Legacy Pains

Remember this Bill Gates quote?

It's obviously my role to ask people, 'Hey, let's not throw things out we shouldn't throw out. Let's keep things in that we can keep in.'

Bill was talking about the rewriting of Vista from scratch. Except it wasn't quite from scratch..

And now, it looks like at least one company has bypassed Microsoft's Vista security:

The company specifically said that it is using an element of the kernel meant to help the OS support older hardware to bypass the [ kernel security ] feature. The loophole allows the company's tools to infiltrate Vista's kernel hooking driver, and get out, without the OS knowing the difference.

Insert evil laugh here.

Everywhere I go, people are sick of Microsoft. Sick of the problems, sick of the incessant viruses, sick of the whole thing.

It's not perfect over here in Unix/Linux land and there is no doubt that there are people trying to make it just as bad here. But right now, right here, sitting in Mac OS X or Linux is a far, far better place to be.

I'm heading out this morning to look at a Windows network that suddenly cannot print to network printers. The Unix and Linux machines in that office are still happy to print, but suddenly none of the Windows boxes think that's possible. Ain't that special? We tried the usual things over the phone, but no luck: I need to go see it up close and personal. It's a tremendous waste of my time and the customer's money.

Oh well: maybe we're getting closer to a sea change. Maybe Microsoft is getting closer to being just a footnote in computer history. I'd sure be happy if that works out.

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2 comments

Fri Oct 27 18:02:53 2006: 2559   TonyLawrence


Well, I still don't know what Window's problems are: the machines just would not see shared printers. Often Windows gets stubborn like that: if a share was even momentarily unavailable, Windows can get convinced that it never will be available. But usually reboots will fix that.. not in this case though.

So, to restore printing, I just deleted the share connections and added the printers back as direct tcp/ip port 9100 printers. I had to do that individually on each machine, but it's a small office..

Stupid Windows :-)



Sun Oct 29 04:55:30 2006: 2562   BigDumbDinosaur


The problem might be due to the local master browser not updating the browse list often enough. Is this one of those situations where one of the PC's is designated as the "server?"

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