Life with Vista (part 3)
It’s been three months since my last “Vista” post [La vida con Vista (part 2)] and I can tell you things have not gotten much better. I thought products were supposed to get better with each new version, like when each new book from an author gets better because the author is more experienced, or how a winery produces better wine each year as the vines mature. So what happened to Windows?
Vista sucks. How’s that for a professional opinion? They can promote their “Mohave Experiment” all they like, but the fact is that after the shiny bobbles get old, we all need functionality and it just isn’t there. Is it just a coincidence that Bill handed the reigns to Steve at the same time Vista was being prepped for market? Is this the shape of the new Microsoft? I hope not.
I work all day with three systems at my finger tips. There is the laptop with Windows XP that I use for client work, the PC with Windows Vista Ultimate that I [try to] use for all my personal stuff, and the CentOS-5 server (RedHat Linux without the support) I do all my software development and testing on. Guess which one gives me the least grief? (hint: it didn’t come from Microsoft) As far as the Windows boxes go, I’ll take the XP one over Vista any day.
There are numerous reasons why I believe XP is better than Vista and this is speaking strictly from experience.
Occasionally I need to reboot my router and switch, bringing the network down temporarily. When it comes back up again, the Linux server is always the first to access it followed closely by the XP box, but the Vista PC can take up to 5 minutes to re-establish a connection. When it does finally establish a connection it always (always) resets my “private” network to “public” which disables file and printer sharing. Talk about frustrating.
Windows has always been able to save username and password credentials for commonly used applications, like mail or secure web sites. When I first installed Vista this worked, but after a “security update” that was apparently mandatory and installed itself without asking, it does not work any more. Not only did all of my saved credentials vaporize, I can’t re-save them again or add any new ones either. Even manually added credentials are completely useless.
Active-X add-ons have taken on a life of their own. In XP, removing a bad or damaged add-on program was as easy as opening the “Downloaded Programs” folder and clicking “DELETE”. Not with Vista. Now it’s next to impossible to remove one even if you are logged in as Administrator will all the security turned off.
And what’s the deal with changing perfectly good terminology? If I click on SAVE, I want the dialog questions to be YES or NO not SAVE or DON’T SAVE. Worse are the moronic questions when you try to copy over existing files. Was “are you sure you want to replace this file” such a bad question that it had to be replaced with three separate equally confusing questions like “ do you want to copy and save the original”?
I believe Vista has drawn its last refresh across my screen as my frustration has reached overload level. After trying to work with Vista (Ultimate) for three months, I’m packing it in and tossing it. If anyone is interested in $298 worth of slightly used Microsoft Operating System, let me know – it’s going cheap.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
To PHP or not to PHP. Is that even a questions?
This is still a question, but not as big a one as it used to be. Five years ago I was building web sites with a combination of PERL, PHP, HTML, and JavaScript. Today they are almost entirely PHP. Over the last few years, the PHP language has developed into a powerful, flexible language that has shown strength in not just the web arena, but in mainstream application programming as well.
Recently I was asked to write a script to inject mail to a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) in order to send several thousand emails in a short period of time (no, this was not SPAM) and I had my choice of languages to write it in. My first choice was PERL because I have had great success with PERL when I need to search and strip text data and access databases quickly. However, this time I chose to test how far PHP has really come so I wrote the script in both PERL and PHP and ran them on the same job data.
To my surprise, the PHP script performed as well, if not better than the PERL script. Both were fed the same information and had to perform the same task and over 25000 iterations, the PHP script may have actually beat the PERL script, by a few nanoseconds – too close to call.
I am currently re-writing a couple of my older web applications and replacing all of the old PERL and JavaScript chunks with equivalent PHP and have been able to actually reduce the code size and increase functionality along the way.
The moral here is… if you are a programmer and have ignored PHP because it is “just for dynamic web pages” then take another look. You might be surprised.
Recently I was asked to write a script to inject mail to a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) in order to send several thousand emails in a short period of time (no, this was not SPAM) and I had my choice of languages to write it in. My first choice was PERL because I have had great success with PERL when I need to search and strip text data and access databases quickly. However, this time I chose to test how far PHP has really come so I wrote the script in both PERL and PHP and ran them on the same job data.
To my surprise, the PHP script performed as well, if not better than the PERL script. Both were fed the same information and had to perform the same task and over 25000 iterations, the PHP script may have actually beat the PERL script, by a few nanoseconds – too close to call.
I am currently re-writing a couple of my older web applications and replacing all of the old PERL and JavaScript chunks with equivalent PHP and have been able to actually reduce the code size and increase functionality along the way.
The moral here is… if you are a programmer and have ignored PHP because it is “just for dynamic web pages” then take another look. You might be surprised.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
La vida con Vista (part 2)
Life with Vista (part 2)
OK… One of the things I have learned in this whole process with Vista is that Microsoft obviously names their products based on price points, not functionality. Vista Home is priced for the person who won’t pay more than $99 for any OS. Home premium is for the guy who will pay an extra $30 to play movies on his PC. Vista Business is obviously priced for the business OS market that is used to paying $200 for any network capable operating system and Ultimate is clearly priced for the geek who will pay anything for “all the toys”. Unfortunately they all have the same defective thinking behind the framework.
In my opinion, “Home” should be packaged with a recipe book, encyclopedia, and an on-line guide explaining what to pay the baby sitter. Now wouldn’t that be more useful? Home Premium should also include not only the ability to play movies, but an integrated PVR. A guide to fine wines and a voice activated HDTV tuner would top that one off for me. Vista Business should include Office Pro by default and should be stripped of security assuming it will be installed in a network out of the box. The Ultimate version should have all that and an on-line personal coach too.
I really think if Microsoft won’t make the above changes, they should at least release one more version and call it “Vista Guru”. This would be completely stripped of any security (and those annoying “are you sure” messages) assuming that it will be installed in a properly managed network. It would include remote management by default and all the games, movies, music, and anything else non-business would be non-existent. It would be tuned for speed, not beauty right out of the box and it would only be sold to someone who could produce an MCSE certificate. I’d buy that.
It would seem that Microsoft has created 4 versions of the same product with little regard for the fact that it completely alienates the business market that has been feeding it for years. While “Ultimate” is a really nice product for “Home” use, “Business” is a far cry from business-friendly. Every installation of Vista Business I have seen includes removing or disabling all the annoying, redundant “security”, games, media, etc that seem to be the hallmarks of this OS. This sounds like a really bad move when Red Hat, Novel, and Apple are aggressively going after that business market with trimmed-down, efficient, fast desktop operating systems.
I’ll keep running the Vista Ultimate system that I finally have connected to all the servers and network shares I need, but I don’t know for how long. I keep switching back to my Red Hat server to do anything productive… that’s not good news for the Vista box.
I’ll let you know how it goes….
OK… One of the things I have learned in this whole process with Vista is that Microsoft obviously names their products based on price points, not functionality. Vista Home is priced for the person who won’t pay more than $99 for any OS. Home premium is for the guy who will pay an extra $30 to play movies on his PC. Vista Business is obviously priced for the business OS market that is used to paying $200 for any network capable operating system and Ultimate is clearly priced for the geek who will pay anything for “all the toys”. Unfortunately they all have the same defective thinking behind the framework.
In my opinion, “Home” should be packaged with a recipe book, encyclopedia, and an on-line guide explaining what to pay the baby sitter. Now wouldn’t that be more useful? Home Premium should also include not only the ability to play movies, but an integrated PVR. A guide to fine wines and a voice activated HDTV tuner would top that one off for me. Vista Business should include Office Pro by default and should be stripped of security assuming it will be installed in a network out of the box. The Ultimate version should have all that and an on-line personal coach too.
I really think if Microsoft won’t make the above changes, they should at least release one more version and call it “Vista Guru”. This would be completely stripped of any security (and those annoying “are you sure” messages) assuming that it will be installed in a properly managed network. It would include remote management by default and all the games, movies, music, and anything else non-business would be non-existent. It would be tuned for speed, not beauty right out of the box and it would only be sold to someone who could produce an MCSE certificate. I’d buy that.
It would seem that Microsoft has created 4 versions of the same product with little regard for the fact that it completely alienates the business market that has been feeding it for years. While “Ultimate” is a really nice product for “Home” use, “Business” is a far cry from business-friendly. Every installation of Vista Business I have seen includes removing or disabling all the annoying, redundant “security”, games, media, etc that seem to be the hallmarks of this OS. This sounds like a really bad move when Red Hat, Novel, and Apple are aggressively going after that business market with trimmed-down, efficient, fast desktop operating systems.
I’ll keep running the Vista Ultimate system that I finally have connected to all the servers and network shares I need, but I don’t know for how long. I keep switching back to my Red Hat server to do anything productive… that’s not good news for the Vista box.
I’ll let you know how it goes….
Sunday, August 17, 2008
La vida con Vista
(Life with Vista)
My PC is an 8 year old box that I put together myself (because that is what I am good at) containing a P4 – 1.7Mhz processor, 640Mb of RAM, 60Gb Hard Drive and a 32Mb Video Card. This probably seems archaic to some, but it was well built and has served me so far. It originally had Windows 98 installed, then I reluctantly upgraded to Windows XP (Pro) and recently I tried MS Vista. Big mistake.
The Vista experiment on this PC lasted all of about 2 hours before I wiped it and went back to XP; it was so slow it was non-functional. Even though Microsoft says this PC falls within the usable parameters, it was far from it.
So I acquired a new PC to put Vista Business on – an HP with an Athlon 64 X2 processor, 2Gb of RAM, 400Gb Hard Drive and a 256Mb Video card. Should be a speed demon right? No. Loaded with Vista Business, it was no faster then my 8 year old box running XP.
I love a good puzzle, so instead of just wiping it and installing “Red Hat Enterprise 5”, I started to look for all the speed tweaks. Ya. Ok. Not. While MS Vista looks really cool, it is functionally retarded (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). Everything takes twice as long to get into, has extra security hoops and more check boxes than ever before.
So I started with the security and turned OFF that annoying “are you really, really sure you want to do that thing that you just clicked with the intention of actually doing something” message. This is also knows as “User Account control”. Turning this off seemed to make most of the system much faster right away. However, there are still the periodic delays when I open, well, anything. Many times when I open a folder, the mouse pointer turns into a green spiral that turns like a clock, obviously timing the opening of an event like the Hourglass used to do. I have to assume this has something to do with indexing files, but it often just stays there, for hours.
Don’t even get me started on the networking issues – I have a Red Hat server and a mixed bag of clients that are Win 98, Win XP, Linux and now Vista. Guess which one I have the most connection problems with. Once I made it through all the hoops to make the connection to the SMB share on my Linux server I thought it would be OK, but even though it is mapped and the credentials are saved, Vista still makes me log in to view files where it was automatic with ‘XP and transparent in ’98. Most of my old remote access tools don’t work and Remote Desktop is a complete write-off.
So now what? XP is dead and Vista is the current standard OS from Microsoft, and any new software I build needs to support it, so I HAVE to make this puppy work… somehow…. I’ll dig in deeper and let you know how it turns out….
My PC is an 8 year old box that I put together myself (because that is what I am good at) containing a P4 – 1.7Mhz processor, 640Mb of RAM, 60Gb Hard Drive and a 32Mb Video Card. This probably seems archaic to some, but it was well built and has served me so far. It originally had Windows 98 installed, then I reluctantly upgraded to Windows XP (Pro) and recently I tried MS Vista. Big mistake.
The Vista experiment on this PC lasted all of about 2 hours before I wiped it and went back to XP; it was so slow it was non-functional. Even though Microsoft says this PC falls within the usable parameters, it was far from it.
So I acquired a new PC to put Vista Business on – an HP with an Athlon 64 X2 processor, 2Gb of RAM, 400Gb Hard Drive and a 256Mb Video card. Should be a speed demon right? No. Loaded with Vista Business, it was no faster then my 8 year old box running XP.
I love a good puzzle, so instead of just wiping it and installing “Red Hat Enterprise 5”, I started to look for all the speed tweaks. Ya. Ok. Not. While MS Vista looks really cool, it is functionally retarded (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). Everything takes twice as long to get into, has extra security hoops and more check boxes than ever before.
So I started with the security and turned OFF that annoying “are you really, really sure you want to do that thing that you just clicked with the intention of actually doing something” message. This is also knows as “User Account control”. Turning this off seemed to make most of the system much faster right away. However, there are still the periodic delays when I open, well, anything. Many times when I open a folder, the mouse pointer turns into a green spiral that turns like a clock, obviously timing the opening of an event like the Hourglass used to do. I have to assume this has something to do with indexing files, but it often just stays there, for hours.
Don’t even get me started on the networking issues – I have a Red Hat server and a mixed bag of clients that are Win 98, Win XP, Linux and now Vista. Guess which one I have the most connection problems with. Once I made it through all the hoops to make the connection to the SMB share on my Linux server I thought it would be OK, but even though it is mapped and the credentials are saved, Vista still makes me log in to view files where it was automatic with ‘XP and transparent in ’98. Most of my old remote access tools don’t work and Remote Desktop is a complete write-off.
So now what? XP is dead and Vista is the current standard OS from Microsoft, and any new software I build needs to support it, so I HAVE to make this puppy work… somehow…. I’ll dig in deeper and let you know how it turns out….
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Moving on....
Hello ......
For any one out there who has been waiting patiently for me to return to the blog-o-sphere... I'm BACK!
Ya - I know - It's been 4 years! The last post to my old-style "blog" was July 2004 [ http://mairs.ca/tom/writing.php ] - it seems like yesterday. Well, enough of this working for a living stuff... I'm moving on to more important things like writing and playing in the sand.
I'm in the process of rebuilding all the associated web sites, moving to this "new" blog format, and adding Cell Access, RSS, and other goodies.
Watch this space for more soon.
Ciao!
For any one out there who has been waiting patiently for me to return to the blog-o-sphere... I'm BACK!
Ya - I know - It's been 4 years! The last post to my old-style "blog" was July 2004 [ http://mairs.ca/tom/writing.php ] - it seems like yesterday. Well, enough of this working for a living stuff... I'm moving on to more important things like writing and playing in the sand.
I'm in the process of rebuilding all the associated web sites, moving to this "new" blog format, and adding Cell Access, RSS, and other goodies.
Watch this space for more soon.
Ciao!
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