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.
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.
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.
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!
@MAC_Arms Pay taxes when you make your money, pay taxes when you spend your money, pay taxes when you successfully invest your money, pay taxes when you save enough taxed money to afford a house, pay taxes to live in your house, pay taxes when you sell the house that you paid taxes on to
Yup, taxes are criminal and we need serious reforms. I've always said that if you want to see a tax revolt, make withholdings illegal and have Americans write a tax check every payday. They'll revolt for sure. You don't miss what you never had.
Sen. @berniemoreno says voter ID and proof of citizenship are simply common sense.
“We’re talking about a very low threshold — identify who you are and prove you’re a U.S. citizen when you register to vote. I think we’re getting closer to
