Geekin’… sorry for folks who were reading me for the warm fuzzies.<\/p>\n
So, I’m writing this from a machine that’s running the *REAL* honest-to-goodness Vista Ultimate. Downloaded from MSDN a mere two days ago. I’d played with some of the Betas and Release Candidates, and for the most part kept thinking “Yeah, it’s sorta pretty, but I don’t really NEED any of this stuff.” It’s mostly true, too, ’cause for the most part, I could make my XP machine look like Vista<\/a>, and could add a sidebar<\/a> with or without gadgets\/widgets<\/a>, and since Office 2007<\/a> runs just fine under XP (so far, except for the new “x” that appears on the end of document extensions – hope that means everything’s a nice recoverable XML format, ’cause that might make it worthwhile for once again having backward compatibility issues).<\/p>\n I’m still wary of MS after the stunt they pulled with Word 97, which claimed to be able to save in Word 95 format, but didn’t… It would save in “RichText” format, which would lose all *sorts* of formatting and chewy goodness. They didn’t fix it until after people started noticing that the document didn’t appear to be the same when saving as previous verison (like Law Firms like to do). Whooopsh.<\/p>\n Outlook is still using the single-file PST\/OST format for storage though, which will keep data recovery folks like myself in business for a while (sorry St. Aardvark, your Very Good Idea<\/a> wasn’t incorporated into this version of Outlook).<\/p>\n But what does it all mean? What’s the point of a new OS, and a new Office? Is anyone actually going to USE the new feature sets<\/a> in either of them? As a Desktop Engineer (there’s the brave young souls on Helpdesk doing triage, there’s the slightly slower moving, but more dangerous rocket-launcher-carrying Desktop folks, and then there’s the snipers in the unmarked helicopters like myself and my cubemate), there’s a lot of new stuff to learn and implement to allow the Development Teams do their thing, but not be able to completely hoop themselves or the network. We also (due to Sarbanes Oxley<\/a> rules) have to have a process in place to make sure they’re not pirating stuff from other gaming companies or music houses.<\/p>\n So this new version? Complicates our lives at work. All of our lives. There’ll be the people who will bang their highly-skilled knuckles on their desks until we roll out the new OS, even though half of the applications and pipelines they rely on (and have, in some cases, built themselves) WON’T WORK on the new system. It’ll create more work for them, in the long run. At least pre service pack 1. The one good thing it does that I’ve seen so far that XP couldn’t do?<\/p>\n See more than 2.75GB of RAM. Now maybe you’re reading this on a machine with 128MB or something, but for developers of HiDef gaming “experiences,” or Accounting folks who’re working on spreadsheets for a multi-billion dollar company, the might RAM rules. Being able to put 6GB of ram in a machine and have the OS actually, y’know, USE it, is pretty cool.<\/p>\n …and yes, I know Macs could do that before the cavemen learned how to bang rocks together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Geekin’… sorry for folks who were reading me for the warm fuzzies. So, I’m writing this from a machine that’s running the *REAL* honest-to-goodness Vista Ultimate. Downloaded from MSDN a mere two days ago. I’d played with some of the Betas and Release Candidates, and for the most part kept thinking “Yeah, it’s sorta pretty, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87614122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87614122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87614122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87614122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87614122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}