Background When I joined the Windows setup team in late 2000, just ahead of Windows Whistler Beta 2 (the OSs you know as Windows XP and it’s belated sibling, Windows Server 2003), Windows was in this odd limbo when it came to how the OS was put down onto new or existing Windows PCs. Legacy Windows setup and upgrade – how consumers and many smaller businesses would roll out releases of Windows Third-party imaging – where tools would apply a preconfigured image…
It has long been said that from 1973 to 1983, the American automotive industry was stuck in a rut that is now referred to as the Malaise Era. This period of time, marked by some of the most underwhelming, gutless, depressing cars ever to come out of the United States, was bookended on the frontside by the energy crisis and the need for manufacturers who had focused purely on displacement and horsepower to shift their thinking to focus instead on…
I’ve worked around Microsoft licensing for almost 7 years at my current employer, but even when I was doing Web development back in the 1990’s, Microsoft’s licensing —particularly for SQL Server—was infamous for its complexity, or at least for how hard it was for someone new to the realm to wrap their head around. The more things change, the more they stay the same; Microsoft is still (in)famous for the complexity of their enterprise software licensing rules. I compiled a…
A few months ago, before Microsoft announced their new Surface Laptop or Windows 10 S, I had several conversations with reporters and friends about what might be coming. In particular, some early reports had hinted that this might be a revision of Windows, something designed for robustness. Some thought it might be more Chromebook-like. Given the experiences of my daughters with Chromebooks, those last two sentences are oxymorons. But I digress. What arrived, Windows 10 S (AKA “Windows 10 Pro in…
Yesterday, when I heard the news from Microsoft’s WinHEC announcements stating, “Windows 10 is coming to ARM through a partnership with Qualcomm”, my brain went through a set of loops, trying to get what this really was, and what it really meant. Sure, most of us have seen the leaks over the past few weeks about x86 on ARM, but I hadn’t seen enough to find much signal in the noise as to what this was. But now that I’ve thought about it,…
A bit ago, this blog post crossed my Twitter feed. I read it, and while the schadenfreude made me smirk for a minute, it eventually made me feel bad. The blog post purports to describe how a shitty shutdown dialog became a shitty shutdown dialog. But instead, it documents something I like to call “too many puppies” syndrome. If you are working on high visibility areas of a product – like the Windows Shell – like Explorer in particular, everybody…
A few years ago, following the success of many other HDMI-connected computing devices, a new type of PC arrived – the “compute stick”. Also referred to sometimes as an HDMI PC or a stick PC, the device immediately made me scratch my head a bit. If Windows 10 still featured a Media Center edition, I guess I could sort of see the point. But Windows, outside of Surface Hub (which seemingly runs a proprietary edition of Windows), no longer features…
0.12 of a pound less in weight. 0.6 inches more in display area. That’s all that separates the iPad Pro from the Surface Pro (lightest model of each). Add in the fact that both feature the modifier “Pro” in their name, and that they look kind of similar, and it’s hard to not invite comparisons, right? (Of course, what tablets in 2016 don’t look like tablets?) Over the past few weeks, several reports have suggested that perhaps Apple’s Tablet Grande…
This NYTimes article about the VW diesel issue and the DMCA made me think about how, 10 years ago next month, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) almost kept Mark Russinovich from disclosing the Sony BMG Rootkit. While the DMCA provides exceptions for reporting security vulnerabilities, it does nothing to allow for reporting breaches of… integrity. I believe that we need to consider an expansion of how researchers are permitted to, without question, reverse engineer certain systems. While entities need a…
It’s become apparent that there’s some confusion between Microsoft’s Continuum feature in Windows 10, and Apple’s Continuity feature in OS X. I’ve even heard technical people get them confused. But to be honest, the letters comprising “Continu” are basically all they have in common. In addition to different (but confusingly similar) names, the two features are platform exclusive to their respective platform, and perform completely different tasks that are interesting to consider in light of how each company makes money….