Oct 3, 2006 | blog
Well, this is one piece of Windows Vista that I had not heard much on. It seems that corporations planning on deploying Vista will require a mechanism to validate or “Authenticate” their Vista installs similar to how retail versions of XP need to be authenticated.
For those who’ve yet to hear about it, Volume Activation is a new digital-license activation technology aimed at businesses. It’s part of the larger “Software Protection Platform” that Microsoft is constructing to combat piracy. In short, Microsoft is not going to allow enterprises to operate on an honor system, when it comes to proving how many copies of Windows they’ve paid to license. Just like it does with individual Windows users, Microsoft is going to start requiring companies to authenticate their new versions of Windows within 30 days of installing.
This will cause more deployment headaches and costs than previous Windows desktop operating systems. It also drives home the concept of centralization again. Instead of all those PCs, move 90% or greater back to the Data Center using Terminal Services/Citrix, and some Virtualization for really unique installs.
Yeah, we can’t get away from Microsoft extracting their full licensing costs, but we can reduce the amount of time and money we spend managing the desktop. Put a dumb terminal on the desktop and move the OS & App’s to the Data Center.
Source: Neowin.net – Volume Activation 2.0: Another Potential Vista Gotcha?
Oct 1, 2006 | blog
So it’s sounding like the media is starting to believe that Vista will actually ship when Microsoft said it would.
Right on schedule, Microsoft says there is one more beta release for the main Vista beta team. After that, the next build for an external release will be the RTM.
eWeek has a good article that discusses this along with many aspects of what MS has been working towards with the Vista product.
Link to Just One More Release Before Windows Vista Goes Gold
Sep 30, 2006 | blog
The Virtual PC 2007 beta program starts October 11th and will run trough March 30th, 2007. According to Bink.nu, beta nominations will be accepted throughout the entire beta period. Should be a good upgrade, and a fun beta to participate in.
Link to Bink.nu | Microsoft will start Virtual PC 2007 public beta program in October
Sep 28, 2006 | blog
The Windows Live Writer team has issued an updated beta that fixes a few issues and provides a flexible new tagging option. Here is a summary of the changes in the latest beta:
- Tagging support
- Support for Blogger Beta
- Categories are sorted by name and support scrolling, plus improved support for reading categories from your blog
- Improved startup performance
- Paste is enabled for Title region and TAB/SHIFT+TAB navigation between title and body supported
- Insert hyperlink added to context menu when text is selected
- Title attribute in Insert Link dialog
- Custom date support for Community Server
- Improved keyboard shortcuts for switching views
- Change spell-check shortcut key to F7
- Add ‘png’ to insert image dialog file type filter
- More robust image posting to Live Spaces
- Improved style detection for blogs
- Fixed issues with pasting URLs and links
- Remember last window size and position when opening a new post
- Open post dialog retrieves more than 25 old posts
I’m working on customizing the tagging option for Technorati as shown in the tags below. You have the ability to edit the HTML code for the tags – looks good so far!
Check out the Windows Live Writer space for more details.
Sep 27, 2006 | blog
OK, one really cool present so far on virtual desktop infrastructure.
The concept is more extensive than I had previously understood. Very cool.
I’ll find and post some tidbits later. Still at the seminar, looking forward to some more topics.
