Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about Jim Gray, one of Microsoft’s best and brightest minds in database development.  (Jim is currently the target of a massive search & rescue after failing to return from a sailing trip on time – I wish his family the best)

Jim was recognized as the world’s thought leader in database development.  Formerly an IBM Researcher, Jim has been very important in the development and advancement of SQL Server technology at Microsoft.  The rearchitecture of SQL Server from 6.5 to 7.0 and beyond was driven by Jim Gray’s guidance.

Microsoft has a lot of famous employees within it’s ranks.  I’ve even met a few folks that wrote the very software that I used back in the BBS days.  Here’s a short list of some of the folks that I’m aware of.  I hope you find this interesting:

• Alexey Pajitnov – Famed Russian Puzzle Designer & Creator of Tetris
• Jim Gray – Father of the Modern Database & Pioneer in Database Scalability
• Rakesh Agrawal – Inventor of modern Data Mining (TechFellow – Search Labs)
• Peter Molyneux – Video Game Luminary, founder of Lionhead Studios
• Ray Ozzie – Co-creator of Lotus Notes & Groove Networks
• Jean Paoli – Co-Creator of the industry XML 1.0 Standard
• Richard Garfield – Creator of Magic the Gathering
• Scott Isaacs – Co-creator of AJAX development & DHTML standards
• Ryan Parsell – Creator of Spaces, the world’s largest scalable blogging system
• Dave Cutler – Creator of Windows NT & VAX/VMS
• Jim Allchin – Father of Enterprise Directory Services, former directory services lead at Banyan
• Tim Patterson, Creator of DOS & minimum memory programming technology
• Gordon Bell – Foremost Scalable Systems Reseacher
• Anders Hejlsberg – Creator of Delphi & father of C#
• Mark Russonovich – Industry-recognized Windows Kernel & Internals expert
• Michael H. Freedman – Pioneer in Quantum Computing research
• Jim T. Kajiya – Pioneer of Modern Parallel Computing
• Yousef Khalidi – Chief Architect of Sun Solaris & UNIX Clustering
• Roy Levin – Lead developer of first Object Oriented Programming, Principal Scientist of Xerox PARC
• Tarek Najm – Father of Microsoft’s adCenter, Recognized leader in advertising platforms research
• Eric Traut – Thought leader in Virtual Machine Technology, creator of various virtual machine engines, created Apple’s 680×0 emulator for PowerPC, Sony Playstation emulator for PS2, etc.
• Anders Vinberg – Father of CA Unicenter
• Chuck Thacker – Co-Inventor of Ethernet-based networking, former Xerox PARC Researcher

Here’s an interview by Newsweek’s Steven Levy with Bill Gates on the topic of Windows Vista’s value, what bugs him about Apple’s advertisements, and the history of naysayers declaring the "impending death of Windows".

Best quote of the article:

Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?
I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

Testify, Bill.  I’ll add something else that I’ve said it once before & I’ll say it again:

Contrary to implications made by organizations like Apple, you do not need to buy a new computer or embark on a massive hardware upgrade in order to realize the most significant benefits of Windows Vista.  

Windows Vista is simply easier, safer, mobile, a lot more fun, & empowers and entirely new generation of great applications.

Incidentally, it dawned on me that Apple’s current "Anti-Windows Vista" campaign is remarkably similar to their "Apple Switch" campaign from 3-4 years back – a campaign that during which, Apple lost more than 1% of the worldwide personal computer marketshare in both business as well as consumer spaces… and that’s before the worldwide release of Windows Vista.

LINK:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16934083/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/

Has anyone else run into problems using Acrobat Reader 8.0 with Windows Vista?

Weird.  I loaded up version 7.08 just fine on the release bits for Windows Vista, but when people try to load version 8.0 from the Adobe Web Site, the supposed "Windows Vista" version, it freezes after you double click the installation executable.  It’s happened to 4 people I know now and that’s from directly off the Adobe download page.

If you’d like a copy of the 7.08 version that I know works, here’s the install executable:
http://www.evilkoala.org/download/2_AdbeRdr708_en_US.exe

In the mean time, I’m going to try to figure out what’s going on here with v8.0… not that I care actually, being that I’ve never needed any feature of Adobe Acrobat Reader other than… well… to read basic .PDFs.

Hey Kurt.  So why did you want to load Acrobat Reader in the first place?  I thought you didn’t generally like .PDFs?

Well, there’s a document online that I wanted to parse through that was in .PDF format:  It’s the patent application for Zune and describes the details of our patent around a WiFi connected media player.
http://www.cliczune.com/2006/10/zune_review_yo_.html

I was curious as to whether they’d mention that the device is driven by WINDOWS CE – because it is, just as Windows Mobile-based cell phones are and Thin Client terminals.  I haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere though – including the patent document.

Oh well.

Wow.  This is a pretty important point here that I haven’t seen discussed much.  My customer pointed this out and I’m currently reviewing it and validating this information internally with it’s sources.

My customer commented that this isn’t exactly well documented although it’s a very important point:  the insertion/slipstreaming of hotfixes into an existing Windows Vista .WIM image is a very important process that needs to be better documented… at least somewhere other than a Australian Microsoft employee’s blog.  (Thanks to Michael Kleef for raising this point.)

Hotfix Injection into an Offline Windows Vista Image

I raised this at the Ready Tour when I presented on Windows Deployment Services but I just wanted to discuss it again.

Theres been conflicting information presented around whether hotfixes and service packs can be inserted into a WIM image thats been mounted up. The basic guidance is that if you can open the hotfix such as with the process below then it works. If the service pack, application or hotfix is in an MSI format or an executable then it cant and must be installed "online" which equates to an installed running Vista OS.

Process: Once the image has been mounted RW or applied, you need to expand the hotfix package to a temp folder such as expand qfe.msu –f:* c:temp, then use pkgmgr to apply:
(start /w pkgmgr /n:c:tempqfe.xml /o:”c:;c:windows” /s:c:sandbox).

You can check if it is successfully by using echo %errorlevel% command. If return value is 0, then it’s good.

Credits for the process: John Liu (OEM Engineering).

LINK:  http://blogs.technet.com/mkleef/archive/2007/01/22/hotfix-injection-into-an-offline-image.aspx

Are you looking for a faster "time-to-insight" out of your computationally intensive applications such as those built on Microsoft® Excel?

Microsoft has the answer.

Microsoft® Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) brings the power of High Performance Computing (HPC) to the individual user, workgroup, department, and the enterprise.  Whether you are in analysis, compute-intensive application development or responsible for operations, Microsoft has a solution to meet the performance requirements for your company.

Join us to find out how to leverage CCS enabled infrastructure to optimize performance of applications. Hear about building Microsoft® Excel, Microsoft® Excel Services and Microsoft® SharePoint based solutions that leverage existing and new Microsoft technologies. Learn from industry experts, the Microsoft product team, and key partners about how these solutions can support your most strategic business objectives. 

Come to better understand what promises to become a widely adopted and easier to use HPC platform – Join us!

Sessions:

• 8:30 – 9:00am 
  Registration and continental breakfast
• 9:00am
  Welcome and Introduction
• 9:10 – 10:15am
  Taking HPC mainstream – CCS overview
• 10:15 – 10:30am
  Break
• 10:30 – 11:15am
  CCS scenarios for your business
• 11:15am – 12:00pm
  Compute intensive applications built on Excel and Excel Services
• 12:00 – 1:00pm
  Partner solutions for CCS (working lunch)
• 1:00 – 2:00pm
  Deploying and managing a Windows CCS cluster

WHEN: 
Tuesday, April 03, 2007 9:00 AM – Tuesday, April 03, 2007 2:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 8:30 AM

WHERE:
Hyatt Regency Irvine
17900 Jamboree Road
Irvine California 92614
United States
(949) 975-1234

REGISTER: 
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032326421&culture=en-US
(or call 1-877-673-8368 and quote Event ID# 1032326421)

Here you go:

1. DVD drive
2. 1GB RAM
3. 4GB storage 
4. 1Ghz CPU
5. …and if you want something that looks different visually from Windows XP:
   32MB video adapter.

That’s it.  Seriously.

"But Kurt!  What about Mr. TV/Radio/Blog expert that says I need 2GB RAM, 128MB video adapter, and a 2.3Ghz processor?"

They’re straight up WRONG.  They’ve likely installed Windows Vista once and it was a Beta or Release Candidate build when they did it, which wasn’t optimized for overall speed, optimal memory usage, or graphics performance.

WINDOWS VISTA DOESN’T NEED A NEW COMPUTER
That’s right.  I said it.  I’m calling them either inexperienced or purposefully deceptive to draw more attention to themselves knowing that "negative reporting" draws more viewers than "positive reporting".  It’s like a political election, with the candidates being supposed-IT-experts running for the office of advertising profitability.  I’m simply getting tired of people that are talking out of their butts claiming that Windows Vista requires some demonic transformation of your PC’s hardware in order to operate sufficiently or to "take fully advantage of the OS".  It doesn’t.  It just DOESN’T. 

EXAMPLE:  TOSHIBA TECRA M4
Take my Toshiba Tecra M4:  It’s a 1GB RAM, 2.0Ghz CPU, with 64MB VRAM and I’ve installed Windows Vista on it.  Sound familiar?  It should:  It’s the exact same configuration I used for Windows XP and it’s probably really close to what you have.  Even with Antivirus, MSN Instant messenger, Windows Defender, and all the trimmings, the thing never eclipses 300MB RAM used leaving the other 700MB for applications.  With Word 2007, Excel 2007, Powerpoint 2007, Outlook 2007 and a few Internet Explorer windows open, I eat up 400MB leaving 300MB of RAM free.

It’s what I’m using RIGHT NOW to type up this blog entry.

"But Kurt!  What about the fancy user interface?  And the fancy next generation applications?  Won’t I need all that speed & memory for all of that?"

YOU DON’T NEED 2GB RAM/MEMORY
For the last time:  NO.  Those applications run on a built in set of interfaces called .NET 3.0, which are a set of APIs that allow applications to take advantage of software already in the OS to get things done… like rendering 3D graphics, or sending/receiving communications from other computers, or creating AI decision trees for certain tasks – i.e. if the disc is 90% full, clear out the browser cache, otherwise defrag.

Because much of today’s existing applications have their programming incorporated into the OS, many next generation applications will require LESS memory since the OS already has the core technology in it to do the same tasks.

WHAT ABOUT VIDEO RAM?
As for the graphical interface, if you install Windows Vista on a 16-32MB video adapter, you’ll get virtually everything a 64MB video adapter would provide you except:

1. No Flip3D.  You won’t get any fancy 3D technology.  Oh boo hoo.
2. No "glass" effects, i.e. alpha blending.  The title bars on applications will not look opaque & transparent and instead of have normal-looking, solid backgrounds.
3. No monstrous 3D rendered games like Gears of War for Windows Vista.  But then again, you’d already have a fan cooled 128MB nVidea/ATI video adapter if you’ve been playing Quake 4 or Counterstrike competitively.  More to the point:  Everything that worked before in Windows XP with this level of Video RAM, should work just fine in Windows Vista barring compatibility issues.

Wait.  That’s it?  Yup.  That’s it.  That’s the ding you take with a 16-32MB video adapter.  You can still leverage Windows Vista applications, you can still get the best security available for Windows operating systems, you can still take advantage of all of the hardware you’ve already purchased… you can virtually get all the benefits of Windows Vista.  If you have less video memory, you’re likely not doing anything drastic on your laptop or PC and/or are looking to buy a new one anyway.

Bottom line:  YES, you can install and run Windows Vista on your existing hardware and take advantage of most, if not all, of its benefits.  I’d bet a Vegas marker on it.

I’m really proud of this.  The center really looks fantastic, is fully Internet connected, and it’ll give kids a great opportunity to experience computer technology in an area of Los Angeles that generally has little.  I went down there with my wife to purchase and bring in some furniture for the center on behalf of Microsoft and I have to say that everything there is state-of-the-art.  For the most part, the center is equiped with technology better than most of the equipment my own Fortune 100 customers use, meaning that it’ll have a long life span.

(We thought of everything:  We even made a point to ensure that there are extra replacement keyboards available knowing that keyboards tend to rapidly lose their keys in schools and libraries!)

Microsoft Donates $1 Million to the Oscar de la Hoya Foundation

On Monday, January 22 in Los Angeles, Microsoft announced a $1 million grant to the Oscar de la Hoya foundation for the renovation of his learning center which sits in the middle of one of Los Angeles’ most economically challenged neighborhoods.  

The lab represents the first fully Windows Vista-powered community center in the world.

In attendance were Oscar de la Hoya, José Huizar, 14th District Councilman and Chris Weber WR Vice President for a day of press activities that included more than a dozen one on one interviews with key local and national outlets and a ribbon cutting ceremony where we literally filled the room with cameras and reporters from the local press corps. In addition, students from the Oscar de la Hoya Charter High School were highlighting all the cool features of Windows Vista. 

Not only is this center is a safe haven for the kids, but also an environment for their parents to learn about technology- in their community!

The Microsoft Southern California team that helped put this effort together worked through every obstacle that appeared in their path totally renovating the Center with new furniture, Windows Vista-ready PCs and a new sign on the outside of the building: “The Oscar de la Hoya Foundation & Microsoft Unlimited Potential.”  This is the first phase of our partnership with the learning center. 

The opening of the center was the largest press event for Microsoft Southern California.  Some highlights of the opening’s media coverage included the Los Angeles Times, La Opinión, KTLA Morning Show Los Angeles, CW Morning Show San Diego, FOX 11 Los Angeles, Despierta America National (Univision Network), Al Rojo Vivo National (Telemundo Network), 710 ESPN radio with Dave Denholm and CNN Radio en Español, National and International.

• GOLDEN BOY PRODUCTIONS PRESS RELEASE:
  http://www.goldenboypromotions.com/media/2007/jan/1.22.07_lc_article.htm
• GOLDEN BOY PRODUCTIONS MEDIA PHOTOS:
  http://www.goldenboypromotions.com/media/1.22.07_lc.php
• MICROSOFT PRESS RELEASE:
  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jan07/01-22VistadelaHoyaPR.mspx

Here’s the ENTIRE 22 minute episode of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart featuring Jon Stewart’s interview with Bill Gates about the launch of Windows Vista.  It’s actually very funny… and there’s even a hilarious bit on Hilary Clinton & Barak Obama in the beginning.

http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf
Video: Daily Show with Bill Gates

Bill Gates Celebrates Worldwide General Availability of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System
From Times Square in New York City, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates hosted the worldwide launch of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. The celebration paid tribute to the millions of Microsoft customers, partners and product testers around the world who provided input and feedback on these products — helping Microsoft transform the way people communicate, create and share content, and access information and entertainment in the new digital age.

LAUNCH VIDEO:  http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0701/29339/GA_Launch_MBR.asx
(In case you’re wondering who that band is playing "What a Wonderful World" on stage, that’s "Angels & Airwaves" with lead singer Tom DeLonge of Blink 182 fame.)

On a personal note, I truly hope everyone will take the time to try it and give it a fair chance:  I assure you that you’ll like it…  It’s hands down better than anything we’ve ever built before and it’s a bottom up rewrite of many of the things that have absolutely bugged the hell out of you before about Windows. 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
If you remember one thing, keep this in mind:

The computer folks on the radio, the folks blogging about Windows Vista, the "cyberguy" on the TV news station, the geek that lives next door:  If you hear them say "Don’t upgrade unless you have a new computer", you can consider them boneheads and write them off.

I’m going to write more about this later but I’m getting really tired of theseself-important know-nothings that are claiming Windows Vista requires 2GB RAM, 128MB video card, & a 2.1Ghz Processor.   I’m doing this blog and watching my Slingbox from an old 1.1Ghz machine with 1GB RAM and a 16MB video adapter… RUNNING WINDOWS VISTA JUST FINE, THANK YOU.

Wow.  I love our commercial! 

I remember back in 1995, the impact that the Windows 95’s commercial had ("Start Me Up" featuring the Rolling Stones) on not just Microsoft but the computer industry.  I remember IT guys back then who worked on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 humming that song along while they worked on some guys Token Ring connection or fixed their Attachmate 3270 installation.

And now, I think we’ve got ourselves a spiritual successor to the Win95 ad.  It’s a really good commercial!  At least I like it… I hope you do too.

Here’s the Austrian version of our Windows Vista ad:
(It’s the full 1 minute version – German)

http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf
Video: Windows Vista WoW Video

…and here’s the Australian version:
(This is the shortened 30 second version – English)

http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf
Video: Wow! Windows Vista