Tech News and Rambling from a Surly Little Bastard…
Hurray! Vista SP1 is now available to TechNet Plus subscribers, just like it should have been all along.
If you’re looking to download, be sure to read the notes about it only being available under Top Downloads for the time being.
The original article I read said it was also now available to MSDN subscribers, but I’m too lazy to find that link…
Ed Bott published fresh browser stats this morning, and I thought I would comment on some aspects…
The point that Ed makes about the lack of increase in Firefox’s market share is disappointing, but are we really surprised? I’ve said for quite some time that Firefox is geared towards the tech enthusiasts among us and that it really offers no hard benefits for your average every-day user.
Back when Mozilla was competing only with IE6 (we’ll continue ignoring Opera and Safari), it offered great benefits like tabbed browsing and native popup blocking, etc. Unfortunately, by the time it caught any ground, Microsoft had already usurped a great deal of its momentum by releasing the most-needed features in IE7. Sure, Firefox’s amazing extension support offers a lot of flexibility to those of us who consider ourselves power users on the web, but does the average person who only has one computer need 10 different bookmark syncing extensions or the inspection capabilities of Firebug? No…
The most interesting thing I see in these stats is the market penetration of IE7.
I run some basic stats on all our sites at work (mainly to let me know what cool stuff I can and cannot use), and IE6 still has an 80% lead over IE7 in our user base. Since we’re getting traffic from totally technically inept users, that’s a somewhat unfortunate statistic. Even more distressing is that IE has a 95% lead over all other browsers combined.
Clearly both Mozilla and Microsoft have done a fair job marketing their newer products to technical users who keep up with such things, but they’ve failed miserably at extolling the virtues to the average user — and that’s something that needs to change.
How do we do that? I haven’t a clue… I develop the stuff, I don’t market it.
The really interesting question, given the recent announcement that IE8 has passed the ACID2 test, is whether this will matter in a year. If all browsers follow standards properly, do we care which browser anyone uses? Of course if IE8 doesn’t drastically improve upon the market adoption of IE7 thus far, it may take another 10 years before everyone is seeing the web as it was intended to be seen…
After ordering a TechNet subscription last week, now that Microsoft offers a significantly cheaper “Direct” (ie: download-only) version, I got a postcard in the mail today offering me a whopping $200 off an early-bird registration to Microsoft’s TechEd 2007 conference.
Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d check the TechEd site and see how expensive this particular conference was. I’m constantly amazed at how expensive some conferences can be, while the particularly interesting ones like WordCamp are 100% free.
In case you were wondering, the regular price for TechEd ‘07 is $1,9951, but if you register before April 7th, you can save a whopping $200 and get it for the rock-bottom price of $1,795.
I had thought about doing a little “What you could get instead of going to TechEd” segment, but turns out I’m too lazy. Suffice it to say: a lot2.
Now if only I could convince my boss to blow about $3,000 (including travel, meals, etc.) to send me to Orlando for 4 days…
I checked out the headline Reader Poll: Will Windows Vista send you when I saw it on my Google homepage, mainly because I wanted to see what the rest of the sentence was.
Clicking on it popped up the full-text of Reader Poll: Will Windows Vista send you running to a new OS? and the no-javascript message got me interested, so I decided to load up the article and check out the poll.
Am I the only one that realizes that this poll is totally, obviously, and painfully anti-Vista and anti-Microsoft in general? I mean, every single option may as well have “if I absolutely have to…” tacked on to the end. There’s not a single positive remark made about Vista on the entire poll, despite its increased security measures and the amazing Aero glass effects.
What kind of statistical results can you honestly expect from a poll that could easily be summed up with a single “No way will I upgrade to Vista” option? We may as well have called the post “Why won’t you upgrade to Vista in the new year?”
Thank you for objective and fact-filled reporting, Life Hacker… *unsubscribed*
What’s with the Vista SP1 Delay?
Vista SP1 was RTM earlier this month, and they announced a laid-back release schedule.
Their plans for slowly rolling it out to end users sound great, but I have to wonder why Microsoft doesn’t plan on releasing SP1 to IT Pros through TechNet until it’s publicly available for users to download.
This seems like negating the entire point of the TechNet community if you ask me. It’s there so its members can get their hands on essentially all of Microsoft’s software for testing and pre-deploy purposes. Several Windows 2008 Server builds have been on TechNet, and it was available for full download the day it went RTM. Why, then, is Vista’s service pack different?
Update: Per the rumors, the release schedule for SP1 has indeed been changed, so that technical users get updates sooner than expected.
I still don’t understand why we’re waiting for TechNet. If nothing else, those users should get it at the same time VL customers do - they’re likely one and the same people.
I was waiting to rebuild my Vista box at home1 until SP1 was available, but it looks like that’s still going to take too long. Maybe I’ll move ahead with my plan to make that box a Windows 2008 Server and using my Ubuntu laptop as my primary machine…