Bad Windows

With Vista's first service pack due for wide release early next year, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is intent on addressing the many things which need to be fixed in its still-young operating system. The question is, are they going to fix the right things? I think not, since the problems this time 'round aren't bugs so much as performance. Read on for my list of five must-have Vista corrections.

# 1) Good Performance From SP1.

There's currently a debate raging about just how well the upcoming Vista Service Pack 1 works. (This guy says it stinks, Paul Thurrott thinks it's going to be pretty good.) You and I can't know for sure, since SP1 is currently in the hands of a select group of testers.

However, a release candidate of SP1 is supposed to hit the Web very soon, at which time we'll be able to put it through its paces. Early word is that it focuses far less on raw performance than on fixing all the little nits that a first service pack for a new Microsoft operating system has to address.

Read more at InformationWeek 

Several anonymous readers pointed us at CNET UK's Crave blog for a list of what is or was, in their opinion, the worst consumer tech in history. Vista comes in at number 10, in company with Apple's puck mouse (number 6) and Sony's CD rootkit (number 9). According to Crave: "[Vista's] incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list.

Read more at Slashdot 

 Security researchers warn that attack code targeting an unpatched bug in Apple Inc.'s QuickTime has gone public and added that in-the-wild attacks against systems running Windows XP and Vista are probably not far behind.

There was no word as of Sunday whether the Mac OS X versions of the media player are also vulnerable.

The critical bug in QuickTime 7.2 and 7.3 (and perhaps earlier editions as well) is in the player's handling of the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), a audio/video streaming standard. According to alerts posted by Symantec Corp. and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), attackers can exploit the flaw by duping users into visiting malicious or compromised Web sites hosting specially-crafted streaming content, or by convincing them to open a rigged QTL file attached to an e-mail message.

Read more at ComputerWorld 

Almost a year on from the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, only 13 percent of companies say they expect to move all desktops to the operating system, according to a survey released this week. Furthermore, adoption of Linux continues to gather pace, with a particular emphasis on the desktop emerging.

A survey of 961 independently selected IT professionals found that 90 percent still have concerns about the migration to Vista, and 48 percent have not yet deployed Vista in any way. Forty-four percent said they are "considering" alternative operating systems — mostly Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux and Ubuntu.

But analyst Clive Longbottom of Quocirca advised caution when interpreting the figures. "Very few places are looking at Linux as a replacement for Microsoft," he said.

Longbottom disputes the widely held belief that users will find it easier to upgrade to Linux than to adapt to Vista's new GUI. "It does take a bit of time to find things on Vista, but most people do the majority of the transfer themselves and require less than an hour's worth of training," he said. And, while Linux might be free, there could be a lot of effort involved in transferring things like Word and Excel macros, he warned.

Read more at builderau 

It's been at least a week since the last bout of Microsoft FUD hit the wires, so I guess it was time for a new wave. Today's FUD comes from an article Microsoft released on how its security compares with that of Linux. It should come as no surprise that Windows comes off as the Second Coming while Linux is left on the wrong side of Acheron.

It's amusing to watch Microsoft attempt to claim the moral high ground with security. Pat Edmonds, Senior Product Manager for Microsoft, writes that the "many eyes makes all bugs shallow" aspect of open source doesn't work for security, and points to several studies that purportedly confirm that Windows is more secure than Linux:

In reality, the "many eyes" mantra for Linux security has largely been disproved for two primary reasons. First, it assumes that all of the "eyes" are qualified to know what they are looking for. In reality, security expertise is not widely distributed across most users, but is actually a fairly rare and valued skill set. [Mr. Edmonds should know, as this skillset has been sorely lacking at Microsoft for decades.]

Read more at CNet 

Almost a year on from the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, only 13 percent of companies say they expect to move all desktops to the operating system, according to a survey released this week. Furthermore, adoption of Linux continues to gather pace, with a particular emphasis on the desktop emerging.

A survey of 961 independently selected IT professionals found that 90 percent still have concerns about the migration to Vista, and 48 percent have not yet deployed Vista in any way. Forty-four percent said they are "considering" alternative operating systems — mostly Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux and Ubuntu.

But analyst Clive Longbottom of Quocirca advised caution when interpreting the figures. "Very few places are looking at Linux as a replacement for Microsoft," he said.

Longbottom disputes the widely held belief that users will find it easier to upgrade to Linux than to adapt to Vista's new GUI. "It does take a bit of time to find things on Vista, but most people do the majority of the transfer themselves and require less than an hour's worth of training," he said. And, while Linux might be free, there could be a lot of effort involved in transferring things like Word and Excel macros, he warned.

Read more at ZDNet 

Results of a survey released this week, Windows Vista Adoption and Alternatives: A Survey of Technology Professional, found what many open source supporters had long suspected – Vista is driving more companies away from Microsoft than it is attracting.

The goal of the survey, which was sponsored by KACE and carried out by King Research, was to gather data about the perceived impact of Vista on IT organisations, and specifically their operating system adoption strategies

In compiling the data, 961 IT professionals responded to the survey, with a mix of front-line IT professionals, IT managers, and IT executives.

Of those surveyed, a whopping 90% reported concerns about migrating to Vista, with 53% of participants having no plans to deploy Vista at this time.

Although it might be suspected that, with these results, those surveyed were supporters of other operating systems, 99% percent of respondents operated Windows in their work environments.

Read more at Tectonic 

This decision was a long time coming but I think it is the right thing to do right now: I have reformatted the hard drive on my laptop and replaced Vista with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux as the main operating system. I did this for a number of reasons: it's probably worth going through them one by one.

Building a picture of Open Source today. "Desktop Linux is ready for the mainstream" we are told—but is it? And how to know without trying it for real? I had Linux running in a virtual machine on Vista, and it looked fine, but I tended only to play with it and not really put it through its paces. To give it a proper once-over there really is no substitute for putting it in as the "main" operating system. I should say up-front that this shouldn't be construed as a comment on Vista, which I am actually getting to like (see below). The same caveat should be applied for other applications, proprietary or open source (for the record, however: I'm not in any hurry to move over to OpenOffice just yet!).

Testing virtualisation. There's a variety of combinations of virtual environments that can exist today—one of the strengths and weaknesses of virtualisation (I am quickly discovering) is that anything goes. Linux on Windows, Windows on Linux, either or both on a hypervisor from either side; add to that the potential for running individual apps (e.g. with Wine or Softricity) or remote desktops and it all becomes very complicated indeed. I decided to start with Linux as, to be fair, Vista is already big, and I decided I could do without the base overhead. I'm now running virtual instances of Ubuntu server, Ubuntu desktop and Windows XP—see below.

Read more at IT Analysis 

KACE, a systems management appliance company, announced on Nov. 19 that its new survey revealed that 90 percent of the Windows users are concerned about migrating to Vista, and that 44 percent would consider deploying Macs or Linux-based systems to avoid Vista migration.

While Microsoft claims that Vista deployments are increasing, analysts, such as Forrester, observe that business Vista adoption has been going extremely slowly and that Linux is becoming a serious contender for the enterprise desktop.

KACE, which focuses on system management rather than having its own dog in the desktop operating system wars, sells system administration appliances that run on FreeBSD. Its appliances can be used to mange both desktops and servers running Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS.

Read more at DesktopLinux