A long time ago, in a company far far away, I ran a Novell network (2.15 !).  The other administrator and I checked had Supervisor powers on this network and we found that it was nearly everybody. So we removed all of them. Our director threw a fit - so I told him I'd log his machine in as supervisor and he could give his account rights again. If he couldn't do it in 5 minutes, he probably shouldn't be one...  

On the roadshow we've been doing I've started saying something similar about User Account Control in Windows Vista. Although I think I first used the word Numpty when talking to a meeting of the BCS in Aberdeen. Fitting as the definition in Urban dictionary says its a Scots term  for someone who "demonstrates a lack of knowledge or misconception of a particular subject or situation". What I said in Aberdeen went something like this

Most people who dislike UAC prompts, have a reaction of "I'm a power user, not a numpty, you don't need to tell me". 
but the "numpties" who need to be protected are also the people who wouldn't be able to turn off the warnings...    

Now saying "Numpty implies can't turn off UAC" isn't the same as saying "Can't turn off UAC implies Numpty". But I think a few people thought that's what I was saying (hey, if the cap fits ...) but I think there's also a fallacy in saying "I don't want a warning". Do the same people argue they're such good drivers they don't need to wear seatbelts ? A racing driver would use a more complicated seat belt than you find in most cars.  But where there's a legal requirement to wear a seat belt, UAC can be turned off. Type "User Account Control" into Windows help and it offers you information about how to do it in control panel (you can do it group policy too, or re-enable the account named "administrator" and use that to set the machine up and not get the prompt). But most complainers haven't even checked the help, and what would you call someone who can't even use help ? Perhaps A "right Numpty"

I'm not sure how else to get this point over, but security people like Steve, and OS people like me see UAC as a Good Thing. (Wonder why I capitalize Good Thing and Bad Thing ?). I know when programs I run should be doing something potentially dangerous. What I want to know is that one time in thousands where it was something I didn't know I was running. Security is a nuisance, but turning off the warnings is like saying it's too much bother to lock and unlock my front door a couple of times per day.

I'm on the verge of insulting a lot of IT departments too. There was a lot of fuss in our blogger's group when Information week carried a story that part of the US Government had banned Windows Vista. Now you don't have to ban anything that people don't want, so my take on this was that some of their users wanted to deploy Vista (even if only by bringing in new PCs which had it pre-installed) and they weren't ready. Now I said in a previous post.

In 6 years in Microsoft Consulting I met IT departments whose agility was a business enabler or a strategic asset. And I met others so risk averse they would do nothing before their competitors. The latter think they are prudent and their departments are well run; what I saw was often people too busy fire fighting to understand what was coming next. When I first came across our Infrastructure optimization model , this struck a chord. Those who are at the "dynamic" end of the spectrum don't always deploy new technology, but they can, they're the ones who tell me that forthcoming feature X will make the product compelling for their business. Those at the "Basic" end of the spectrum find all changes harder, they're the ones who just wait for SP1 without knowing what's in it.

There's a tough message in that. It boils down to If you're in a position where you can't deploy new technologies, even if you wanted to, and your not sufficiently abreast of them that you don't know why you'd want to (or not) then your IT department isn't up to the job. (c.f. If you can't turn UAC off, and don't know why you'd want it on, then you're a Numpty). Again you can't automatically blame the people who work in it. A department, might have enough good people (or not) it might have the right funding (or not), it might have good leadership (or not), but it certainly hasn't got all 3.

Talking to a colleague recently we were on the subject of what people learn about computing in universities. Computing is tied into technology - but universities don't like to follow the latest technology fashions. I think there 3 themes which people need to learn. Technology and change are tied together - Cheap computing at the desktop changed how offices worked. E-mail has changed how we communicate. The internet has changed how we do business. So theme 1 is how to you spot the opportunities and threats in technological change. The next is that making sense of the information we have is a constant challenge. When I had my first job in School holidays I was keying information from mainframe reports into a visicalc spreadsheet to allow an Actuary to make sense of the information we had. Today I used the data-bars feature of Excel 2007 so I could see and make sense of the scores from our roadshow: some of the biggest advances in Vista and Office 2007 are around "finding stuff", bringing it to us and helping it to make sense. That theme hasn't changed in over 20 years. And the final theme is managing complexity. Managing an estate of thousands of PCs or managing a large datacenter aren't trivial tasks. One Mechanism for coping is to freeze everything; say no to everything either on security grounds or support grounds, in the guise of a complex set of "Policies"

The only people who read policy manuals are goldbricks and martinets. The goldbricks memorize them so they can say: (1 ) “That’s not in this department,” or (2) “It’s against company policy.” The martinets use policy manuals to confine, frustrate, punish, and eventually drive out of the organization every imaginative, creative, adventuresome woman and man.
(Robert Townsend, again)

I was hearing today that people think that increasing numbers people are quitting IT, the evidence isn't conclusive.  To me there is a connection, Companies whose IT departments which can't manage complexity, don't get the tools to make senses of information, they lack the agility to respond to opportunities and threats. If their IT people came into the industry with ideals about delivering technologies to help people do more, now they are disillusioned that they confine and frustrate the imaginative, creative people in their enterprise, and weary from constant firefighting.

It's not something where Microsoft can just produce a product and put everything right; there isn't any "magic bullet". There are plenty of bright spots in the industry but if we want  a generally healthy IT sector in the future it is something we're going to have to do something about.

I think everyone knows the saying an optimist says the glass is half full, and a pessimist says it is half empty.

• A cynic says it doesn't matter what you call it, it still contains the same amount.
• A PR person will tell you it matters a lot whether people think is it half full or half empty.
• An Engineer will tell you the glass is twice as big as it needs to be
• A Sales person will try to persuade you to re-fill the glass
• A Consultant will tell you how much you have in your glass.
• An Evangelist will tell you if you looked from a different...

I've been doing the evangelist job for a year now. I spent 6 years working in Microsoft Consulting Services. For most of 1990s I wanted to be in consulting and I'd have loved to work for Microsoft, so it should have been my dream job. Eventually I had to admit that I was a Microsoft person but not an MCS person. There's nothing wrong with MCS, and there's nothing wrong with me, we just don't go together well. The culture is different working in evangelism, and it suits me very well – though my old friends who are MCS people wouldn't like it.

This week I've been doing some telephone interviews for people wanting to join the team and that's had me thinking about the good and bad of working here. I've mentioned this list before and I'll share it now for the benefit of anyone who is thinking of going to http://www.microsoft.com/uk/careers/ - life at Microsoft isn't perfect, but we have more than half a glass.

Bonus Link

You might have picked up from the last point and a post I made earlier this week that I'm not a big fan of "process". When I meet some which is ridiculous I want to make seem all the more so. Last night in on the drive home I heard Mark Thomas on the Radio. Mark decided to poke fun at the "Serious Organised Crime and Police Act" – or strictly it's definition of what needed to go through the process of getting a permit to hold a demonstration. Rather than break the law Mark decided to apply for authorization for a lot of demonstrations. On being presented with 20 applications the Police officer who handles permit applications complained about the work he had to do "I share your pain" said Thomas "look at the first cause I'm demonstrating for." The office turned to the application "Cut police Paperwork".
One of several places in the story I nearly drove off the road. If you have Real Player installed you can play the whole programme from the BBC website.

GAG HALFRUNT:   Zis iz most regrettable.
VOGON CAPTAIN:  A personal friend?
GAG HALFRUNT:   Ah no, in my profession ve never make personal friends.
VOGON CAPTAIN: Ah, ‘professional detachment’!
GAG HALFRUNT:  No, ve just don’t ‘ave ze knack.

The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy 

Jon Honeyball, if not actually a friend, is someone we think highly of as I've said before - and he did the keynote for the community EVO launch. All-round top chap. So when I got a mail saying "Jon Honeyball, a journalist with ITPro (UK), inaccurately reported a date slip of Windows Server virtualization, codenamed Viridian, and implied a delay to Windows Server “Longhorn”. Both of these statements are wrong. " I sit up and take notice. I'm not going to provide the link to the article, because it seems Jon has a corrected version in the works.

So what is the true position ?

Q. Longhorn server is going to ship as 32 and 64 bit versions, and virtualization is 64 bit only. SO will the 64bit and 32 bit versions be functionally different, or virtualization be an add on ?
A. The plan is the later. At WinHEC in May 2006 we said that we planned the RTM Windows Server Virtualization "within 180 days" of Longhorn 

Q. When will longhorn and Windows server Virtualization ship. 
A. When they're ready

Q. That's what you always say. But can you give a date for Longhorn?
A. If I knew I wouldn't say (it's someone else's baby; it's for them to announce the due date etc). As it happens I don't know, and it doesn't help anyone to have Microsoft people publishing guesses.  But it bears repeating that we've said we're on track to release beta 3 before the middle of the year, and the goal is to ship longhorn server before the end of the year.

Q. And Virtualization ?
A. It's expected after the server. We're don't know when either will be released, if progress on one is quick and the other is slow the gap gets bigger or smaller.  We haven't changed the view since May '06 - we plan to do it within 180 days. It might be less....

Q. You talk the "before the end of the year", not " '3rd quarter', or 'October' " can I infer from that ....
A. The inference I'd draw is that we're being vague. There is still work to do (obviously), the more complex the work, the easier it is to under-estimate how long it will take.

I'm off to Belgium tomorrow and, fortunately, I've just printed my boarding pass. Despite plans to the contrary I've ended up on British Airways. And I've had to do work with the our new travel tool. Although it is a external web site, you can only authenticate to use from the corporate network. Fortunately I don't travel enough to need to book a trip while on a trip. The best thing about this site is no longer having to go through a bunch of intermediaries. When I worked in Microsoft Consulting Services the process worked liked this.

1. Go to expedia, or the airline's web site and find the flight
2. Phone or email the departments administrator and tell her the flight details
3. Wait while admin contacts the travel agent, travel agent reserves wrong flight / hotel / price and forwards it to me
4. Go back to admin with a description of what is, or appears to be, wrong
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4. Sometimes more than once.
6. When travel agent gets down to the price on Expedia, Attempt to confirm flights.
7. If policy entitles you to fly business spend a further 2 days getting the secretary of the director who has to sign it off to read the policy.
8. Go on-line to enter frequent flyer number
9. Travel.
10. If flying with British Airways complain about their handling of executive club tier points.

In that job, I was billed out at MCS's hourly rate; so the time involved making the booking was worth more than the flight. In this job (where my time isn't charged) I could go straight to the travel agent's call centre. Reading Mark Wilson's blog I know I'm not the only person who feels a crushing sense of gloom on calling these places, and travel isn't the worst one I deal with. I'd never use them again after they sent me to a rough part of Madrid with a note on their computer saying the hotel was full and the confirmation code on my itinerary was bogus. But we have a purchasing agreement with them. Now, I've quoted Robert Townsend before, here's what he said about such things.

Fire the whole purchasing department.
They cost ten dollars in zeal for every dollar they save through purchasing acumen.
And that doesn’t count the massive unrecorded disasters they cause. Let’s say somebody has persuaded a young Edison or Steinmetz to go to work for General Conglobulation, Inc. By the time he’s found out that there’s no way to get that $900 desk calculator through the purchasing department he’s lost all respect for General Conglobulation (“They’d hire Einstein and then turn down his requisition for a blackboard.”).
So let’s be sensible. Fire the whole purchasing department. The company will benefit from having each department dealing in the free market outside instead of being victimized by internal socialism.* And don’t underestimate the morale value of letting your people “waste” some money. If you must, have a one-man “buying department”   for those who want help in the purchasing area and ask for it.

* I’m told that the federal government, with all their joint-use purchasing economies, really pays 20 per cent more for a pencil than you do

You get an idea of his thinking when he talks about delegation of authority, he gives the example of renewing an important contract, too many managers see too much risk in letting people below them do it. He says they should, starting:

Find the man in your organization to whom a good contract will mean the most.
and He concludes
Is it a risk? John is closer to the point of use. He will be most affected by a bad contract. He knows how much the company gains or loses by a concession in each area (and {the supplier knows} he does). And he'll spend full time on it for the next thirty days. Would you? I maintain the company will get a more favorable contract every time.

Steve and I have some thoughts about what this means in the IT world, which we'll share another time. Townsend was describing aspects of a people ready business about 35 years before we picked up on the term, and few businesses have got there yet. So I'm left with new on-line travel tool, and let's be honest: Microsoft can't be such a bad place to work if this is one of the suckiest things about working here. Steve has summarized nicely what it's like to use, to put it simply this tool is to Web Usability what Scrapheap Challenge (or Junkyard wars in the US) is to automotive styling. And Steve also points out we have to give the travel agent a ton of personal data and agree to their sharing it with their credit card company, their insurance company, and anyone else they please OR not travel. 

Still I can avoid the Call centre and unlike Steve I think it saves time. It passes my frequent flyer details through so I can check in more easily - the call centre never did and they mailed trip details as a protected PDF - which I couldn't copy into my calendar. The new tool e-mails me text but it neglected to tell me I need Terminal 4 for Brussels flights. Most BA short haul flights go from Terminal 1 -when you're leaving the house at 5.00AM the last thing you want is an unexpected 30 minute trip across the airport. I found out because I went to the BA site and printed my boarding pass. Why couldn't I do the whole thing on their site ? It seems we're not that people ready yet. But at least we have started the journey.

A year ago tomorrow, I posted something entitled "Civilisation will come to an end because no one will understand what anybody else is saying"

It seems I manage to post that the Beta of Office Communicator is live, before the product team did. And more tersely too.

How's this for saying "Surely in the 21st century technology can help us call the person we want, instead of all that mucking about with phone numbers. ".

Interaction Impedance Mismatch: Users were frustrated because the experiences offered to them by the current communications systems didn’t match their mental model. A prime example of this is the initiation of communications. Users wished to communicate with other users. However, they found themselves communicating with other users’ devices. Because the systems didn’t offer the right abstractions so that users could have interactions that matched their mental model, there were instead exposed to the details having to make a choice whether to call a person’s office phone number, or their mobile phone number, or disturb them and call them at home

Eileen's managed to negotiate with the folks in Redmond to bring forward their plans to get us the devices so we can show you the new bits of this technology and not just the videos for it (which are on the download site as well).I'm so looking forward to that.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, office Communications Server, live Meeting, Live communications Server, communicator, betas

I was a bit surprised to find someone still blogging about VPC Express - especially as they linked to a post of mine which said it was dead. If you go back to Vista documents of last summer we talked about this product, which essentially was going to a cut down version of Virtual PC which could only run a single VM. The idea being that if something wouldn't run under vista you'd be able to run it under the old OS in a VM.  I never saw a screen shot, much less a demo of "express" and I think it was always intended to be Virtual PC 2007 coded for a 1 VM limit.

When we made all Virtualization free of charge last year the need for VPC Express went away, and all talk of it ceased. Did we update documents accordingly ? If we had no one would still blog about it.

Little more to say. It's here 

Documents are available separately.

So is speech server 

Given our propensity to move these download URLs, Just be aware that if you search for it putting 2007 in the search terms narrows the hits down.

Spring is here, Spring is here ... I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring, yes I do, don't you ? course you do.

Actually when I look at the weather it's doesn't look like spring. But unlike Tom Lehrer, the one thing that makes spring complete for me is the changing of the clocks. All of Europe changes it's clocks on the last Sunday of March and October. The UK keeps pondering if we should move onto the same time as most of Europe who are an hour ahead of us - the argument for being that the 30 million people who live in the Southern half of England would save Energy and reduce their risk of accidents. The argument against being 5 million Scots would have to go to work in the dark.

I got thrown a question which I didn't know the answer to -  At what time does Windows  change its time forward an hour on the 25th March 2007 in the UK.

"2AM" I thought... but then does that mean jumping from 1 to 2 or from 2 to 3 ? And going back does it jump from  2 to 1 or from 3 to 2 ? Rather than give the direct answer (the former in both cases) here's how you check.

The Time Zone information is stored in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones (which you can export and re-import if needed) . However the critical bits are stored as block of Hex, and it's not immediately clear how to decode it, instead there is a downloadable tool called TzEdit which lets you view the settings and check for yourself.

I was presenting "Everything you want to know about Vista imaging but were afraid to ask" again this week. The Slides are here, but the session overlaps with the Vista deployment session we've had at the roadshow, and I said I'd post a link to those slides as well.

This user group is going to try to concentrate on those things which are Vista specific - rather than be a general Windows user group, and they have their first meeting on the evening of March 28th. It will be at Microsoft's UK headquarters in Reading. I'm dashing back from Belgium to be there and a few other Microsoft UK people will be along too.

I love the bit of art at the top of their page - makes it worth a visit on its own.

I was asked a little while ago if I would answer some questions form the UK's leading online photo magazine - ePHOTOzine. Readers provided quite a lot of questions, most of which had a photography angle, and the final article has now appeared

Mark Wilson asked an interesting question about virtualization. Would Windows Server Virtualization provide the ability to overcommit resources, therefore increasing consolidation ratios.

A few new bits of information have come out since my last Virtualization round-up and two of them were about memory.

Page Sharing. : a feature which identifies identical pages in memory and shares them among multiple virtual machines, regardless of the guest OS. If 10 VMs are running different OSes they will not have many pages in common. 10 copies of the same OS will have a lot more overlap.

Memory Reserves. think of it as a minimal memory guarantee for a virtual machine. Configuring memory for a virtual machine you (a) Allocate memory (b) Assign a (percentage) reserve 
Virtual Server always reserves 100%. Windows Server Virtualization defaults to 100% - which ensures the best performance out of the box. But if you reserved only 75% of an allocation of  2 GB might be paged to disk.

There's no free lunch here. You need to be very careful about using reserves under 100% - you can pack more VMs into one box, but the performance hit when the host OS needs to page could be severe. My hunch is for most workloads, telling a VM it has 2GB and letting it manage it's own paging will be better than telling it has 4GB and having the host OS manage which 2GB of that is RAM at any moment.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Longhorn, Virtualization

I like 64 bit vista. It's proved be excellent at performance, reliability and application compatibility but I've already acknowledged that driver support is its weak spot. HPs drivers for my scanner don't support don't support the film scanning functions. And it's forced me to look hard at memory cards I use.

The Toshiba I had before the Dell went for repair and the Lexar 32 bit cardbus CF adapter which lived it got lost. Toshiba were very apologetic, did the right thing and ordered me a replacement Lexar card which arrived on Friday. In the meantime I've gone 64 bit but there are no 64 bit drivers. I mailed Lexar. Here's their response

We would like to inform you that, 32Bit CF card reader was an discontinued product, we have not tested the 32Bit card reader in windows Vista operating system. So the 32bit CF card reader was not compatible with the Vista operating system.

I know their 32 bit driver works with Vista and even Windows PE, so I can take my bootable USB key, and use DRVLOAD to get it to work if I really need to. But frankly that's too much hassle. I compared the INF file for Delkin's CardBus adapter (also still on sale) and found that both cards have the same ID. But no sign of a 64 bit driver there either.

But this is stupid; I can do without a CF reader now. I've explained that I jury rigged 64 bit support for the camera I take diving, because I don't want to remove its CF card. Everything else I have is SD based. My CF type II holder for SD cards is redundant, and it's time to stop handling CF cards - taping the last one into the dive camera. End of an era. It's only 5 or 6 years since I got my first CF format card (a Microdrive) which had a PCMCIA adapter to go in the jacket I had for my iPaq: if I needed WiFi I had to swap cards. A later Jacket combined Bluetooth and CF support. WiFi is common on PDAs, even smartphones these days. Bluetooth is a given, but PCMCIA and even compact flash are things of the past for PDAs

That Toshiba Laptop had an SD slot (but no smartcard reader). The Dell is the other way around. Since the Dell supports it, I've ordered an Expresscard SD adapter, and it looks like the Lexar 32 bit cardbus CF adapter will get sold off. That's also the end of a era: I've been using something in the PCMCIA slot for the last dozen years - one by one dial-up modem, wired network card, wireless network card and smartcard reader have been incorporated into the machine. The Lexar is the last device to go in that slot.

One of the things that annoys any technical person is when you get asked a question and have to shrug and say "No, never seen that one", even if you suspect there is a genuine problem. I've had a couple of people ask me about problems with Outlook web access under Vista. The symptoms are usually in the form that the user can read mail but not reply to it. I've known for a while that there is a patch for OWA but until recently I didn't know what the cause was or where to go for the resolution. A post on the IE Team blog explains what the root cause is (removing the DHTML control), where to get even more information, and where to go for the patch.

So now I know (and so do you)

I'm on my third Orange C500 phone. The first got lost on a flight home from the Channel Islands at Easter 2005. It's replacement died last November. I've got the phone pretty much how I like it.

• Look and feel: I learnt how to customize the screen layout (it's an XML file), and have my own screen backgrounds and colour schemes, plus I have the Halo Monks as a ring tone.  
• Keyboard - I've got the Bluetooth Freedom Keyboard for it; though I don't use it as much as I expected to partly because ....
• I got One-Note Mobile working again only quite recently. Orange require a different signing certificate for applications to the one the office team used for One-Note mobile. I had to use a different unlock process for the newer phone.
• Sat Nav. I have co-pilot to find places in the UK, and also have Pocket streets which gives me maps (but not instructions) when I'm in the US.
• Music and Podcasts. The phone is my MP3 player - I had to get the adapter to use it in the car or with headphones. With 300MB or so free on the memory card after installing everything else there's plenty of room.

However the design is 3 years out of date. New phones have better screens, support push e-mail, have Wifi. I expect to see a lot of Microsoft people toting the newly announced Orange E600 before long. My dilemma is do I get one too ? Why ? Because there might be something better around the corner.  As a major customer Orange give us some hints about what they're thinking, but often that is "We haven't ruled it in or out". Lots of different form factors are coming out of HTC, but unless and until it goes in the right bit of Orange's catalogue nothing is certain. And it's what you can do with different form factors which has interested me since 2000 when I got one of the first iPaq devices in the country. I think about this as six axes.

• Display. Sort of goes without saying but you can do more with a bigger display. The latest phones have the same resolution as my first ipaq.
• Input. Stylus input PDAs, Vs Mini-QWERTY Keyboard PDA or phone, Vs Micro-QWERTY phones, Vs 4x3 keypad phones with T9 text input, Vs external keyboards. Without good input, documents are effectively read only.
• Connectivity. If the display and input makes me want to download documents - then is GPRS enough or do I need 3G ? What new scenarios would Wifi on a phone enable ? Does WiFi reduce need for 3G or vice versa ? 
• Storage  Quantity isn't the issue it was: I can get Micro-SD cards up to 2GB today which means I can take as much music and as many documents as I need, but how easy is to get stuff on ?
• Portability not just how small and light is the device but how long can it go before it needs to be re-charged.
• Applications and OS. What can I do beyond making calls. Will my Sat Nav work ? How good is the mail client ? Is support for Office built in editors or a bolt-on viewer ? After reading Jason I'm pretty convinced by Windows Mobile 6.

Phones and PDAs have converged, and in the Mobile 6 there is precious little difference (a touch screen and Remote Desktop client according to this post of Jason's). The only Windows Mobile devices that Orange have with 3G (today) are PDAs, but for me the greater portability of the phones is more important. Orange's page for the E600 says it is "only" Windows mobile 5, they haven't said anything about upgrades to 6 - otherwise I'd take it and that would be that. If I don't, the HTC S710 (aka Vox), isn't far away; a search for 'Orange HTC Vox' showed HTC have already announced that Orange will introduce it as the "E650". Would it's slide out keyboard be better ? It's too small to touch type and the E600's thumb pad might be better besides, if that's important, why not go for the PDA Option) . How long would I have to wait... by the time it's available the 3G version will be imminent (the Wings or S730) with GPS receiver built in. This shower of questions shows that things are getting silly: I'm on point of saying I'll wait for a device which might never be available, for the sake of 3G - which I said I could do without and integrating GPS which I've got already as a standalone device !

Choice is good, of course - but doing nothing offers the chance of better choices in the future, and always will. Too many choices can result in the inability to decide...