Hopefully you all had a relaxing long holiday weekend, but now it's back to
the grind. And today
is
patching time again
as Microsoft plans to roll out four fixes.
Fortunately, they're all only "important," which is far less serious
than "critical."
SQL Server is getting protection against elevation-of-privilege attacks, and
Microsoft continues to plug remote code execution flaws.
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/08/20080 comments
Readers chime in on a grab-bag of topics -- the
Hyper-V
debate
that isn't, the pros and cons of cloud computing, and Bill Gates'
post-retirement
plans
:
Here's what has been annoying me about this Hyper-V versus VMware "debate":
There's nothing to debate! People are approaching this as though Microsoft
should be eviscerated for coming out with a 1.0 product -- how dare they!
You mean Hyper-V version 1.0 doesn't match up feature-for-feature with ESX,
a product that VMware has been working on for years? Well, that's no surprise,
and I'm a bit astounded that people are acting so vehemently about this.
I for one am excited about Hyper-V. It's apparently targeted precisely
at a shop my size. We have about 12 servers and around four or five of them
are ready to be replaced so, for me, Hyper-V looks a lot more attractive than
spending thousands on ESX features I don't need. We may someday need a more
robust product, fine, but for the time being, I think Hyper-V is going to
be just what the doctor ordered. So I wish people would get off their soapboxes
and use whichever product suits them and leave everyone else alone to do the
same thing.
-Greg
There is no choice in the browser wars! There are too many sites and devices
on the Internet that do not play well with any browser but Internet Explorer.
Our corporate HR Web site will not even let a user log in with a browser other
that Internet Explorer.
Firefox is my default browser at home. It's fast, clean and functional.
I use it for everything except the corporate stuff (and my Web cam). I have
never been hijacked or seen a drive-by download using it. But I have been
asked to clean more than my share of computers when the users (running IE),
despite having AV and anti-spyware software installed, get stuck with a useless
machine due to Internet pop-ups and browser hijacking.
-Tom
I love cloud computing for my own business and I am sure that others who
try will, too. But there is a downside: Customisation is real tricky. So yes,
I agree, the clouds are approaching fast, but once in the cloud, your business
better fit the model or you are not going to be able to fine-tune your business
model at all, wasting any savings that you might make.
-Garry
Perhaps I simply have a firm grasp of the obvious reason Billy Boy allegedly
"retired": He is taking over the programming aspect of Microsoft
once again, where he started, to be sure the next OS is not the embarrassment
that Vista is, and will continue to be. Vista is to Windows 7 what Windows
ME was to Windows XP -- simply a test product at the consumer's expense. After
all, the stock price of Microsoft has dropped and he is no longer the wealthiest
man on this planet. Ouch!
-R.M.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/08/20080 comments
Bill Gates retired last week, though he remains Microsoft's chairman. Some chairmen
have a soft touch, are more figurehead than figure. I expect Bill will be different,
that he'll err on the side of being a strong rather than a weak chairman.
Over the years, I've been asked many times what Microsoft would be like without
Gates. My theory was that Microsoft wasn't so much focused on a single product
as it was on building an integrated system, like a quilt. Each piece didn't
have to be better or as good as the competition's; it just had to fit better.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/02/20080 comments
I don't use Internet Explorer even though it's still installed on my computer
(this thing is dang impossible to take off!). I switched years ago to Firefox
before IE 7 came out with tabs, and because Firefox is arguably the safer browser.
Plus, it's just cooler -- like an iPod versus a Zune.
But was that the right choice? Well, according to a new
report, it was dead-on. IE is more vulnerable.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/02/20080 comments
Yesterday
,
I started an item about Bill Gates by saying, "Unless you were living in
a bio-dome or were in a Nick Hogan-induced coma, you must have heard that Bill
Gates retired last week."
Redmond Report reader Chris took offense and had this to say:
"Bad taste, Mr. Barney. I could see that coming from a young staff
writer, but not from an editor in chief."
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/02/20080 comments
On Monday, Doug
posted
a letter
from reader Mark who was less than enthusiastic about Hyper-V.
Here are some more of your thoughts on the Microsoft hypervisor:
Sounds like he has a axe to grind. Hyper-V demonstrates a much more mature
software product than the pre 1.0 that the reviewer exclaims. I have found
Hyper-V to be an extremely stable and flexible product with a full Windows
2008 install or with a Server Core, the latter being much more locked down
and hacker-safe.
In the next year or two, this product will have "world-class"
written all over it.
-Howard
The issue at hand is that everyone (including Microsoft) is comparing
this product to VMware ESX. Just because they strip the Start menu out of
the OS to make Server Core, doesn't mean this is a bare-bones hypervisor.
It's merely an evolution of Virtual Server allowing deeper penetration into
VMware-entrenched territory. Now with the use of clustering, you can perform
cold migrations and have the ability to use a ridiculous amount of processors
in a VM.
There are other more glaring problems than killing a host through the
parent partition -- like not being able to over-commit the level of RAM or
iSCSI-only support. Hyper-V is a good ESX 1.0 competitor but no one will take
it seriously until you get those two limitations straightened out, along with
Live Migration.
-Lee
I have been using Hyper-V for about two months with few problems except
for the following:
- NO support for wireless adapters. Yes, you may argue that there is
no place for wireless in a server environment, but what about us developers
who emulate the complete client system on our laptops? I have been told
that the reason is that Microsoft can not clone the MAC address of the wireless
-- but it worked with Virtual PC!
- Still no USB support.
As to running out of resources on the root/parent machine, that has never
been a problem. I have configured it as core and not used the core machine
for anything (other than Hyper-V). Bottom line, I think it is a good product
and will become even better when Exchange 2007 is certified to run on Hyper-V.
-Tim
VMware Enterprise has many very cool features that Hyper-V lacks, but
the reality is that Hyper-V is version 1 and really cheap to buy and use!
For a test environment, it works great and is easy to use and set up. Heck,
VMware now gives some of its products away for free in reaction to/anticipation
of Microsoft's entry to the virtualization market.
The writing is on the wall for VMware. By the time Hyper-V is in rev
3 or 4, it will be able to support enterprise virtualization very well. Why
pay 5K a processor for VMware Enterprise when you can get it much cheaper
in Windows? Why hire a VMware OS expert when anyone that can admin Windows
can admin Hyper-V?
-Chris
I'm planning to try Hyper-V as a small computer science experiment so
that I can run Vista and XP in parallel. Toward this end, I built a new machine.
I've installed Vista Ultimate on this machine while waiting for the Hyper-V
RTM and discovered that it does a good job of supporting the hardware the
Vista analyzer said wouldn't be supported (Epson Perfection 1650 scanner and
ATI HDTV Wonder). But even so, I want to continue with my experiment to see
what happens and possibly write up my experience for the benefit of others.
This is going to be a budget project; I got Vista Ultimate and a one-year
Windows 2008 trial from Microsoft for free. Now my wait for Hyper-V is over
and I'm ready to start.
But where to start? This is the purpose of this e-mail. Do I have to
build a new system from scratch, starting with Win08, reinstall Vista, etc.?
Or can I "import" an existing installation of Vista and install
a new version of XP? And what do I do with the downloadable images Microsoft
provides? Should I use a core Win08 60-day trial and just extend it three
more times as Microsoft suggests? Then can I update that install with my one-year
trial product key? Can I extend my one-year trial three times? Does virtualization
share peripheral hardware (i.e., NICs) or do I really need to have two machines
worth of hardware on one motherboard? It doesn't seem likely that two OSes
can share the same MAC/IP address, I must admit, but that would be quite a
problem if I wanted to run 12 OSes as "astute reader Mark" desires
to do.
Keep the info coming. I'm indeed about as giddy as Mark suggests but
I'm not going to let his comments spoil my buzz. I can see from his comments
why an actual server administrator might be a bit less than over-enthused
by Hyper-V 1.0. If I can get just XP Pro and Vista Ultimate to coexist, I'll
be one happy camper.
-Eric
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/02/20080 comments
Some of you who downloaded XP SP3 got a little surprise:
corrupted
registries
. The problem is that security software such as Norton anti-virus
wants to use the same registry entries that the service pack is trying to delete.
The result? Wireless connections that no longer connect and random restarts.
(I thought this was just a feature built into all desktop versions of Windows.)
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/01/20080 comments
Unless you were living in a bio-dome or were in a Nick Hogan-induced coma, you
must have heard that Bill Gates retired last week.
I've been fortunate enough to cover Microsoft for the last 20-plus years, and
have never been disappointed with the company's drive, personality, toughness
or brainpower. This culture came directly from chairman Bill.
Some employees even took to looking like Bill, acting like Bill and talking
like Bill. Bill even invented his own vocabulary: "Golden" was good,
"random" meant your thinking was scattered or stupid, and "bandwidth"
was your ability to concentrate and deal with something.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/01/20080 comments
Microsoft has been on an openness kick of late for two reasons. One is of a
legal nature; Microsoft's toughest legal foe is the European Union, which has
been suing and fining the company for years. The U.S. government, though far
less active under the Bush administration, is another thorn. And, lastly, Microsoft
competitors have been suing over antitrust.
The other reason is the reality that open source exists and IT likes it.
Regardless of the reason, Microsoft is taking openness seriously. It struck
a deal with Sun, whose former CEO, Scott McNealy, has more bad words for Redmond
than an HBO late-night series. While the Sun deal has been a bit of a dud, the
one that has bore real fruit is the Novell
arrangement, where the companies offer mutual tech support and now have
significant interoperability.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/01/20080 comments
Microsoft did the near unthinkable last week: It shipped a major product --
early!
Yup, Hyper-V
is in manufacturing, two months earlier than we expected. (Truth be told,
we usually expect these products to slip several times, so August to us would've
been early.)
This is an industry-changing event. Microsoft is unequalled in building third-party
communities, and I expect VMware vendors to add Hyper-V -- and for more traditional
Windows third parties to jump in, as well.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/30/20080 comments
Every year, Microsoft holds a contest for the best leading-edge PC designs.
I love seeing the cool ideas that come from college students around the world.
My only beef? These puppies never make it to market.
The
latest round of designs, which will likely never be produced, include the
Napkin PC, a Backpacker's Diary and a computer built for pre-schoolers.
The Napkin PC sits on a table like a napkin, and can be written on like a napkin.
The PC, however, can't take care of your coffee stains. The irony, of course,
is that many seminal PCs, like the original Compaq Portable, were designed on
napkins. I'm not sure if the Napkin PC was sketched on a napkin or a CAD program.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/23/20080 comments
Bill Gates is retiring this week to spend his time helping save the world (that's
no joke -- the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation does amazing work).
The editors at our sister publication Redmond Developer News, aimed
at corporate software development managers, decided
to find out if Gates was as good at making software as he is at making money.
Longtime analyst guru Will Zachmann took up the challenge and spoke to a who's-who
of software to see just how good Gates was at the craft.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/23/20080 comments