My birthday came and went with no lasting consequences. Still debating with myself what I deserve to buy for myself with all the money I got.
MBSA and Windows Update annoys me. I need a local update server with a web interface that will only fetch updates that match a certain regular expression - or not fetch updates that match a particular expression. I also need to be able to massage the secure.xml file from Microsoft so I don't have to look at this shit:
Recently I was privy to a talk about Windows Vista and Longhorn (what will probably be Windows Server 2007) that did not involve signing an NDA, so I'd like to talk a little bit about that. First of all, we were a bunch of techies and the presenter kept showing us the transparency effects in their new GUI. We didn't care.
The best thing, from the point of view of someone who needs to manage thousands of client systems, there is now a Group Policy service! That's right: Group Policy is no longer tied into WINLOGON, so you will be able to run policy checks every time your policy is altered and distributed. I'd like to see that ported to XP as part of Service Pack 3, please.
The other nifty thing is ximage, a "new" imaging technology based on files rather than disk sectors. Instead of installing say Office on a client, you overlay an image with Office onto the client, which is much faster. We'd like that in XP, too, and you can keep the remaining features of Vista, thanks.
Msh, the new command shell, won't be part of Vista. Vista will contain Windows Install 4.0. Vista will have support for full volume encryption but it won't utilise any hardware encryption accelerators present for this. It will only use any TPM chip to keep the consumer at bay.
The server product is looking more and more like UNIX. They've taken a hint. You will be able to easily run a server with only the services you need. You can even disable the GUI so the system boots into console mode and manage the system via WMI. If that holds true when you install third party applications and management tools, I don't know.