilt about the new security measures in the upcoming Windows Vista. Whether you love them or loathe them, they'll almost certainly result in a more secure operating system, fewer malware and hopefully less spam from infected boxes. What you won't hear much about is trusted computing, which was set to be the next big thing in security.

Trusted computing is a scheme to create a secure, protected zone within computers which they can then use check the security of the rest of the system. In principal the scheme by the trusted computing group is a great idea but many people foresee problems. The early plans for Vista included extensive use of trusted computing, but as time has gone on, these have been whittled away and only one service in Vista uses it, the so-call BitLocker

Another iteration of the Microsoft Vista EULA has been released. The previous version caused uproar among hardware enthusiasts, by placing extra burdens on those who frequently upgrade their hardware. This version eases those burdens somewhat, but still contains:

Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device (physical hardware system). That device is the "licensed device." A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.

The "hardware partition" clause has two effects. Firstly it requires that each virtual machine has a separate licence, and secondly it prevents you from installing Vista on two hard drives on the same machine.

You may only obtain updates or upgrades for the software from Microsoft or authorized sources.

This gem of a clause prevents you from applying third party patches to fix bugs if Microsoft is being slow to fix bugs being actively exploited.

Microsoft appears to have made some comprises in Vista that will keep the European Commision happy. It's not bundling Windows Media player (at least not in Europe), it's allowing existing security vendors to compete with the Vista security system and it's submitting XPS (a potential PDF killer introduced after Microsoft fell out with Adobe) to a standards body.

The EC issued a statement saying:

The European Commission has been informed of Microsoft’s intention to deliver its Vista operating system worldwide, with no delay in Europe.

The Commission has not given a "green light" to Microsoft to deliver Vista because, as the Commission has consistently stated, Microsoft must shoulder its own responsibilities to ensure that Vista is fully compliant with EC Treaty competition rules and in particular with the principles laid down in the March 2004 Commission anti-trust decision concerning Microsoft (see IP/04/382 and MEMO/04/70).

Microsoft Canada accidently released the price of Windows Vista: US $449 for the full version.

Of course, that's just the licencing cost for the software and doesn't include the eye-watering cost of new hardware that meets the mininum specification to run full Vista.

Thanks to the register.

Vista, the next version of Microsoft Windows, is going to support IPv6 natively. IPv6 is the next-generation of Internet Protocol, which adds a swathe of enhancements to the more widespread IPv4 which has been used in previous versions.

IPv6 has a number of features to make autoconfiguration (when the computer works out all it needs to know about the network by looking at the network itself, rather than from endless dialog boxes) easier; multicast (when a single computer broadcasts a single stream of data to many other computers) more efficient; routing faster and the whole lot significantly more secure.

IPv6 is widely seen as key to allowing very large numbers of devices to connect to the Internet simultaneously. Whereas previously IPv4 supports 4.3×10^9 (4.3 billion) simultaneous connections, IPv6 supports 3.4×10^38 addresses: billions of addresses per person.

A research version of the IPv6 ``stack'' for windows has been kicking around for at least six years, and appears to be stable and interoperable, so it seems unlikely to be cut from Vista. While the stack implements IPSec (the optional security module of IPv6), it is not clear whether it is likely to be widely used in windows environments.

In a significant media blitz, Microsoft have announced that they are going to abide by 12 principles to "promote competition." These new principles will apply to the new Microsoft Vista and subsequent releases. Unfortunately, what they forget to mention is that in a significant number of the markets in which they operate, they're already required to do many of these things by law. Take for example:

5. Business terms. Microsoft will not retaliate against any computer manufacturer that supports non-Microsoft software.

MSN is carrying an interview with Bill Gates about the latest delays to Vista. In it he says:

"We got to get this absolutely right," Gates said. "If the feedback from the beta tests shows it is not ready for prime time, I'd be glad to delay it."

There is a glimmer of hope here. If Microsoft really is paying more attention to the beta testers, fixing more bugs and getting a faster turn around time on the bug fixes, then there is a chance that Vista will be substantially more stable than previous releases. On the other hand, this could be all spin, who can tell from an organisation with that big a PR budget?

Now that the hoopla around the Windows Vista Beta 2 has died down, I've been thinking about the comparisons between Vista and Dapper (the latest version of Ubuntu).

For those of you who have heard Linux advocacy before, I can assure you that Dapper will not do everything your current desktop does, in 1/10th of the memory at twice the speed while bringing peace to the Middle East. What it will do is install easily, give you real choice about how your desktop looks (gnome (default) or kde (via the "kde" metapackage)), a choice of office suites (OpenOffice AbiWord or the commercial StarOffice (from Sun)). Dapper comes with astounding minimum hardware specs, but if you don't see a link between hardware and performance, I've got a bridge you may be interested in.