The Vista from my Window(s)
Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 3:11 am
{Relocated from http://forums.olapforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=402 since it's now well out of the boundaries of the original topic.}
The retailer couldn't offer me XP Pro disks with the machine that I wanted. (Or at least the machine that was as CLOSE to what I wanted as I could get, given that the options for notebooks aren't as wide ranging as they are with desktops. If the video card had 512 meg memory rather than 128 meg, I'd be a happy man (at least it's an nvidia not an ATI), but it's not like I'll be playing Rome Total War on the thing. I have a hard enough time getting my hastati to do what I tell them to do when I can actually see them on my Apple 23" cinema screen. The smaller (13.3") screen is much lighter to lug than the old 15.5" wide screen. Mike L's eyes wouldn't care for it, but I find it generally OK; though I was a bit bemused when the SQL install program asked me whether I wanted to create a fallover duster. Oooooh, it says CLuster!) Anyway, I'd either have to wait until I could get XP disks from MicroSloth, or go with what was on there... {hissing voice} Vissssstaaaaaaaa.
At least it's Vista Ultimate.
So I weighed up the options and figured that I'd have to get hands-on with Vista at some point, and it would give me the opportunity to test TM1 with it, so {grits teeth}, what the hey.
To date it hasn't been as bad as I'd feared. Aero seems to be working without turning the machine into a bath of treacle, though admittedly this is, except for the graphics card memory, a fairly brisk and powerful machine with 3 Gig of RAM on board. (3 times more than the first TM1 server that I worked with, and 6* more than the dev server of that era...) Having read through the documentation, the PRINCIPLES behind UAC actually make a lot of sense even if the application of it leaves something to be desired. Essentially even if you're a local administrator you aren't running as an actual administrator most of the time; you only elevate your permissions when you need to, such as when you're installing software. The problem is that despite implementing this security Microsloth found it all too hard to embed something inside Windows to tell it where the request came from. Granted this would require some significant under the hood work, but I can't believe that it would have been impossible. Thus we have UAC requests for confirmation coming up IMMEDIATELY AFTER YOU YOURSELF HAVE CLICKED ONE NAFFING DIALOG FROM THE O/S CONFIRMING THAT YOU WANT IT TO RUN THE NAFFING SETUP.EXE PROGRAM. What, is Vista amnesiac? Has it forgotten that I did this, not two seconds ago? Is it impossible for it to have been written so that it could isolate actions coming out of the GUI (or even its own dialogs!) from actions coming out of scripted operations? It seems so. This is what also annoyed me about Outlook. Rather than coding outlook so that you could automate mail from code WHICH IS TIED TO THE CURRENT SESSION OF OUTLOOK rather than from automation, just cripple the code and rely on good old fashioned user intervention dialogs.
UAC probably annoys me the most when it asks me to confirm that I really want to open the Management Console. Yes, I understand why. Yes, it's still bleeping annoying.
Oh, and thanks for renaming the historically easy to find "Add and Remove Programs" item in the Control Panel as "Programs and Features", Microsoft, I really appreciate it. I loved the number of times UAC got in my face when I had to go through there to enable IIS since you've decided that it's so dangerous that you didn't merely disable the service, you didn't have it installed as part of the system in the first place. On Ultimate. You know, the version that you could reasonably expect power users who actually know what IIS is and does to be using?
Speaking of Power Users, contrary to what my IT department had been advised it appears that they can indeed still be enabled in Vista for upgrade compatibility from XP. I haven't tried it yet, though.
So far I've had three Compatibility Issues warnings and wow, they're all off MS products, whadda surprise. Visual Studio 6 was the first one, though apparently it's only VC++ that has a problem. VB6 is OK as long as you run the install program as administrator. Office 2003 Business Contact Manager (BCM) was the next one. That was interesting. The Vista fanbois always maintain that it's only "badly written code" that has compatibility problems. Here's a program that's only a few years old, hardly written for Windows 3.1, and written by MS themselves, yet it has compatibility issues. Howzabout that. (Admittedly according to the KnowledgeBase the latest service packs will solve that.) The third one is SQL Server 2005. See all of the comments above.
Ah, speaking of BCM, it requires the DotNet framework 1.1. Yes, that makes sense. MS has a DotNet framework for every day of the week and they all work differently with no backward compatibility so that different applications (TM1 Web (1.1), EV (2.0), TM1 Rules Editor (3.0)...) need different ones so hey, rather than installing ALL of them as part of the OS, howzabout we just install the most recent one.
Hibernation and restart speed seem to have improved over XP, I have to admit.
Next, I get to try TM1 9.4 on it. Although first I have to get it home, activate Office 2003, and probably download around 150 terabytes of patches to overcome the compatibility issues described above.
Oh, and rip bleeping McAfee off it (a trial version came with the computer) and replace it with something that WON'T slow my system down like, oh, say, a concrete wall.
And install Retrospect to do backups.
And activate CS3.
And install Rome Total War... no, wait, scratch that one. Nonetheless there's still the software to sync with the Palm telephone, remote control the EOS 40D, the blaaah, blaaah, blaaaah....
This coumputer had better last me an AWFULLY long time... 'cos unlike Jim, I'm NOT having fun here.
Oh, you don't know the worst of it. (Warning: semi-blog which may contain occasional traces of rant or rant-like products ahead. Feel free to move on if you don't wish to be exposed or are allergic.)jim wood wrote:Call me daft if you will but I actually enjoy rebuilding machines. That's why I never bother with ghost. I just keep all software on a USB hard drive, attach it after the OS installation is finished and then do the rest. Told you it is fun!!
The retailer couldn't offer me XP Pro disks with the machine that I wanted. (Or at least the machine that was as CLOSE to what I wanted as I could get, given that the options for notebooks aren't as wide ranging as they are with desktops. If the video card had 512 meg memory rather than 128 meg, I'd be a happy man (at least it's an nvidia not an ATI), but it's not like I'll be playing Rome Total War on the thing. I have a hard enough time getting my hastati to do what I tell them to do when I can actually see them on my Apple 23" cinema screen. The smaller (13.3") screen is much lighter to lug than the old 15.5" wide screen. Mike L's eyes wouldn't care for it, but I find it generally OK; though I was a bit bemused when the SQL install program asked me whether I wanted to create a fallover duster. Oooooh, it says CLuster!) Anyway, I'd either have to wait until I could get XP disks from MicroSloth, or go with what was on there... {hissing voice} Vissssstaaaaaaaa.
At least it's Vista Ultimate.
So I weighed up the options and figured that I'd have to get hands-on with Vista at some point, and it would give me the opportunity to test TM1 with it, so {grits teeth}, what the hey.
To date it hasn't been as bad as I'd feared. Aero seems to be working without turning the machine into a bath of treacle, though admittedly this is, except for the graphics card memory, a fairly brisk and powerful machine with 3 Gig of RAM on board. (3 times more than the first TM1 server that I worked with, and 6* more than the dev server of that era...) Having read through the documentation, the PRINCIPLES behind UAC actually make a lot of sense even if the application of it leaves something to be desired. Essentially even if you're a local administrator you aren't running as an actual administrator most of the time; you only elevate your permissions when you need to, such as when you're installing software. The problem is that despite implementing this security Microsloth found it all too hard to embed something inside Windows to tell it where the request came from. Granted this would require some significant under the hood work, but I can't believe that it would have been impossible. Thus we have UAC requests for confirmation coming up IMMEDIATELY AFTER YOU YOURSELF HAVE CLICKED ONE NAFFING DIALOG FROM THE O/S CONFIRMING THAT YOU WANT IT TO RUN THE NAFFING SETUP.EXE PROGRAM. What, is Vista amnesiac? Has it forgotten that I did this, not two seconds ago? Is it impossible for it to have been written so that it could isolate actions coming out of the GUI (or even its own dialogs!) from actions coming out of scripted operations? It seems so. This is what also annoyed me about Outlook. Rather than coding outlook so that you could automate mail from code WHICH IS TIED TO THE CURRENT SESSION OF OUTLOOK rather than from automation, just cripple the code and rely on good old fashioned user intervention dialogs.
UAC probably annoys me the most when it asks me to confirm that I really want to open the Management Console. Yes, I understand why. Yes, it's still bleeping annoying.
Oh, and thanks for renaming the historically easy to find "Add and Remove Programs" item in the Control Panel as "Programs and Features", Microsoft, I really appreciate it. I loved the number of times UAC got in my face when I had to go through there to enable IIS since you've decided that it's so dangerous that you didn't merely disable the service, you didn't have it installed as part of the system in the first place. On Ultimate. You know, the version that you could reasonably expect power users who actually know what IIS is and does to be using?
Speaking of Power Users, contrary to what my IT department had been advised it appears that they can indeed still be enabled in Vista for upgrade compatibility from XP. I haven't tried it yet, though.
So far I've had three Compatibility Issues warnings and wow, they're all off MS products, whadda surprise. Visual Studio 6 was the first one, though apparently it's only VC++ that has a problem. VB6 is OK as long as you run the install program as administrator. Office 2003 Business Contact Manager (BCM) was the next one. That was interesting. The Vista fanbois always maintain that it's only "badly written code" that has compatibility problems. Here's a program that's only a few years old, hardly written for Windows 3.1, and written by MS themselves, yet it has compatibility issues. Howzabout that. (Admittedly according to the KnowledgeBase the latest service packs will solve that.) The third one is SQL Server 2005. See all of the comments above.
Ah, speaking of BCM, it requires the DotNet framework 1.1. Yes, that makes sense. MS has a DotNet framework for every day of the week and they all work differently with no backward compatibility so that different applications (TM1 Web (1.1), EV (2.0), TM1 Rules Editor (3.0)...) need different ones so hey, rather than installing ALL of them as part of the OS, howzabout we just install the most recent one.
Hibernation and restart speed seem to have improved over XP, I have to admit.
Next, I get to try TM1 9.4 on it. Although first I have to get it home, activate Office 2003, and probably download around 150 terabytes of patches to overcome the compatibility issues described above.
Oh, and rip bleeping McAfee off it (a trial version came with the computer) and replace it with something that WON'T slow my system down like, oh, say, a concrete wall.
And install Retrospect to do backups.
And activate CS3.
And install Rome Total War... no, wait, scratch that one. Nonetheless there's still the software to sync with the Palm telephone, remote control the EOS 40D, the blaaah, blaaah, blaaaah....
This coumputer had better last me an AWFULLY long time... 'cos unlike Jim, I'm NOT having fun here.
