My primary desktop computer, a 4+ year-old VAIO, had been flaky for months. I’d replaced the power supply, re-glued the north bridge heat sink to the chip, re-installed XP, and so forth. So I happily replaced it with a Vostro 200. It was time to try Vista (Home Premium) seriously. But not without a safety net, the ability to multi-boot to XP if/when necessary.
Supposedly there are still zillions of us running NT4 Server. Windows Server 2008 might almost be attractive enough to make us want to upgrade and get back in the realm of software supported by Microsoft. I would think Microsoft would want to make that easy to do, to upgrade directly from NT4 to the newest edition. But somewhere, it appears that some decision maker thought out loud “We could do it, but it would be wrong.”
Supposedly there are still zillions of us running NT4 Server. Windows Server 2008 might almost be attractive enough to make us want to upgrade and get back in the realm of software supported by Microsoft. I would think Microsoft would want to make that easy to do, to upgrade directly from NT4 to the newest edition. But somewhere, it appears that some decision maker thought out loud “We could do it, but it would be wrong.”
Yesterday, Avistar issued a press release: Fourteen of Microsoft Re-examination Challenges of Avistar’s U.S. Patents Rejected by U.S. Patent Office. Various reports followed, counting nine re-exam requests that had been determined for re-exam by the U.S. PTO, e.g., Avistar 14, Microsoft 9 in patent re-examination battle; shares jump. Since there were a total of 29 reported filings by Microsoft, that appears to leave six requests that have neither been rejected nor determined for re-exam. (The reported 21 cent jump in AVSR share price from below a dollar to $1.18, might actually be the biggest news, given the NASDAQ ramifications of share prices less than a dollar.)
In spite of lamenting the seeming likelihood that Fedora 9 would not handle simple routing well enough for production deployment in a VMware Server (1.0.5) environment, I now have Fedora 9 deployed in such a production environment, without major problems.
I just read another blog post bemoaning Vista, with a commenter saying they would never use Vista. If you haven’t read posts and stories like that, you probably don’t need to read this perspective.
Thursday, Caroline and I traveled to Richardson (heart of the Dallas “telecom corridor”) to see her father and record his bi-weekly gig. I hadn’t done much with the equipment or Cubase since the trip last year. Setting up the equipment and the actual recording seemed to go smoothly, but I should have been better prepared, for monitoring the recording and better framing the video with the camera.
Thursday, Caroline and I traveled to Richardson (heart of the Dallas “telecom corridor”) to see her father and record his bi-weekly gig. I hadn’t done much with the equipment or Cubase since the trip last year. Setting up the equipment and the actual recording seemed to go smoothly, but I should have been better prepared, for monitoring the recording and better framing the video with the camera.
I diverted time away from working with Windows Server 2008 to check out the latest edition of Fedora, released last week. I routinely check out new editions of Fedora when released and put them into production soon afterward. Preliminary reports, e.g., Fedora 9 - an OS that even the Linux challenged can love, made this edition sound at least as promising as usual. Fedora 9 is promising. But it seems doubtful that Linux newbies will find Fedora 9 lovable. If Fedora 9 is comparable to sliced bread, the slices are uneven.
Microsoft supported Windows NT4 Server from release to manufacturing in 1996 to the last fixes in 2004. Astonishing numbers of servers reportedly still run NT4 Server, including two that I manage: one is a file/print/directory server and the other is a hot spare for the first one. Both are behind a firewall, and neither is used for email or browsing or other applications likely to be vulnerable to Internet compromise. They’re mostly trouble free. So if it ain’t broke, why fix??