Here is Paul Thurrott’s second installment in his Road to Gold series.
In the first part of the series, Paul talked about the 2001 to 2002 timeframe where Longhorn emerges from the secret corners of Microsoft engineers.
In part 2, 2003 is covered talking about leaked builds, the beginnings of delays, adding of features, troubles of WinFS, and more.
It really has been a long road to RTM for this Windows release and the more I think about it, the more I ask if current and past approaches to Windows (and Mac OS, and Linux) are valid any longer. With the potential of Web 2.0 coming to fruition by many, many new talented people – do we need a fat legacy client any more?
That said, Windows Vista is an impressive piece of code, and its history detailed in Paul’s articles are a fun read.
This post at The Wireless Report talks about Detroit leading the nation in wireline telephone replacement with wireless. It also points out that Minneapolis/St. Paul is at about the same wireless penetration rate for wireline replacement.
I’m not surprised, I’m one of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area residents that dropped wireline service about 5 years ago. While it seemed a little ahead of its time back in 2001, many of my peers, and more importantly, parents, have followed suit.
Both my parents and mother-in-law have gone wireless as well, in addition to my sisters, cousins, friends, and many business associates. Its rare to run across someone who has a home phone any longer.
Most people I know actually saved money by switching to a mobile phone plan in place of a landline phone. With the wide selection of minute plans, included long distance, roaming and such, a $50 cell phone plane for a single user is much more cost effective than a $35 phone plan plus add-on services line long distance, voice mail, caller id, call waiting, etc…
Moreover, most of my family is on the same carrier (T-Mobile) so we all benefit from unlimited calling between each other. Landline service can’t compare.
Almost seems like I’ve started some kind of weird “Rocks” series of posts. Well, ok, yes, but it wasn’t intentional – it just kind of happened.
But we’re at our hotel in Duluth and its nice to be able to catch up on news & post a little on things at “full speed”. Brianna was swimming, Amy was reading, and I was keeping on top of news and such.
We were able to make it to Canal Park for dinner, and enjoyed a walk along the shore afterward. Tomorrow we’ll be heading up the north shore to Grand Marias.
An aside: Amy and I both came up the the word “Locatability” at the same time – yikes, that’s weird, even for us.
From there, we’ll head towards Ely, and then on down to Crosslake for a day or two before heading home.
Looks like Microsoft is unfortunately postponing Windows XP Service Pack 3 until 2008. For me, at least, this was a complete surprise.
The disappointing part is the sheer number of patches that will need to be applied to Windows XP Service Pack 2 machines. As one reader points out, there are already several dozen patches that need to be applied to a fresh XPSP2 install.
“As of yesterday, if you install XP with SP2 slipstreamed in, you firstly get 2 updates (Windows Installer and WGA [Windows Genuine Advantage, anti-piracy software]) and then a huge 73 critical updates. I dread to think how many updates I’ll have to install in 2008 — and knowing my company, it’s not certain we’ll be on Vista by then!”
Of course this is complete hogwash, just “sour grapes” on Symantec’s part. Microsoft has spent a huge amount of time in the last 5 years working solely on securing the Windows OS.
The real problem for Symantec (and McAfee as well) is that they have stopped innovating, and are about to be caught with their proverbial pants down. Tough shit.
I used to recommend Symantec as a AV product, but its tied for top place with McAfee and Microsoft’s own OneCare product. Its sad that these companies can’t come up with new ideas and products. Instead, they have to run crying to anti-competitive-biased foreign regulatory arm of the EU. Can’t even try to make their case here at home.
As governor, the State Capitol will stand for unity and common sense.
In addition to the POW/MIA flag that has long flown over the State Capitol, we will fly two flags when I am governor: the Wisconsin state flag and the American flag.
