I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
Five reasons why Windows Vista failed
October 21, 2008
It’s probably a tad premature to claim that Windows Vista has completely failed, as a market venture and as a product. But it does have a number of problems with it, and Jason Hiner enumerates these handily. Some of them are fairly obvious — Apple did an absolutely stellar hit job on Vista with their “I’m a Mac” advertising campaign, for example. Others aren’t perhaps as obvious to some — people in the IT industry, myself included, are fairly aware of the fact that Windows XP has nearly a billion users world-wide, and so is very “locked in.” People outside the industry, however, may not be aware of that fact.
But I find I most agree with Hines on his #1 reason: Vista breaks things and, what is more, makes security into a frustration. By comparison, Windows XP is fairly easy to both secure initially, and to keep secure. And on the odd time when one does get into trouble, one can actually run the software necessary to regain control of the system without being thwarted by the OS itself.
After Windows was targeted by a nasty string of viruses, worms, and malware in the early 2000s, Microsoft embarked on the Trustworthy Computing initiative to make its products more secure. One of the results was Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), which won over IT and paved the way for XP to become the world’s mostly widely deployed OS.
The other big piece of Trustworthy Computing was the even-further-locked-down version of Windows that Microsoft released in Vista. This was definitely the most secure OS that Microsoft had ever released but the price was user-hostile features such as UAC, a far more complicated set of security prompts that accompanied many basic tasks, and a host of software incompatibility issues. In order words, Vista broke a lot of the things that users were used to doing in XP.
Related: if, O Reader, you are a Vista user…for the love of Pete, please disable UAC before calling your buddy to come over and troubleshoot the system for you. It’s just such a nuisance.
