Naxxfish

A question I’ve heard a lot recently.

Recently Microsoft announced that Vista is going to be released to the world in January, and to VLK users (companies and the such) later in November. But is it ready yet?

I’m not sure, to be honest. I’ve experienced Vista in a couple of guises, on a laptop I’m currently borrowing from a friend and on his laptop. It seems stable enough for everyday use – no show stoppers as far as I’ve seen. The only thing that got on the wrong side of me was the new security – more on that later. Aero is nice, but not entirely nececary.

It’s a shame that the main feature they promised went out of the Window(s). WinFS would have been very nice – they have ended up using NTFS and “emulating” the features of WinFS – that being the Virtual folders and such. I would have loved to see a nice implementation of SQL Server like filesystem, being much more efficient and better at storing things than most Windows filesystems are currently. Fragmentation would have never been a problem with WinFS – or so it seems. So we’re stuck with NTFS for a while to come. It’d be interesting to see if the next Server product ships with the new filesystem – as I think the main benefit will be seen in high I/O applications such as you might see on a server.

Dave from shellrevealed.com shows a few other features which were removed before release.

My take on this? My machine isn’t good enough to run Vista, so I’m not going to bother trying And I’m not going to be getting a new PC any time soon, perhaps a new laptop but I certainly won’t be aiming to run Vista on it. If I get a bargain and a laptop capable of running Vista, great, but if not I could care less.

Whilst having a lunch break at work this weekend something occurred to me. The Blogosphere as we know it had an unknown predecessor without the RSS, XML and database powered posting and commenting that we have today.

London Taxi drivers.

Unlike other social networks, taxi drivers are more similar to the blogosphere for one main reason. They “publish”. Other social networks generally keep their information to themselves, even if it is of interest to the public. Taxi drivers on the other hand talk to their fares – that is, the unsuspecting public. Most of the time their fares will just be passive and listen (or ignore) the drivers rants and raves. That is your average blog visitor. Others will engage with the drivers and tell them what they think. That is a blog commenter.

Then, when the drivers are off duty they’ll talk to each other and exchange information, and then they will talk to their fares about the information they have absorbed from other drivers, adding their own views.

See the similarities?

This is what keeps me entertained whilst at work, that and playing with Norton Internet Security boxes….