Entries for NitzWalsh

Zune games - Free, but a 30second ad. WTF?! [Zune games - Free, but a 30second ad. WTF?!]

NitzWalsh — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:58:13 GMT

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/zune-hd-apps-are-here-complete-with-pre-roll-ads.ars

Hard to imagine how MS thought this was a good idea. This is just jaw-droppingly idiotic.

It's a PMP. You're going to be whipping the games out for minutes at a time. A 30 second ad - then additional loading time after that- is just utterly laughable. Even the apps without games take ridiculously long to load, 8 seconds for weather? 9 for the frickin' CALCULATOR APP?!

Sigh...MS really just doesn't "get it", do they?

in reply to Zune games - Free, but a 30second ad. WTF?!

Win7 more expensive than Vista? Is MS really this stupid? [Win7 more expensive than Vista? Is MS really this stupid?]

NitzWalsh — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:41:58 GMT

Well this is still in the "rumour" stage, but it's coming from a Dell marketing executive:

"“If there’s one thing that may influence adoption, make things slower or cause customers to pause, it’s that generally the ASPs (average selling price) of the operating systems are higher than they were for Vista and XP,” Darrel Ward, director of product management for Dell’s business client product group, said in a phone interview, referring to the various versions of the Windows 7 operating system that are expected to appear."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10242555-64.html

http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=4414

I really hope this turns out to be baseless, but at this point doesn't sound like it - this isn't coming from the Inquirer. I feel this would be one of the dumbest moves MS has made to date for several reasons:

1) Legitmately or not, Win7 is viewed as "Vista done right". The last thing you want to do is charge *more* for the OS that's supposedly fixing the problems of the first.

2) The economy. 'nuff said.

3) MS is one of the most profitable corporations alive. In their recent "down" quarter, they "only" made a profit of 4.4 billion - and responded with thousands of layoffs. This in one of the worst economic climates in decades and with their main OS being savaged by the critics.

4) Netbooks. Suddenly the Starter Edition makes a whole lot more sense.

What say you? I really hope the ire over this builds up and makes MS change its mind here. This is without a doubt the wrong product and wrong time to charge a price increase.

in reply to Win7 more expensive than Vista? Is MS really this stupid?

VSS 64-copy limit: When will that be raised? [VSS 64-copy limit: When will that be raised?]

NitzWalsh — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:16:48 GMT

One of the hassles with using VSS-based backup products (like MS Data Protection Mgr) is the rather meagre 64-copy limit per volume.

Two questions:

1) Why such a low limit?
2) When/if will it be raised?

To give an example, since I'm using DPM 2007 and have set to have 2 restore points per day over a month, I cannot enable shadow copies per hour like I used to on my users data file server. Shadow copies is an awesome feature but the low limit really puts a crimp in its effectiveness - or am I using DPM incorrectly?

in reply to VSS 64-copy limit: When will that be raised?

Well, get used to Ultimate/Enterprise/Business/etc [Well, get used to Ultimate/Enterprise/Business/etc]

NitzWalsh — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:47:00 GMT

Every indication so far is that MS will stick to its incredibly consumer-unfriendly practice of the ridiculous number of Windows versions. Cripes MS simply can't learn from its mistakes, can it?

http://www.istartedsomething.com/

Truly pathetic.

in reply to Well, get used to Ultimate/Enterprise/Business/etc

WDS 4.0 - Lack of Live Mail integration on XP sucks. [WDS 4.0 - Lack of Live Mail integration on XP sucks.]

NitzWalsh — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:26:50 GMT

I'm sure some people use their PC's like me - Outlook for all office material, and Windows Live desktop for all personal email. Between the two of them I have nearly 2GB of mail.

Now of course with Vista and WDS 4.0 this is no problem. However with XP, the problem is that while you want WDS to index your live mail contents, the results outside of searching from within Live Mail directly are pointless as you just get the filename of the .eml files returned to you.

For those of us with two large mail databases on our systems, this seriously messes up the results and makes WDS almost useless if you have a large amount of WL mail you're indexing. I'll have the same contacts in both systems and naturally over this amount of time a lot of the same keywords, so when I search the results are dominated by a huge listing of gibberish filenames.

Is this planning to be remedied anytime soon, especially as you're nagged both in Outlook and Live mail to download WDS 4.0? Or is it going to be like me asking for the re-addition of the Programs category when you're searching? :)

in reply to WDS 4.0 - Lack of Live Mail integration on XP sucks.