Windows 8 has been unveiled, OSx is Roaring, and Ubuntu is trying to create a Unity. These new OS’s give us a peek at the future, but what does it really say?

Over on ZDNet Ed Bott wrote a nice article on Windows 8. I’m not going to go into it in detail, but the Article and the screen shots got me to thinking, what is the future of the Operating Systems in general? Ubuntu and Windows have come up with new GUIs, and they are different. Geared toward simplifying navigation, are these becoming too simple? Are we getting to the point of making something that a fool can use, and only a fool will use it?

I am not against change, as long as there is a good reason for it. Making a GUI more user friendly is not a bad thing. The big problems I have with the way Ubuntu, and now Windows are going about it though worries me from a support standpoint. How much more difficult is it becoming to find the deep areas that those of us who do troubleshoot machines use? How much more training will we need? How will this affect how people use the OS in a business environment?

The OS that has changed the least in GUI appearance over the years is Macintosh. The basic layout, and where you find things has been essentially the same going back to its beginning, with just some upgrades to that classic look and feel. Apple boasts about how easy it is to use a Mac, and from an OS standpoint, they are right. You don’t have to learn a new GUI with every update. You have your bar up top which allows for the classic drop down menus. They added the dock at the bottom, but you don’t have to use it.

Unity, the new look kills off the classic menu structures to get at your programs. It takes more clicks to find something that is not docked. The more elegant look actually becomes more complex. When you log into the OS, you can choose to go back to the Classic look, but it is not prevalent on how to, although it is simple if you know where to look. Still, the more complex sets of clicks to find an installed program can be a big hindrance to acceptance. Also realize the look doesn’t add anything to security.

Windows 8 poses a bigger question. With it being meant for touch screen, although you can use a mouse and keyboard, and the look and feel being more toward Microsoft’s phone OS, how is this going to complicate finding files, finding software you install? The desktop space is a premium but, as we all know, you put too much there it becomes hard to find what you are looking for. Also what about software that is not on the desktop? How about file exploring especially if you are on a network where items are kept on multiple network drives?

These questions, and where the companies want to steer the computing world are really what will shape the future, and also cause problems. Too much change at once is not good, and change for its own sake usually causes more problems than its worth. Only time will tell what the answers are but, from first glance, it seems as if making the look the same across all platforms is happening, and from there, maybe you get into a situation like Chrome OS, where it is basically a browser, and nothing is kept locally. If that is the case, you can port your GUI look across multiple devices easy, but then who owns your information since it will not be stored locally? Its something to think about.

Years ago I use to think McAfee was a good Anti-Virus program. Then they got bloated. Now McAfee is becoming chicken little.

You can see the reports regularly. New exploit in this, new trojan here, new zero-day exploit, and on. The world of securing your information and your identity, either individual or corporate, is a complex and never ending battle. Nothing is going to be 100% secure. you know it, I know it and the bad guys know it. Its a matter of mitigation. The smaller area of attack we give the bad guys, the more chance that they will pass us up for an easier target.

It becomes more complex every year. New devices come out, connectivity becomes better, people become more greedy. In fact the more complex things get, the easier it is to break into them with simplicity. You may ask how is that the case. Simply put you just showed how. We tend to gloss over the simple items for the more complex ones, including bugs and holes. That is a discussion to have another time though.

Right now, in the security field, McAfee has been making a lot of headlines lately. From a RAT Report that other companies are calling “shady” to the latest report from them about cars becoming the next hacking target, McAfee keeps getting their name out there. The problems with these reports is their are either obvious or disputed. That McAfee look more like an attention hound than anything else.

This grab for attention comes on the heels of a decade of McAfee putting out worse and worse products. Suites that are so bloated that you machine drags to a crawl during start up. Anti-Malware products that let too much Malware through. Software that is difficult to remove from a system should you prefer to go with one of their competitors. How the mighty have fallen.

Most companies in the consumer security field, especially those that make Anti-Malware software, can run into these same pitfalls as the become more popular. Norton has, although they are slowly turning things around, they still have a long way to go. Kaspersky is doing its best not to fall down that path, but it does seem to be getting more resource intensive. AVG, well they put out a decent product but we are about due for another bad patch that messes machines up. None of them are perfect, but some are better than others, and McAfee has been considered part of the bottom of the heap for a while now.

So McAfee throws up a smokescreen. Instead of improving their product, they try to show that they know more. Sorry but knowledge of what is happening, and the ability to translate that into a decent working product do not have to be equal. In fact, McAfee has shown me that you can have the knowledge without the product. Then again, McAfee lately has been more like Chicken Little. Just remember, the sky isn’t falling, things are just progressing. We as the ones in the field need to keep our wits about us and it will all be fine.

The patent world is a jumbled mess. Companies are suing companies left and right. In the end, the consumer and economy get hurt.

News broke yesterday that Apple has won a round in the patent infringement case against HTC. HTC of course is appealing. Meanwhile HTC has purchased S3 to sue Apple. Kodak has sued Apple and RIM. Apple and Samsung are suing each other over patents also. This is just a small smattering of the lawsuits going on over smartphones, and just another example of how broken the patent system is.

A patent ( /?pæt?nt/ or /?pe?t?nt/) is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state (national government) to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention(from Wikipedia). A simple enough definition, yet a problem arises with patents in the technology industry. Technology moves fast, and patents cause it nothing but problems. The limit for a patent in the United States, or Europe is 20 years. The amount of time one of the patent lawsuits will go through the legal system is 3-15 years depending on resources of the companies, and whether they come up with an agreement outside of court.

The problem really arises in how many things get patented, and are there other ways to do those same things. A lot of the patent issues arise not from hardware, but from software. Software is a bunch of commands and equations. There are only so many ways to program something. Yes, you can license the patents from the patent holder. Yet if you write something that does a similar function, and goes about it a different way, without that patent license, you still could be sued.

This not only can stifle innovation, but create issues for the end consumer, which are the ones who in the end are supposed to benefit from innovation. Without that innovation, you don’t come up with valid competitors, which may leave a lack of choice and a larger expense to the consumer. The lawsuits can sow confusion in the consumer, slowing down the adaptation of new technologies, putting companies out of business, and increasing the unemployment rate. I am not saying that this will or always does happen, but it is a big chance to take.

Imagine, if you will, if say the Pythagorean Theorem was patented. Better yet, if the Theory of Relativity was patented. Think of all the items, designs, and things that we would be missing out on, or that could be sued into non-existence.

The real fix isn’t licensing, or suing, but a more reasonable term for patents and intellectual property in the world of technology, more specifically software.  20 years is reasonable for a drug, considering that by the time it actually gets to market there is around 5-8 years left on the patent, during which time the companies can make up their investment. A company such as Apple can easily make up its investment in a patent for a smartphone within 3 to 5 years of the device hitting market. The problem is that a drug company takes 12 years to market, research, get approval, and get the drug out to the consumer. A company like apple takes about 3 years to get a new device out and less when creating upgrades for said device. The original investment in the technology itself is only viable with the release of the first generation of said product, otherwise you wouldn’t have new iPhones coming out every 6 months to 1 year.

So what is the answer then? A 10 year software patent? Maybe 5 years? With the rate at which technology changes, it has to be less than 20 years. Otherwise, people could become afraid to innovate, new ideas could be stifled, and we will be left with less of a choice for items that are supposed to make our lives better.

A few days ago I wrote about A problem with Add-Ons and Firefox 5, along with no support anymore for Firefox 4. Now Firefox is really trying to commit suicide.

Firefox was a great browser. Yes, I say was, because it won’t last that much longer. Not with the path they have chosen at least. Focusing on the consumer market isn’t a bad thing. You will get people who will use Firefox at home when their corporations don’t allow for its use internally. Actively saying, “We don’t care about corporations,” though is akin to committing suicide.

Mozilla might not care about the corporate environment, but they do need to be aware of it. With hosted apps, and work websites becoming more and more prevalent in the world, to survive on a consumer end, you need to be. Heck, most of the web sites that people visit are done by corporations. Now with the accelerated pace of releases, and no support for the prior release, web designers will need to check more and more versions of Firefox against their websites to make sure that they aren’t broken by the changes. The amount of manpower and time will drive up the cost of web development. Sites will shut down, or the other logical solution will happen.

Sites won’t try to be compatible with Firefox anymore. They just won’t care. Chrome is passing up Firefox in usage, and Internet Explorer still has the majority of market share. Google just needs to support prior versions for a corporate environment, just like Microsoft has already started to jump at companies reminding them they won’t run into a lack of security patches. Heck, IE8 and 9 are pretty good from a security standpoint as it is.

Firefox thinks that doesn’t matter. Consumers will continue to use Firefox. No, they won’t if it doesn’t render web sites properly. The lack of foresight on Mozilla’s part is pretty amazing. First thing taught in retail and marketing is that 1 complaint, 1 problem with a client, can hurt you in a huge way, as they spread the word to avoid such an item.

Six weeks between releases is ambitious, and hurts consumers who’s plug ins and add-ons might now work with the latest version. Can new versions of the plug ins be ready in under the time it takes for the next version to come out? This is the other side of the death spiral Mozilla is putting itself into. Consumers love the plug ins. If they don’t work, what good is Firefox to them anyway?

There is still time for Mozilla to save itself. They have to support a 3 month old browser they put out. They have to show the world that they care about more than their own egos. They have to stop being the poster child for what can be wrong with open source, and get back to showing what is right with it.

With all the hacks going on out on the net today, patching your machines is more critical than ever.

Microsoft is releasing 16 Patches, 9 of which Microsoft deems critical. Patches include Windows, Office, and .Net, and all attempt to address RCE attacks.

Oracle has also released a major patch for Java in the past few days which addresses a number of security vulnerabilities. Adobe has patches out recently for Flash, Apple is playing whack-a-mole with malware, and basically there is a lot of patching to do.

Don’t forget though, with all these patches, to test them before deploying them. It doesn’t happen very often, but some patches can break your software.

The Public folder issue with the Exchange 2010 migration has been solved. An old lesson was reconfirmed. Then the chewing out of myself commenced.

Many years ago, when I was first learning to fix and build PC’s, I would go to the local monthly computer show. Each month would mean some new part for upgrading or replacing. It was fun to learn about these things, see what I could do with them, even cause the parts to eventually die out because of my own stupidity. It was a glorious time.

Eventually though I ran into a problem that took forever to solve. I had replaced something in my computer, and straightened up the cables connecting the PC to everything. I fired up the machine, and… no sound. Checked the settings in windows, checked the driver, pulled the card out, tried a different card, all still with no sound. 6 months I kept dealing with this problem, checked everything I could, tried new cards and still no sound. Well I checked almost everything I could. In month 6 of this issue, I went to do another cable cleanup, and that is when I found that I, for 6 months, had the microphone plugged into the speaker jack and the speakers plugged into the microphone jack. This was before they color coded everything, and for 6 months I swore that they were plugged in right. I assumed they were is more like it.

For many years I have told this tale to friends, and colleagues to exercise the point of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) method. Always check and double check the simplest things before moving on to the more complex reasons. Sometimes though, even I need a swift kick in the rear to remember this.

I had been struggling this week with the public folder migration from Exchange 2007 to 2010. The Mailbox migration had worked fine. The public folders though had been beating me up. The hierarchy was not propagating, let alone the folders communicating. I did some research, and found that the replication was done over email, basically emailing the folders between servers. So I started checking SMTP settings, telnetting between machines, even remembered that there was a problem with mailboxes on the 2007 server sending e-mail to the mailboxes on the 2010 server, but not vice versa.

All the symptoms were there, right in my face as to the main portion of the answer. I still didn’t see the simple thing though, instead looking up every way I could think of describing the issue in Google, with no fix. Then, on day 4 of this madness, while starting to look at yet another site’s solution, the answer hit me in the face. I logged into the Domain Controller, opened up DNS, and yep, there it was. Actually, there it wasn’t. When I set up DNS for the new server, I had forgotten to put in an MX record for the new server. All they years of dealing with DNS and MX records, I had forgotten the simplest thing, yet for 3 day had assumed I had put it in. I was elated and angry with myself all at the same time, especially when I saw the hierarchy start to show up on the Exchange 2010 server (the rest of the solution was cleaning up the old security certs on the exchange 2007 server, and getting a new self signed cert on it).

So once again, I get reminded of the 6 months of no sound from the speakers, and why one really does need to double check the simplest things even more thoroughly than the complicated thing.

Going from Blackberry Enterprise 4.1 to Blackberry Enterprise Express 5.0.2 looks like a daunting task, but really it is not that tough.

So there I was, ready to find the stash of nukes I hid somewhere. In anticipation of the migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 coming up real soon, I had to upgrade our BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) to the most recent version. the prior guy who had gone through 2 weeks of Blackberry training kept putting it off, coming up with excuses, and now is no longer with the company. I had done what anyone should do. I read up on the product and learned how to do the upgrade. Then the worst thing happened. Upon running Windows Update and Rebooting, the Blackberry Server came up but only enough to be pingable. I couldn’t remote into it, which meant so much for doing everything after hours.

First thing in the morning I went to our server room at the office where the BES is located, forced a hard reboot and the server came up normally. then came the task at hand. Few small things about going from BES 4.1 to BES Express 5.0.2. First you have to completely uninstall 4.1. Second, 5.0.2 is extremely slick. Once installed, and I got the users added into it, the majority of phones were found and automatically connected, as if they had always been on the 5.0.2 version of the BES. There were a couple of problem phones, but for the most part, all the planning on having to reactivate 50 Blackberrys went to the trash.

Sometimes, when things get done right, good surprises happen. Just never let it stop you from planning for the worst case scenario. Next step will be the final Exchange Migration.

Exchange doesn’t like drive error, or bad blocks. Never has, never will, and while there are things that can temporarily correct the problem, new hardware is the ultimate solution.

I’ve been slowly prepping to do a migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 at the company I work for. I’ve done my reading, come up with all sorts of bad scenarios, and basically anything else I could think of to prepare for it. Mind you, I’m not the only high end internal IT guy (Engineer, support, sales, etc…), but I’m also the only outbound tech. I had things planned out to finish the actual prep the day before a long weekend a few weeks ago, just in case I ran into any problems.

Smart thing I did that, because I ran into a major problem. I had to go to a client site, due to a printer issues. the client is a major one for the company and the directive came at 10pm in the evening from by boss to be out there the next day. This of course caused me to cancel the planned migration.

The day of the cancellation was going to be installing Exchange 2010 on the newly purchased server, and installing the latest version of Blackberry Enterprise server so that we could keep using our Blackberries. Needless to say, a few days after the cancelled migration date, our current Exchange 2007 server starts running really slow. Disk errors, bad blocks, a chkdsk cleared the errors, and I was put on the hot seat.

I explained why the migration had not happened, how I was ordered to be down at a client for a printer problem. How the amount of e-mail data will take 2-3 days to migrate, and that I wanted to do it over a long weekend. I was asked for a hard date for the migration, something soon, since slow or non-working e-mail near the end of the month was not acceptable. So I gave a date of this upcoming weekend, and went to work on getting the domain all prepped.

So here I am trying to run the Schema and AD prep on a domain where the Exchange server is in a separate site (Not domain, just physical site) from the Schema Master. Not only that but the Schema Master is a 2003 server. Yes, following Microsoft’s information of just running the Schema Prep through a 2008 server that is in the site where the schema master is located, has not worked so far.

I know I’ll get it, I dealt with this went tossing SP2 on the Exchange 2007 server, I’m just frustrated that Microsoft doesn’t even know how its own stuff works.

Firefox 4 is out. For a browser that re-sparked the browser wars, Firefox had been falling behind lately. Can 4 bring back Firefox?

I have a tendency not to download betas of web browsers. I’m not much of a bug hunter, haven’t been able to establish myself in those communities, don’t have a ton of time for actual hard core testing, and I’m not a developer. I just like having things work, especially where web browsing is concerned. So when I heard that Firefox 4′s final release was going to be the exact same as the last Release Candidate, I decided to actually jump the gun and start using it. I figured it couldn’t be any worse than using 3.6.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser since version 2, and overall have liked it. There have always been some issues with it, such as the memory hole it has, but they were things I could mostly live with. As  Firefox 3 kept getting updated though, it was all getting worse and worse. To open my iGoogle home page, which is set up with a bunch of news widgets, would take 5 minutes. Not only that, but the whole browser would be slow and unresponsive until it fully opened.

So I finished downloading Firefox 4 and installing it, expecting the same sluggishness. Surprisingly to me, my iGoogle paged opened in under a minute, and I was all set to go to other websites in other tabs, even while the iGoogle page was loading up. This is starting to look promising.

I continued on my browsing way, going to sites I frequent such as Tech Republic, ZDNet, Krebs on Security, and many more. All rendered faster than in Firefox 3.6. I did run into an occasional site which just wouldn’t open in Firefox 4 (Buffalo Wild Wings being one), but considering that there have been a lot of changes in Firefox 4, this doesn’t surprise me.

Everything isn’t all roses though. Java rendering (I enjoy playing Text Twist) and some Flash rendering is slow and painful. The Java being the worst of them all, as it slows to a crawl with a java game on Yahoo’s website. Once loaded, it works ok, but still a bunch of issues. Also, Firefox still uses a lot of memory, and doesn’t have the best memory management in the world. I have also heard reports of people who have had issues with it upon install, although the percentage seems to be small.

Is Firefox 4 an improvement? Definitely. Is it a game changer? No. Can it fend off Google Chrome? Maybe. Personally, I’m not going to Chrome unless I have to (Google has enough info on me from Android, Gmail etc, they don’t get any more if I can help it), and I don’t care of IE, Safari, or Opera. In the end, its really about what you are comfortable with and what works. On that, Firefox 4 is a solid, fast browser.

So here we are, a society that considers itself civilized. A society that has tons of issues. A society that loves clogging up the court system with litigation. You get litigation if you buy coffee at McDonald’s and spill it on yourself, if you are a 4 year old who hit an older lady while riding your bicycle, and especially if you try to make anything in the technology field.

I look at the lawsuits being brought out recently. Apple Sues Motorola, Motorola sues Apple, Microsoft sues Motorola, some company that bought a software patent sues major websites, and so on, and so on. Heck I’m waiting to see who is going to sue whom over what next.

With all the big companies suing each other, its no wonder that you don’t have much technological advancement anymore. You get repackaged versions of older ideas that work better cause of faster processing power. No real innovation, and this is I feel is due to 2 things. Patent trolling, and lack of entrepreneurial spirit.

Seriously, who wants to try to build new things when you can just keep making money off what you already have, and who wants to try to start up a new company, when virtually every method of doing anything is patented, and thereby a potential death by litigation for a small company.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a good reason to have patents, just like copyrights. The issue is the length of time they last for. At some point you need to reduce that amount of time back to something more normal, just so that we can innovate and move forward.  Of course, that is just my opinion.