Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

If you have been living under a small rock over the past few days, then you may not have realised the furore surrounding yet another flaw in a Microsoft product.

Corporations all over the world have been warned to stay away from Internet Explorer version 6, including our very own government. The figures published from another Guardian article outlines just how badly organisations in the public sector need to update their software. I am particularly fond of this:

“More than 750,000 workstations in the NHS and 500,000 in the Department of Work and Pensions use exactly that combination… The DWP installation of IE6/XP in 2002/3 took a total of three years…”

The private sector is not any better. From my own personal experience, businesses still use Internet Explorer 6. It’s almost like a safety blanket that is difficult to let go of. Version 6 has been a browser staple for many years and investing time and effort to roll out new versions is sometimes considered not a priority. Using other browsers is difficult, as Internet Explorer is the main product for domain integration such as the use of group policies.

For many, this is a lesson learned but perhaps a little too late. Details of  the MS10-002 security bulletin issued by Microsoft can be found here.

Tech IE6 vulnerability, Internet Explorer, Microsoft

It is with a tear of sadness that the sublime Flight Simulator series by Microsoft could come to an abrupt end. My guessing is that its part of their redundancy policy, with profits down they had to make cuts somewhere. Therefore, they decided to lay off the entire development team for the series at ACES Studio, to be honest I think they are making a big mistake. The first ever Flight Simulator was released in 1982, arguably this is one of the longest running series in the game industry (although Final Fantasy also seems to be endless these days).

Fast forward a decade or two, and we are currently on Flight Simulator X. I do like this a lot, with the graphics settings bumped to maximum, some of the scenery you get to fly through is breathtakingly spectacular. In my book, this is one of the few decent games that Microsoft has produced and now it’s gone. They have essentially axed a product line that had a massive following and spawned so many add-ons that you could pretty much fly anything to anywhere. The realism is bar none, you can even play the part of Air Traffic Control in multiplayer mode. Unbelievably, this is actually quite fun, especially if you decide to make a slight deviation to a Boeing 747… directly into the path of a hapless Cessna.

Another series that disappeared into the ether was Combat Flight Simulator. If you find FS slightly snooze worthy, then CFS is the one you want. The dogfights were great and the campaigns were very lengthy, especially in CFS 2. But there’s nothing more gratifying than finally reaching Berlin if you play the Allied campaign, zooming around in your Spitfire for the final attack with guns blazing.

My hope is that the brand will be outsourced to a third party developer; it would be unthinkable for Microsoft to completely shelve this, although version X still has a lot of life left in it. I’m sure I will get over it though, the impending release of Final Fantasy XIII and Starcraft 2 will keep me happy. Especially when Starcraft 2 is released, I may not see daylight for a while.

Games ACES Studio, Flight Simulator, Microsoft

This is an overview of the interface in Windows 7, and the new things they have introduced. Microsoft has said this is close to the final release, so what we see here will be fairly close to the real thing. Let’s take a look shall we?


Install
It took slightly less than an hour or so to install, nothing too speedy. As per Vista, it will detect SATA drives from the get go but you may need drivers for additional RAID support. Fairly standard and straight forward, the file extracting seemed to take a long time and it may sit at 0% for a while before it springs to life. It takes up 8.7gb of your hard disk space, yikes.

Interface
If you were looking for something radically different then think again, because it looks almost exactly like Vista. Aero is still there, I tried to get it to work in VMWare but had no joy. You need to make an amendment to the .vmx file by adding a couple of lines, to enable Direct3D:

mks.enable3d = “TRUE”
svga.vramSize = “16708800″

Unfortunately Aero still did not work, probably because of the limitations of the VMWare graphics driver. There is not much to see anyway as it is looks like the Aero in Vista. By the way, make sure only a single monitor is enabled in the VM settings or else Direct3D auto disables itself.

They have done away with the sidebar and all gadgets will float on your desktop with no docking. The taskbar looks slightly different, with larger icons which are moveable left/right so you can sort all shortcuts/open programs. It has been noted that this is one of the highlights of the new operating system, when you open a program, an icon will sit on the taskbar as per normal. However, you can right click to pin it, creating a shortcut on the taskbar. Also right clicking brings up a dynamic context menu, which gives you additional options for the program. By default, it is set to icon only which can be grouped together like a deck of cards. You can however change this to get the old style. Microsoft mentioned this is to take away the differentiation between shortcuts and running programs, to create a more fluid experience. I do like this, it creates less clutter on the taskbar, as a shortcut instance is “reused” so that you can click on the same icon to control the opened program such as close window etc.

I really don’t like how Control Panel looks now, the classic view is gone and the only thing close to it is to view all Control Panel items which has a different layout. For media content, everything is called “Libraries” where all your videos and pictures are held. Even if you have multiple folders for your content, you can add multiple locations in the library so that you can access them from one place. The Switch Between Windows function in Vista also seems to be absent in 7, I hardly used it myself so no loss there. There are also some additional icon animations when you mouse over, which look aesthetically pleasing.

Features and Functionality
I had a poke around firstly with the Windows Firewall. It looks much better now and gives the user more control for opening ports for incoming and outgoing. Actually, Inbound and Outbound rules did exist in Vista… it’s just that you had to run Local Security Policy (secpol.msc) to get to it, and the average Joe Bloggs isn’t going to know about that. Now it is easily accessible and gives you wider control, about time too. The file system is still the same, WinFS was thrown around as a replacement for NTFS when Vista was first introduced but later dropped. I assume Microsoft is no longer pursuing this for the time being, as it is still NTFS.

In Control Panel, there are additional options available. Most notably, the support for Biometric Devices is available which can be used for things like fingerprint recognition to log onto Windows. As with many Windows iterations, Microsoft likes to change the name of things. Security Center is now called Action Center, something that doesn’t change however is the obligatory nagging that you do not have Windows Updates setup, or if you do not have an antivirus program installed. Thank you Big Brother. User Access Control (UAC) is also still there, extremely annoying and for someone like myself that knows what they are doing I would turn this off. HomeGroup is similar to creating a workgroup within your home network, for sharing files etc with other computers.

The Network Access Protection agent is still here, I first saw this built in Vista and they have carried this across. It’s a way to check against remote users or for example users connected wirelessly, to see if they have full compliance such as an up to date AV software install, a software firewall enabled etc. If the check fails, then the client can be placed in a quarantine area so that they do not connect to the network until they are fully compliant. I’m not sure how widely adopted this is, if you VPN into a corporate network a group policy is generally enforced anyway plus all the other security lockdowns you can implement without touching NAP.

So, is it worth upgrading?
It really depends on what they have to offer over Vista. Only time will tell whether this is more stable or if they can provide good enough backward compatibility for software. To be honest, what is the point? People are still clinging onto XP and Microsoft is trying their utmost to tear them away from it. I am not sure whether this is the answer though, they should have skipped Vista altogether and came out with this in the first place. I would need to use this more to see whether I would like it, also I need to do some benchmarking which I will post over the next few days. But so far, this effort from Microsoft isn’t as revolutionary as it should be.

Here are some screenshots:

Tech Microsoft, Windows 7 beta

To be honest, I’m not sure and I can’t make any firm judgements as yet. I have installed it at work on several machines so that I could have a play, except I have had to put it aside for the moment as work snowballs and there just aren’t enough hours in the day. So I decided to install this at home although I have to download the ISO again because someone has kidnapped the DVD from my desk. The 3 things that go missing at work are pens, Post-It notes and DVDs. Especially pens, but before I go into a stationary rant let’s get back on track…

Avoidance in machine trashing is definitely in order, considering this is a beta the best way is to run it in VMWare initially. I get the pleasure of trying the 32bit and 64bit versions, it will be interesting to see how good the 64bit one will utilise all 4 CPU cores on my machine. If all goes well, I have a spare hard drive waiting in the wings to install for real *fingers crossed*.

I am not expecting any great leaps from this new Windows iteration, the main thing I am interested in is performance optimisation. I do not want to find out I need to install 8gb of RAM just to open Notepad. My conclusions will be posted after a few bench tests.

The download expires on 1st August 2009 and only the first 2.5 million users get the privilege. You can grab it here. Don’t expect to be installing this anytime soon, as Microsoft is buckling under the amount of bandwidth that is hitting their servers. I think it is time to make a cup of tea then while I wait.

Footnote: I absolve myself from all responsibility for anyone wanting to install this. Use at your own risk!

Tech Microsoft, Windows 7 beta