gravo: to oppress, burden, make suffer.

Now that SP1 for Vista has been released and given some time to settle in, I felt it was time to take the plunge. I’d heard good things about how it was now the OS it always should have been and that manufacturers had actually started releasing drivers for it.

So with that in mind I jumped in with open arms ready to embrace and worship it as the next OS overlord and do you know what? I haven’t been disappointed once.

The problems first started when it wouldn’t let me run the Aero theme, one of the key selling points of vista. This wasn’t down to a lack of memory (2.5GB) or processing power (P4 3Ghz) but my graphics card, fair enough its probably pushing 4 years old but there is a proper vista driver for it at least. The trouble is that Ubuntu had absolutely no problem giving me visual effects that put Vista to shame.

Next there was User Access Control or UAC for short. The idea is that most of the time you just run with normal account privileges and get true admin rights when you really need it. Well done MS you’ve finally done what your competitors have been doing for so many years that even Noah was using the sudo command when he was designing his Ark. While we’re on the subject of sudo I’d like to ask MS a question. ‘Microsoft, where the fuck is the sudo equivalent on Vista, because no one can sodding find it?’ I’ll answer this one on behalf of MS because I don’t think they’ll get back to me ‘There is no sudo command. the work around is to run the cmd prompt as an administrator’. So I’ve either got to start a new cmd process as an admin when I want ‘root’ access or always run it as an administrator and risk accidently stuffing up my system.

(on a side note wordress has just lost the rest of the post from here on so you’ll excuse me if the tone is a bit more pissed off from here)

Now I’d like to say that I’m finished with UAC but unfortunately I’m not. I can live with it always prompting me to say that what I’m doing needs admin rights and do I want to continue, even when I’ve told it to run as an administrator and I can just about overlook it taking over half an hour to install a 5mb program all because it was hiding a ‘You must run this as an admin’ window and I do mean hiding it, so much so that a new error screen came up telling me that there was a hidden window that required action and did I want to view it. But the final straw for UAC was when it wouldn’t let me rename an empty folder on the desktop telling me in an endless loop that I needed to be admin to do it and then telling me I couldn’t rename it because I needed to be a member of the administrator group, even though I was. It did however let me delete it.

So that’s two of Vista’s key selling points that don’t work properly (UAC and Aero)

Next on the list is Media player 11. This one is quite simple it doesn’t work. Yes it will run and play videos but they are jerky and the audio sync is always out. I initially thought that this was down to Vista over stretching my machine but Media Player Classic has no such problem and runs beautifully. Also whenever I go into a folder with video’s in I get a big error message popup essentially saying that it’s crashed trying to create a preview of the video. Oh and embedded videos don’t always display video as well as audio so there goes all of my CBT nuggets training videos that cost me a fortune.

That’s three of the main features down now (UAC, Aero and Media Player 11)

Now I come on to the sidebar which HAS worked flawlessly. You do however need a lot of screen real estate for it. It’s OK’ish on my 17″ widescreen laptop and as I have three monitors on my work PC (which is the machine I’m basing this post on) there’s loads of room for it. The problem is hardly anyone has done anything with it, even Microsoft. It would be amazing if there was a ‘gadget’ to monitor the servers from the side panel or at least some useful status information.

That’s now 4 fails (UAC, Aero, Media player 11 and the Sidebar)

I’m going to ignore Vista’s inability to play any of the games I’ve tried to play on it as this is a work machine and I’d obviously never play games at work cough yeah right cough.

I shall also pass over the sometimes incredibly slow file copies simply because I’m starting to get depressed with all of this negativity.

I will give you a very good reason why Vista hasn’t had a good take up by businesses and it’ not because of the hardware requirements or the price or because it doesn’t really offer any thing new. It’s because the first people to use a new OS in a business are the IT guys and if their day to day tools don’t work properly on it they aren’t going to use it. The adminpak tools suite for managing Active directory and other server services doesn’t work out of the box (TechNet does tell you how to make it work and even provides a batch file to do all of the work for you, but good luck on trying to find that article especially if you didn’t now to look for it in the first place) The SMS console does install as long as you do it from the SP3 CD not that they tell you that either. To get the exchange tabs in active directory users and computers you have to copy several files from the exchange server and register dll’s, this as far as I’m aware is not documented by Microsoft. Exchange System manager won’t work if you have Outlook installed as well, as they use conflicting protocols.

Best of all do you know what Microsoft’s work around for all of those problems is? Remote desktop on to the server and do all of the work from there. That’s like buying a new car and on discovering that there’s no steering wheel the manufacturer telling you to just use the bus.

You’ll remember that in the second paragraph I said I wasn’t disappointed by Vista on a single occasion. This is because I expected to have all of these problems from the outset. I haven’t even touched on the normal problems of trying to find drivers (it was actually quicker to get Mac OS X working than it was to get Vista working on this machine)

There is an upside to all of this though. There now isn’t a single reason that I should carry on using any Microsoft desktop OS. The admin tools that I mentioned earlier were the thing that kept me a faithful slave to windows and if the official answer is to remote desktop on to the server  to use the tools then I’m free. Free to use almost any OS I choose. Linux has an RDP client so does OS X, my iPAQ, my XDA and even my iPhone.

In conclusion I must thank and congratulate Microsoft for creating such an epically pointless and shite operating system. I could go on and talk about some of the other problems of vista or that the RDP solution doesn’t scale, not without spending more money anyway. I could also step in front of a moving bus but I won’t be doing that either.

In fact I’m writing this from it now, in the garden drinking Pimms Although it doesn’t seem to like making new posts through wordpress.

In true teen magazine style I bring you ‘Things I envy about my friends’ in no particular order.

Those I’ve you missing from the list will apear in part 2 of ‘Things I en…’ due for release just after Duke Nukem Forever

this post has been brought to you by the letter P and trying not to Piss off my friends. It would however have been funnier had the letter F for fuck ‘em I’m ripping the piss presented it.

You may be forgiven for thinking that you’ve accidentally browsed to Mr Roobottoms site, but bear with me (I hate that phrase by the way).

Turns out the Bible has got some crazy assed shit in it.

We’ll start today’s sermon with a reading from Exodus 2:11-22 (New International Version)

11 One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. 12 Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?”

14 The man said, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “What I did must have become known.”

15 When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well. 16 Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock. 17 Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock.

18 When the girls returned to Reuel their father, he asked them, “Why have you returned so early today?”

19 They answered, “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock.”

20 “And where is he?” he asked his daughters. “Why did you leave him? Invite him to have something to eat.”

21 Moses agreed to stay with the man, who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. 22 Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom, [b] saying, “I have become an alien in a foreign land.”

Now allow me to surmise that. Moses, seeing his people being beaten, checked there was no one around and got all medieval on his Egyptian ass then buried the mutilated remains in the sand.

Turns out that some local do-gooder tossers had seen him and started giving him shit. Fortunately for them, all that killing had given him some major league horn so he blew them of and went in search of pussy.

After several lines of Columbian marching powder and half a pint of Whisky (wine is fine but whisky’s quicker as Ozzy once sang)  he had the luck to come across SEVEN FUCKING SISTERS and ‘did know them’ in a massive incestuous orgy. That however was where his luck ran out and he got one of them up the duff after some serious bare back action. Being a good man at heart he married her.

The End.

Now I’ll be the first to admit it’s got a crap ending but I’m telling you, I wouldn’t mind going drinking with Moses.

It would seam to me that the moral of that particular story is that It’s cool to kill and womanise. Sorry did I miss something?

As some one somewhere once wrote, Martin Luther King may have had a dream, but Moses had a body count.

And don’t get me started on 2 Kings 2:23-24

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

That’s right FUCKING BEARS ATE FORTY TWO CHAVS for shouting at some old guy.

Now please, no body have a sense of humour failure on me

Some people say apathy kills. Personally, I don’t care.

I’ll rephrase that in case you think I’m American; Do they a) Read George Orwell and b) understand the irony of this?

No my keyboard hasn’t shrunk.