One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Today, I traveled back in time to June 28, 2004. It wasn’t just that, though; some crazy dimensional shifting crazy shit happened because Boise became somehow interdimesionally tangled with San Francisco. Why? Because I sat through an hour and a half of presentation from Microsoftie Chris Avis (who seemed like a smart and damn nice guy, but it didn’t help) and all I could think of when I was done was that this was way fucking better when Steve Jobs did it at WWDC 2004. It was original then.

This is long, ranty and Mac-slanted. Fair warning.

Things I saw today:

• Exchange 2007. In general, evolutionary, not revolutionary. Many basic changes made to make lives of Exchange admins easier. Nobody else will give a fuck. In addition there was much hoopla around a feature that takes voicemails as WMV’s and forwards them to your phone. I would swear to Christ I saw Cisco or Avaya or one of those guys doing that some years back.
• Exchange Command Shell: moderately cool. Allows for more advanced scripting of Exchange administration tasks. This is a good thing. However, once again, it’s not bettering the status quo, it’s meeting it; Unix admins have been scripting mail rollouts for decades. In addition, I’d just like to add that it is very depressing listening to Microsoft admins talk about tab completion like it’s new. There are lots of new handy tools, like one that allows you to make an instant chart; but why are there a zillion tools that allow you to format output differently? MS reinvented sed scripts?
• Vista: Aero Glass. Ugly. Well, not exactly ugly. I don’t know what it is. I remember in early bulds of Windows XP there was a rumor that Microsoft was going to replace the default Luna theme with something a little more business-minded (read: muted.) This never ended up happening, so everybody just uses the silver theme since it’s the least godawful (Playsk00l Blue and Vomit/Booger Green are both non-options.) Aero just seems so either blatantly stolen or visually distracting: windows pop up from the taskbar in something that is most definitely not a blatant ripoff of the Scale Effect. (Guess Genie would have been too obvious.) Without the transparency effects turned on, it looks like something some amateur themer would have posted over on the Neowin forums. With the effects on, it looks like the same thing, only you’re looking through someone else’s prescription glasses and so everything is blurry and out of focus.
• Vista: Application switching.. This is the gee-whiz moment of the show. The Alt-Tab launcher is almost a direct lift from OS X, but they mist a couple of the really cool features. Too bad. If you’re gonna steal, steal everything, dammit. The alt-tab screen is also live now. Then up comes Flip 3D, and the windows go a’flippin. I liked this better when it was called Expose. In addition, when compared to Expose, Flip 3-D has one glaring omission: I can’t see all my goddamn buttreaming windows at once. This is why Expose is useful. Got a task running in a background process? F9. Check task live. F9 again, go back to the thing you were doing last. It’s good, but clearly inferior to Expose.
• Vista: Stupid little gimmick performance counter I’d just like to thank Microsoft for inventing tech support’s worst nightmare. Give users a tool to analyze their performance, sure. Give that tool a random little fucking number and you ignite a firestorm of calls every time that fucking stupid little asslicking number changes. I’m not bitter. If I find out who came up with this idea I’ll put cyanide in their goddamn beer.
• Vista: ReadyBoost. Seriously, would somebody just tell me if this is useful or not? I can’t figure it the fuck out. If it really makes things faster, then great! The thing I’m stuck on is this: If I have enough memory to run the shit I want to run, then it shouldn’t be necessary. If I don’t, I should be buying more fucking memory. Say it with me: Buy. More. Fucking. Memory. What am I not understanding? Regardless, if this works, system manufacturers will begin shipping systems with onboard DRAM AND flash RAM. No reason not to. But I think this sounds way too much like Hyperthreading. Or RAM Doubler. Or Stacker. Anybody remember Stacker? Yeah, that was the shit.
• Vista: Spotli-er, Search. I sat there, mouth agape, as Chris ran Spotlight on Windows. I had one of those creepy ‘Hemishperes bickering with each other: a brief interruption in the weirdness stream‘ moments while my brain tried to work this out.
  

  Lefty: They totally ripped this fucking shit off, right!
  Righty: Yeah, but you want Spotlight on Windows.
  Lefty: Yeah, but… this just isn’t right!
  Righty: Oh, but come on. They totally fucked up Expose, at least they got Spotlight right. You can even set up indexed network resources!
  Lefty: Fuck you, they did not! It only does fucking background indexing! It’s not live! Spotlight has instant updates!
  Righty: Yeah, but… uh… er, it’s better than that fucking dog!
  Lefty: …. touche

  So I remain indifferent to search.

In summary: today was a rather depressing parade of evolutionary and blatantly-stolen (embrace and extend, motherfucker) features. It’s depressing that shit like Monad and WinFS didn’t make it in, because the only revolutionary feature that I’ve seen so far is fucking SmartBoost and the jury’s still VERY out on that one.