Steve’s Stuff

It’s a $50/year/user add-on to Google For Your Domain. As written in the New York Times:

The package, called Google Apps, combines two sets of previously available software bundles. One included programs for e-mail, instant messaging, calendars and Web page creation; the other, called Docs and Spreadsheets, included programs to read and edit documents created with Microsoft Word and Excel, the mainstays of Microsoft Office, an $11 billion annual franchise.

They go on to say

By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange, the Microsoft server software typically used for corporate e-mail systems, in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner.

Have you noticed the small crowd around the power outlets near the gates at most airports? What I see as a small community of people sharing a plug is a revenue opportunity for airports.

Technology Evangelist has a posting about the Smart Carte folks, who’ve built a system that will let aiports charge you $3 for 30 minutes of electricity.

And we’re back to XP. This morning was the last straw. Command line FTP was broken. I could open an ftp site, but typing “ls” caused it to think the remote host had disconnected. I disabled the Windows firewall, but that didn’t help. As usual, There were others on the ‘net who had reported something similar.

I’m done. I just don’t have time for this. A quick boot from the Norton Ghost CD and I’ve put my machine back to XP.

As mentioned earlier, I upgraded XP to Vista. As I was cleaning up, I noticed that Windows Defender was on the list of installed programs. Reading that Defender is part of Vista, I uninstalled it. Now Vista has its shorts all in a bunch because it’s downloading updates for Defender but it’s not there. Ok, thought I, I’ll just reinstall. Oh, no, can’t do that because Defender is part of Vista, so the installer won’t install it. Hmmm…. As yet, there does not seem to be a fix short of reinstalling Vista.

Vista

I upgraded my office desktop to Vista Business yesterday.

So far, I’ve found that the following programs had to be removed as they’re incompatible with Vista:

• Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition 10
• Norton Ghost 9.0
• Zone Alarm Pro
• HP PSC printer utilities
• Scansoft PDF Create Pro

The Aero interface is pretty, but I quickly turned off the slide out, fade in, fade out menus and went to the “classic” menu on the START button.

Right now, I’m installing a 90 day trial of Windows One Care Live. I think that should bridge the time until Symantec has an update for our corporate AV solution.

I tried the built-in backup solution, but it won’t work with the current release of Samba and I use Samba on the Linux machine that hosts my PC’s backups. Vista itself is happy to use file shares on Samba, but he backup program does some tricky stuff with the ACLs that seem designed to break Samba. Remeber “It ain’t done till Lotus won’t run”?

More as time goes by.

Vista

In this post, the Internet Storm Center reports on a possible attack vector for Vista systems on which the speech system has been activated. Microsoft says “Yeah, but it’s not dangerous.”

Didn’t Captain Kirk fool a computer with this trick?

Vista